Structure and Space   Image: Etude paysage a auvers, Paul Cezanne, 1873

Paul Cezanne

Structure and Space Monet's achievement was surpassed by only one man, Paul Cezanne, who is certainly one of the greatest of all painters since Rembrandt. Lacking Monet's single-mindedness, Cezanne had a greater range and universality. He was personally responsible for much that is modern art; since Cezanne, painting can never be the same. One may best explain his influence by saying that he re-thought the whole question of painting. He went back to fundamentals, taking as his starting point the problem of interpreting the three-dimensional unbounded world in terms of the two-dimensional rectangular picture. He too was very conscious of the confused nature of human perception. He sought a new way of pictorial composition that would match his own experiences. By his own standards he failed, but it is this that gives his career its tragic and heroic quality. Cezanne abandoned from the beginning some of the tricks, such as linear perspective, that artists had used unquestioningly for centuries. His early work was consequently dismissed as childish; and as he was a man of strong feelings, which he wished to transmit through his paintings, it was often overcharged with his private emotions. Realizing this, he deliberately went to school with Camille Pissarro for a time in the early 1870's, in order to learn from him the Impressionist use of paint and color, and light and space. But the momentary effects of Impressionism were not what Cezanne wanted in painting. They were too superficial, too impermanent. He sought to penetrate beneath appearances, in order to make pictorial reconstructions of what he called his "sensations before nature." The results were some of the most original pictures ever painted.

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