Cézanne’s Lasting Impact
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose works and ideas were significant in the radical aesthetic shift from Impressionism to Cubism. He attended the Collège Bourbon, after which his father requested that he enroll in law school in Aix. Cézanne, having no interest in law, persuaded his parents to allow him to study painting in Paris.
His avant-garde perspective challenged the norm of nineteenth-century painting and laid the foundations of Cubism. His short and rough brushstrokes can be seen in all objects, creating interesting textures that do not necessarily occur in the actual objects. Because of the development of photography, artists like Cézanne no longer had to replicate what they saw, and could explore and focus more on the colors and shapes of objects rather than their actual visual appearance. Cézanne played with perspective and flattened surfaces to show the same arrangement from multiple angles at once. He achieved this by emphasizing each object rather than the scene as a whole. Cézanne’s later work included essential components of early Cubism, such as geometric shapes to represent nature and the use of multiple vantage points. This new abstract style is noticeable in future artists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.
Cézanne truly paved the way for Cubism and the first abstract art movement. The young French Fauvist Georges Braque had been struck by the posthumous Cézanne retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1907. Braque declared:
“It was more than an influence, it was an initiation. Cézanne was the first to have broken away from an erudite, mechanized perspective.”
Comparing Fields at Bellevue and The Round Table makes it easy to see Cezanne’s impact on Braque.
In Fields at Bellevue, Cézanne represents the landscape through spheres, cones, and cylinders, allowing for the various perspectives of the picture plane. He flattens the canvas’ space to highlight the surface. Cézanne does not clearly establish the hills in the landscape and instead gives this flat surface impression; he also highlights the houses blended on top of each other unrealistically. Cézanne was interested in the geometry and shape of spheres, cones, cylinders, and cubes. This is reflected in the round spherical shape of the apples. The perspective and placement of the objects are strange; for example, the little flowery pot and the apples beside it feel like they may fall off of the table. Also, the right side of the table is not on the same plane as the left side. Painting from multiple viewpoints makes the subjects less ordinary and more compelling.
Similarly, Braque’s The Round Table adopts this same flat surface technique. Like Cézanne, Braque sought to undermine the illusion of depth by forcing the viewer to recognize the canvas not as a window but as it truly is, a flat curtain. The painting depicts various objects like books, a knife, and a guitar. As in the houses in Fields at Bellevue, Braque stacks these objects on top of each other in a flat vertical fashion. Braque further developed Cézanne’s play on the perspective and composition of his paintings through Cubism. Both paintings show the breakdown of objects into geometric shapes and share a similarly earthy color scheme. Both Cézanne and Braque utilized a similar two-dimensional flatness in their work.
Cézanne also had a lasting impact on Pablo Picasso throughout the Spaniard’s career. Like Braque, Picasso was also struck by the same Cézanne retrospective exhibition. Through Cézanne’s paintings, Picasso adopted a framework of refining the essence of nature to attain a unified surface that conveyed the artist’s singular vision. Throughout his career, Picasso continued to borrow from and reinterpret Cézanne’s art. Cézanne’s most significant impact on Picasso was the use of geometric shapes to simplify nature. This similarity is apparent in Cézanne’s Le Matin en Provence (Morning in Provence) and Picasso’s La Rue des Bois.
In Morning in Provence, Cézanne paints the landscape of his hometown, Aix-en-Provence. He would take numerous walks, often to the same spot, to paint the town’s varying weather throughout the day. In this landscape, Cézanne reduces the natural world into basic shapes.
Comparably, in La Rue des Bois, Picasso paints the heavily forested terrain of Rue des Bois, a French village just north of Paris. In this painting, Picasso paints the landscape using different tones of green, a color scheme Cézanne would often employ. Picasso also pays homage to Cézanne as he utilizes his method of using basic shapes to express the spirituality of nature while also giving the viewer a different perspective of the world around them.
The techniques Cézanne used in his paintings resonated deeply with the next generation of artists during this aesthetic transition from Impression to Cubism. Artists such as Braque, Picasso, and Metzinger immediately began experimenting with Cézanne’s radical methods, culminating in the invention of Cubism in the early twentieth century. For the following generations of modern artists, Cézanne’s works furnished a methodical revolutionary approach that has been repeatedly utilized to this day. Cézanne inspired these painters in the early 20th century. Mainly, they examined the fragmented space of Cézanne’s paintings, the ambiguity of forms of space, the opacity of foreground/background; of whether an object is in from of or behind another object, objects that tended to dissolve, leading to abstraction, and the simple forms of cubes, spheres, and cones. It is his impact that we can see in the work of the Cubists.
Cézanne inspired artists to challenge traditional art styles and revolutionize painting for generations to follow. Jean Metzinger wrote that Cézanne’s work “proves without doubt that painting is not — or not any longer — the art of imitating an object by lines and colors, but of giving plastic solid form to our nature.” Cézanne’s techniques of using geometric configurations instead of conventional modeled forms and blending the background and foreground of his artwork paved the way for a new shift in how art is made and perceived.
