"I will astonish Paris with an apple" ~Paul Cezanne

I watched a program called,  "The Art Mysteries"; fascinating!

(Apples are marvelous!) :-)

"I will astonish Paris with an apple"  ~Cezanne

Landscapes

I Will Astonish Paris with an Apple

by Courtney Jordan

Still Life with Apples by Paul Cezanne, 1879.

That’s a bold statement—even from Paul Cézanne—but the artist was true to his word. He set out to reinvigorate painting and he did just that. The French artist became the conduit between the Impressionist past and the Modernist future that was fully ushered in by the likes of Picasso and Matisse, both of whom revered Cézanne’s work. But the subject matter that propelled such success in the artist’s career was oftentimes relatively humble—still life paintings of apples, figures in the landscape, and kitchen scenes.

The power in Cézanne’s work is inextricably linked to his investigation of visual perception—how we see. His close ties and friendship with so many Impressionists made that search all but inevitable, and yet his painterly results were much more radical than his contemporaries. Impressionists dabbed with the brush, painting light reflections. Cezanne attacked the canvas with a palette knife, applying paint as if it was plaster, and viewed the structure and planes of objects as most compelling in relation to how we see mass. He continually searched for ways to capture form and perspective throughout his career.

		Midday, L’Estaque by Paul Cezanne, c. 1880.

Most of all though, Cézanne wanted to set the heart beating and blood flowing with his works, and make the paint bleed, as he said the Old Masters had first done. He wanted viewers to smell the fields he was painting in Provence, and sense the deep space and atmosphere of the mountain vistas that he took as his subject matter again and again. He loved sumptuous color and explored how patches of color, placed side by side, could create brilliant color effects.