Paul Cezanne in Provence

Independent and self-taught

Paul Cezanne was for the most part self-taught. Denied official recognition in Paris, he returned again and again to Provence to create his own style, largely independent of other artists' influence.

Development of style

The author Evmarie Schmitt outlines the development of that style against the background of Cezanne's personal life - the close friendship with Emile Zola during the artist's happy childhood in Aix. Cezanne's fight to pursue an artistic career despite an antagonistic father; his extended sojourns in Paris and his acquaintance there with the impressionists. His relationship with, and eventual marriage to, the artist's model Hortense Fiquet, and the lonely final years, devoted with obsessive single-mindedness to the realization of an artistic vision that laid the foundations of modern art.

Mont Sainte-Victoire

While including discussion of Paul Cezanne's still lifes and "Bathers" series, the book focuses on his images of Provence - the coast near Marseille, the villages around Aix, and Mont Sainte-Victoire. Reproductions of some 50 oil paintings, and of several watercolors and drawings, testify to the enduring fascination that this countryside held for Paul Cezanne and to its formative influence on his art.
Cezanne in Provence by Evmarie Schmitt
Prestel Publishing, 2000

Painting in the south of France

Cezanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials. He chose to work in increasing artistic isolation, usually painting in the south of France, in his beloved Provence, far from Paris. Like the landscapes, his portraits were drawn from that which was familiar, so that not only his wife and son but local peasants, children and his art dealer served as subjects.

Landscape into Art

Cezanne: Landscape into Art by Pavel MacHotka presents a new perspective on Paul Cezanne, one of the towering and most influential figures of nineteenth-century art. Pavel Machotka has photographed the sites of Cezanne's landscape paintings - whenever possible from the same spot and at the same time of day that Paul Cezanne painted the scenes. Juxtaposing these color photographs with reproductions of the paintings, he offers a dazzling range of evidence to demonstrate how the great painter transformed nature into works of art. Machotka, himself an artist, moves from painting to painting, examining textures and surfaces, pictorial rhythms, and inflections of tone.

Forms and colors

As Pavel MacHotka analyzes Paul Cezanne's treatment of individual sites, their transposition into forms and colors, and the artist's responsiveness to the demands of each unique composition, we begin to see Paul Cezanne as he saw himself: not as an early Cubist, but as a painter who explored every aspect of his motif for its rich compositional potential and presented a parallel and faithful conception of it. Using color to define form, while retaining hues that are anchored in reality, Paul Cezanne achieved sensuous reconstructions, rather than intellectual depictions like those of the Cubists. While there are other books on Cezanne's landscapes, none is as closely informed by painterly knowledge and perception or as complete in its grasp of Paul Cezanne's period and geography as this one. A visual delight, it is also an illuminating and original interaction with the artist's work.
Cezanne: Landscape into Art by Pavel MacHotka
Yale University Press, 1996

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