Can Cezanne be considered an Impressionist painter?
By Alice Emily Stephenson
Traditionally in art landscape has been considered a low genre in comparison to the esteemed historical and narrative genres. Before impressionism the genre of landscape contained realistic or idealised compositions and were often mere backdrops to a more important narrative in the foreground. Notable 17th century Dutch painters like Rembrandt and Jan Steen composed their paintings in a classical and compositional style and often had the main subject as the focus that were often in contrived positions and commanded attention. Impressionism on the other hand threw out this technique of an artificial feeling between the subject and the background and often depicted something like a photographic stolen shot that creates a more relaxed and natural contextual positioning of the main subject. To a large extent, impressionist styles can be viewed more as a reaction to the emerging visual realism offered by the emerging photographic works that all devalued the need for realistic paintings. In short, impressionism is a depiction of an artist’s impression. It does not aim to be accurate in detail which one finds in the realist and neo-realist style. But the impression often elicits a stronger emotional appeal, which is variously triggered in the beholder. Many impressionist paintings have a soft nebulous rendering of its subject, almost dream-like. Rules about perspective, clean definite lines and interplay of light and shadows no longer apply. It is a spontaneous expression, often discarding the basic ability to draw correctly and becomes more an interplay of colors. Because it is an impression, every impressionist painting becomes more an expression of the heart. Impressionism involved the depiction of a wide variety of subject matter. They strove to break away from the traditional rules of everyday subject matter. Unlike conservative painters who focused on portraying dramatic, often historical scenes of idealised beauty and moral or religious meaning, the Impressionists chose ordinary scenes from everyday life as the subject matter of their work. They put emphasis on capturing reality and depicting what they saw at a given moment. Nature was elevated to become the subject of the painting, rather than a backdrop for another scene, as was the case in traditional art. In painting landscapes, the Impressionists tried to put on canvas what they saw in front of them, without idealization. They often made a seemingly ordinary part of nature a focal point of their work. Impressionist artists were interested in portraying people in everyday, informal situations: the middle class during leisure time activities in gardens, parks, or at the seaside, and workmen or rural people at work. One novelty of people portraits was the introduction of nudes who, "at the time, ... were an acceptable subject in allegorical or historical paintings, but not in scenes of everyday life."1 With the 19th century Industrial Revolution and the reconstruction of Paris into a modern city, the city scene became one of the Impressionists' favorite subjects: "women wearing the latest fashions, the airy new streets and suburbs of Paris, modern modes of transportation..., and the riverside and seacoast resorts where Parisians spent their leisure time."2 And finally painting still life allowed the Impressionists to experiment with the depiction of changing light and to study the effects of light and shadow on the look of ordinary objects.
Impressionist artists have very specific techniques. The Impressionists loosened their brushwork and lightened their palettes to include pure, intense bright colors. They abandoned traditional linear perspective and avoided the clarity of form that had previously served to distinguish the more important elements of a picture from the lesser ones. For these reason, many critics faulted Impressionist paintings for their unfinished appearance and seemingly amateurish quality. The sketchiness or patchiness found in many Impressionist paintings is not the result of carelessness or incompetence, as was implied by critics. It was an intentional device used by these painters to convey something of the experience of the rapid movement or variety in a scene. Nevertheless, it is largely a myth that the spontaneous effects sought after by Impressionist painters were the result of simply painting quickly on the spot. The effects of spontaneity in many Impressionist paintings involved a process of careful calculation and reworking of paint layers in the studio. “They have managed to produce intense coloring with the help of observation as precise as it is simple . . .. They’ve avoided any muddiness in their painting by using tiny brushstrokes, little dotted points, or the juxtaposition of colors: the mixture occurs in the eye, not on the palette. They paint by attenuating, by modifying the local color of an object through reflections of the strongest adjacent color. They have, so to speak, restored the virginity of the eye, forgetting conventional colors in order to find, on their own, the right note. And they have succeeded.”3 The Impressionists also broke the traditional rules of composition and opened their style to experimenting. In their attempts to capture a given moment, they omitted detail in favor of the overall effect of the painting. They looked at their subjects from unusual angles and often cropped or framed their work in a way that was new to painting. A well-known Impressionist artist of the nineteenth century was Paul Cezanne. Cézanne is considered one of the greatest artists of the last century, known to many as the 'Father of Modern Art’. He had his own unique quality that gives his paintings a ripe, continuous growth and its own character that is striking and inspiring. Every one of his masterpieces is taken to a new height and is specifically individual in its nature. His painting is a balanced art; its qualities are compensated in a structural fashion. Cezanne was a very shy man whose work was nearly always misunderstood by his contemporaries because of his modern style and technique. During his early years of work Paul Cezanne used thick and heavy brushstrokes with lots of layers of paint on his canvas. Some described his early work as ‘violent’ in nature because of the hastiness of it. Cezanne would paint from nature and in the late 1870’s his texture and compositions became much smoother and he attempted to create form using his paintbrush. In 1874 the anonymous society of artists painters engravers etc all decided from their meeting in the café Guerbois that they should move away from the traditional salon and open an exhibition of their own in the former studio of the famous photographer Nadar.
In the anonymous societies exhibition Cezanne presented three canvases. One of them was called The Hanged Man’s House. Compared to his much earlier works Cezanne has used a lot of pale colours and broken brushstrokes that was so common with The Impressionists style. The Hanged Man’s House reveals Cezanne’s peculiar brand of impressionism. The composition of this canvas is very complicated. There are several strong lines that lead away from the central point that the viewer’s eye can follow. There is a path, which climbs to the left of the frame, another that leads down towards the center of the painting, a blank that curves away to the right and branches of the trees angling off the top of the painting. The planes are close set. The thicknesses of the grainy brushstrokes seem to almost plaster the painting. The lack of people in the scene and the cool colors that help create a strong sense of solitude.
These arrows on Cezanne’s House of the Hanged Man show the different lines that the viewer’s eye takes when they look at the painting. It is what has made the canvas quite a complicated one but it is still very effective.
In these three close up sections of Cezanne’s painting we can clearly see how grainy his brushstrokes were and thickly he has applied the paint. It has created a really clear texture on the canvas.
A section of the sky in the painting that is filled with colours and tones.
The great French artist Claude Monet was responsible for introducing the idea of impressionism. In 1872 he created the painting sunrise. The scene painted here by Monet is of the harbor of LeHavre, in France. It is a great example that shows the characteristics of Monet’s work. The piece is oil sketched on canvas that has been executed quickly to capture the atmospheric or natural light moment. In this Monet painting, the sun is placed against the dawn sky, with orange and blue-violet contrast. Because it was a very misty morning on the harbor, the rising sun colors the clouds in the dense mist, and the boats take shape, without great definition. The abbreviated, darker brushstrokes in the water create motion, and ripples, while hints of orange and yellow appear as a reflection of the sunrise in the harbor water. The rippling water sometimes disrupts the ships’ masts, as the silhouettes of the boats seem to be disappearing into the mist.
One of two figures that Monet has chosen to include in his scene. Because he has included this tiny detail it now gives us a focus point to look at.
The dark blue brushstrokes in the water that create the effect of ripples.
Boats and there masts that are disappearing in to the thick mist.
The orange sunlight that contrasts with the blue water it reflects upon.
When comparing these painting it is obvious that they are not the same even though impressionist artists created them both. The most obvious difference is the type of brushstroke that has been used. In Monet’s Sunrise we have a very relaxed loose brushstroke that has created a very abstract scene. He has created a mysterious atmosphere in the painting by adding mist to the background. But Cezanne has also managed to create an atmosphere that is very pleasant in his scene with the use of the warm orange tones. The picture depicts a day where the sun is just about to set and has cast a bright orange glow over the little village. Colour was a big part of the impressionist movement and a big part of both these paintings. Monet has used quite cool and muted tones of blue and purple in his piece but then added subtle orange tones in the sky and a bright orange for the sun and the reflection it is casting on the water. Cezanne on the other hand has used very bright and bold tones like greens and yellows. He has used thick brushstrokes that match the type of colours he has used perfectly.
The public’s reaction to the Impressionism Exhibition was mixed. Art critic Louis Leroy was shocked by the loose brushwork and casual composition of Monet and his friends. His reaction was shared by most of the visitors to the show, who thought the subject-matter that consisted mostly of landscape or street scenes of people going about their everyday lives was ‘vulgar’ and ‘common placed’. In addition, they considered the manner of painting adopted to be far too sketchy and incomplete. The use of rapid brushstrokes - with entire paintings completed in one session - was considered to be an insult to the meticulous and timeconsuming brushwork of traditional artists, who often spent weeks on a single work.
Rather than work from sketches Cezanne was influenced by Monet's ability to create shapes on the canvas and applied colour with big, broad strokes. Many of Cézanne's compositions were left incomplete because of the difficulty of finishing a piece of artwork. He took months to finish any piece and his style made working en plein air too challenging. Therefore he returned to the studio and worked there instead. He met van Gogh around this time and was also influenced by his style. Consequently, Cezanne's brush strokes became less dense and more fluid in style. Compositions from this period clearly reveal that Cézanne's technique and subject matter was becoming Impressionistic. Paul Cezanne was a highly analytical person when it came to his subjects and perceived them as different shapes that could be placed together to make an overall form. He would create his works slowly, building upon each figure with a new outline. Using this method it would take Cezanne months to finish a still life or portrait painting. Although Cézanne did use drawings and sketches before he placed his paintbrush to canvas a lot of the work was done on the canvas itself. He found working from nature to be extremely arduous and for him returning to the scene of a landscape was often more challenging than completing the painting itself. Cézanne's complicated method of painting explains why he often painted the same subject matter time and time again. Throughout his life Cézanne became more and more influenced by nature and particularly the beauty of his home in Aix-en-Provence. He wanted to capture the part of nature that was constant rather than the surface beauty that changed with the seasons. “One had to immerse oneself in one's surroundings and intensely study nature or one's subject to understand how to recreate it.”-Paul Cezanne4
In 1875 Paul Cezanne created the painting View of Auvers sur Oise. The scene depicted a rural landscape setting that was Cezanne’s view while he was staying with a friend. He painted along side his good friend Camille Pissarro who encouraged him to use lighter colours and rather than create a swirling bright impression of nature instead depict nature as accurately as possible. Camille Pissarro’s influences did not just stop there, in 1873 Cezanne created the piece House of Pere Lacroix. Just like in View of Auvers Pissarro's influence can be seen on Cézanne's palette knife. The paintings share the same bright yellow and green colors for the foliage, which is reflected in the water. Furthermore the vivid orange tone of the roof is reminiscent of the small block houses stretching across View of Auvers sur Oise.
The center space of View of Auvers sur Oise is dominated by block houses that stretch across the rolling landscape yet the houses in the foreground have been painted with much more detail, those in the background are simple rectangles and squares with distinctive colors distinguishing the walls and roofs. CĂŠzanne used swirling green, yellow and grey shades and the buttercup yellow tones of the leaves and the mint green shades of the grass lend themselves to a sunny day, all these colors are bight which link the style and technique that impressionist artists used. In contrast the sky is a tumulus dark grey tone, created with dirty blues and murky whites. The brush strokes of View of Auvers sur Oiseare rough and loose again very apt for the impressionist art movement. CĂŠzanne liked to use these large brushes with perceptible brush strokes that are obvious to the viewer. It was difficult for CĂŠzanne to finish a piece like View of Auvers sur Oise because it took him an extraordinarily long time to finish a painting. He was a slow worker and when painting a landscape, a great deal would have changed between what he saw at the beginning of his painting process and the end.
An example of the blocks of houses that dominant the painting.
A comparison between the detail in the foreground and detail in the background of the painting.
So the impressionist art movement was a momentous break from tradition in European painting. It had no fixed manifesto or rules. Artists were aloud to paint what they wanted and to a point however they wanted. All artists in the Impressionist art movement were different as we saw with Cezanne and Monet. We found that Monet had a much more looser brushstrokes that were placed straight onto his canvas unlike Cezanne who took a much more detailed approach to his work like we saw with the houses in View of Auvers. They also took very different approaches with their colour palettes; Monet opted for a cool muted tones of blue and purple while Cezanne went for bright yellows and greens. Paul Cezanne was in influence to The Impressionists. He would paint by reducing what he saw to elements of things such as cubes and cones. He would use colours that suggested underlying form. His work even influenced new painters such as Picasso and even helped with the development of the Cubism Art Movement.
http://www.impressionism.org Accessed 5th December 2014. http://www.impressionism.org/paris.htm Accessed 5th December 2014. 3 Critic Jean Ajalbert, “Le Salon des impressionnistes,� Revue Moderne, June 20, 1886. Source- https://deyoung.famsf.org/curriculum/post-impressionismquotes-artists-and-critics Accessed 5th December 2014. 4 Paul Cezanne Quote, Source- http://www.artquotes.com/auth_search.php?name=Paul+Cezanne#.VUkc-oe4nEY Accessed 5th December 2014. 1 2