A Painted Point of View
Paul Cézanne has been called ‘the father of modern painting’ though his inspired innovations were often quite subtle…
Paul Cézanne is one of those ‘great artists’ that I never really appreciated until I understood him in the broader context of his contributions to painting in the formative years that preempted Modernism. On the surface, his works may not seem all that radical today, but it’s his treatment of the canvas, as a surface, that was such a breakthrough…
By 1887, when Cézanne painted this landscape of a Hillside in Provence, the approach that was to influence Cubism so strongly is clearly evident. He’s beginning to develop and demonstrate his ‘Flat Art Theory’. He rejected the traditional approach of treating the canvas as if it were a window onto a real scene and acknowledged that a painting is, indeed, a flat surface. So, experimenting with a patchwork layout of geometric forms, he attempted to depict three-dimensional objects from the ‘real’ world whilst celebrating the integrity of the canvas.
He theorised that the forms found in the world could be represented by two orders of shapes: natural…
