This was such a great video. Thank you for providing so much insightful information and in such a digestible way. I have a newfound love for this work because of you!
I'm not sure what to think about this painting, but I do understand the historical context, and how Impressionism is here falling apart into Deconstruction, and that is well explained and illustrated. Thank you. ... And I think the style remains important as with the rise of photography and now digital media it is affirming to see and nearly feel paint at times, to remind us of the physicality of the medium, and a world where many trad crafts are in peril.
Cézanne's apple and mountain fame made me wonder what I'd want to be known for as an artist.. And yes, this looks unfinished, but I like it more for that reason. You can tell this was quick and energetic - the type of painting I wish I had the courage to do. What I imagine myself doing when I finally get my little paint kit, lol. I look forward to hearing more about cubism and other art styles. :)
"This is what one must achieve. If I reach too high or too low, everything is a mess. There must not be a single loose strand, a single gap through which the tension, the light, the truth can escape. I have all the parts of my canvas under control simultaneously. If things tend to diverge, I use my instincts and beliefs to bring them back together again.. Everything that we see disperses, fades away. Nature is always the same, even though its visible manifestations eventually cease to exist. Our art must shock nature into permanence, together with all the components and manifestations of change. Art must make nature eternal in our imagination. What lies behind nature? Nothing perhaps. Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand. So I close this errant hand. I take the tones of colour I see to my right and my left, here, there, everywhere, and I fix these gradiations, I bring them together... They form lines, and become objects, rocks, trees, without my thinking about it. They aquire volume, they have an effect. When these masses and weights on my canvas correspond to the planes, and the spots which I see in my mind and which we see in our eyes, my canvas closes its fingers. It does not waver. It does not reach too high of too low. It is true, it is dense, it is full... But if I have the slightest distraction or feel the slightest weakness, particularly if I start readingntoo much into things, if I am swept along by a theory today which contradicts yesterday's, if I think when I'm painting, if I interfere, then bang, everything slips away." Paul Cezanne (quoted from Cezanne - Taschen)
@@DirtyBottomsPottery You could also attribute that description of artists to any great thinker. The method is just as important as the final product, as they go hand in hand intellectually. Cezanne revolutionized 20th century art from his original and vastly anonymous views towards how to perceive form.
In previous videos you have been talking a lot about liners perspective, especially Brunelleschi. I was thought that Cézanne's greatest contribution to modernism was that he broke with the central perspective in his paintings. I don't know if this is true but perhaps you could talk a little about that in a video. :)
Cezanne's complicating of linear perspective is probably best seen in his still life paintings since a landscape such as this, with little architecture, offers few of the right angles that linear perspective depends upon. Its a good point and would make sense to address more directly in a video. Thank you for the suggestion.
I think this series feels inspired by Hokusai's Views of Mt Fuji and along with that, the move away from central perspective which was not necessarily used in the Eastern art that was being imported at the time (and very popular among post impressionists). The unusual framing seems to provide the desired effect, showing these mountains as a passive yet ever present anchor in the lives of people around them :)
Instead of thinking of artists as participating in a general evolution of how we think about the painted surface, it often makes more sense to think of them just developing and honing their own idiosyncratic vision, which is why we see artists as diverse as Monet and Picasso working in styles in their later years that the art critics and historians would see as several isms behind. Sure, there's some playing with the ideas everyone else is working on, but, it may be a bit misleading to think of Cezanne as flattening the picture plane or eradicating illusion (naturalist illusion, rather, and in favor of his own variety of illusion). It's a bit like looking at Van Gogh's contribution to art being his use of curlicues. The bigger question is WHY was Cezanne flattening shapes (while at the same time emphasizing their angularity, and thus creating a different sort of space and depth). The answer can't be that he wanted to influence Braque and Picasso. Was his primary interest formal innovations in representation or how we think about it? I suspect some other motivation that's a bit less cerebral and a bit more human. Certainly in Gauguin's case -and he also flattened perspective - his practice was tied in with his living in Tahiti, and all that suggests. It would be odd to consider Van Gogh or Gauguin in light of their formal innovations, I'd think, as the personal is so powerful in their work. I guess that stylistic innovation for its own sake in fine art came a bit later, along with the rhetoric to support it. I don't know, because I don't really get Cezanne in the way I do the other "Post Impressionists" who he is generally lumped into. My art blog: artofericwayne.com/
Sometimes something in ancient artwork strikes me as surprisingly modern. It bumps me out of the historical altogether and makes me wonder about the human mind. Great artists always seem to be working on the same questions. And it always seems to involve setting aside the answered.
Totally agree with you. I think Cezanne was just paiting what he thought was beautiful (patches of different colors) and ignoring the academic rules of space illusion ,atmospheric perspective etc. He was NOT intentionlly to flat the image. He just didn't like the rules traditionally applied to render the illusion of depth or perspective. All the rules make painting applying a formula and developing some kind of iconic assumption of what should be looked like to be easily understood by human brains as a perfect scenario. So the rules make an ideal model but NOT what eyes actually see. In a lovely summer day when the air is very clear, there's no need to apply the techniques to render atomospheric perspective. He wanted to paint what he actually saw or what he thought should be just because he thought it was beautiful. When we are out there seeing a wonderful landscape, it's the colors and shapes of the scene that make us comfortable. Somehow it's less important what is what and how far it is away from us. Depth is not important! We need not to think. It's just a visual experience. The artist is painting what is enough to record that subjective feeling. Also painting a highly finished (licked) paiting maybe is too laborious. And earlier the impressionists had made examples to leave the paintings unfinished (broad brushstrokes). They are OK to paint to that rough detail because what is important is already there. They are not making photographic copies. Since in his early years Cezanne was not well accepted by the Parisien art system and didn't care much whether there was a marketing value of his works, he just painted what he liked. I think that's why his paitings resulted as flat.
Cezanne looked at nature and tried to record the objective truths of what he saw. No stylizing or even (later on in his life) thinking about composition, it was more about reflecting the real world onto canvas. He was very much aware of his own innovations however, take this quote from him in regards to his way of perceiving nature: "This is what one must achieve. If I reach too high or too low, everything is a mess. There must not be a single loosw strand, a single gap through which the tension, the light, the truth can escape. I have all the parts of my canvas under control simultaneously. If things tend to diverge, I use my instincts and beliefs to bring them back together again.. Everything that we see disperses, fades away. Nature is always the same, even though its visible manifestations eventually cease to exist. Our art must shock nature into permanence, together with all the components and manifestations of change. Art must make nature eternal in our imagination. What lies behind nature? Nothing perhaps. Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand. So I close this errant hand. I take the tones of colour I see to my right and my left, here, there, everywhere, and I fix these gradiations, I bring them together... They form lines, and become objects, rocks, trees, without my thinking about it. They aquire volume, they have an effect. When these masses and weights on my canvas correspond to the planes, and the spots which I see in my mind and which we see in our eyes, my canvas closes its fingers. It does not waver. It does not reach too high of too low. It is true, it is dense, it is full... But if I have the slightest distraction or feel the slightest weakness, particularly if I start readingntoo much into things, if I am swept along by a theory today which contradicts yesterday's, if I think when I'm painting, if I interfere, then bang, everything slips away." Paul Cezanne (quoted from Cezanne - Taschen
The default English captions have so many mistakes that I cringed while watching, left a comment on the Khan website, and then proceeded to turn captions off.
Il serait plus juste de parler du mont venturi sur lequel est érigée la sainte victoire. Comme il est plus logique de parler de Paris où est érigée la tour Eiffel et non pas la tour Eiffel comme capitale de la France. La montagne Sainte Victoire n'existe pas, c'est la massif du mont Venturi qui existe. Alors SVP un peu de respect pour notre massif et le monde provençal.
@@smarthistory-art-history Cézanne n'a jamais peint que le fronton du mont Venturi où on ne distingue que la croix de Provence et le prieuré de Sainte Victoire d'où la confusion des termes et de réduire le mont Venturi à la seule Sainte Victoire. Il serait temps de rendre au mont ce qui appartient au mont.
@@smarthistory-art-history Pourquoi préfère-t-on dire « la montagne Sainte Victoire » plutôt que « Le mont Venturi » ? Tout simplement parce que cela sonne mieux à l'oreille de la bourgeoisie et de l'éducation nationale. En effet, bien que Mistral ait imposé le provençal comme une langue à part entière, la capitale a vu d'un très mauvais œil cette initiative. De plus la bourgeoisie locale, soucieuse de singer celle de Paris, a mis au banc notre langue provençale faite pour les bouseux et les sans dents. Tant et si bien que le nom de notre massif faisait tâche dans le vocabulaire des précieux. Le Mont Venturi, si cher à nos ancêtres provençaux, devint une sorte de patois pas très propre ; alors que « Sainte Victoire » est plus glorieux, il y a Victoire dans ce nom et, Sainte, qui le rend majestueux. De plus, le fils du marchand de chapeaux à l'angle du passage Agard et du cour Mirabeau, peintre oisif, connu sous le nom de Paul Cézanne, s'évertua à nommer le mont Venturi La Sainte Victoire en ne peignant que le fronton du mont. C'est tout bête et tout con. D'ailleurs, aujourd'hui, certains tentent de redonner au provençal une certaine existence. Je le sais car je suis allé aux cours de provençal et j'en suis vite repartit tant la langue enseignée n'avait rien à voir avec celle que parlait mes grands parents. Déjà, plus d'accent ! Parler le provençal avec l'accent parisien (c.a.d. Sans accent, lisse, impersonnel) n'a plus aucun sens puisque cette langue est pleine de toniques et de respirations. La phrase « à caga à la vigne et ritourne la clè à l'oustaou » doit être prononcée avec des toniques sinon ça devient ridicule et sans aucun sens. Il faut dire « A Kaga la VIgna É riTOURno la Klé A l'ousTAou » Car à cette époque il n'était pas question de mettre les WC dans la maison. Mon grand père trouvait cette pratique anti-hygiénique et jamais de sa vie il n'aurait accepté cette infamie. Voici donc pourquoi le mont venturi a disparu du vocabulaire français, par snobisme, tout simplement.
Oui et bien on respect ce massif en le grimpant et y dormant dans le gîte lorsqu on pouvait le faire! !! Faire autant de manières c est la tendance aujourd hui Appréciez les peintures du peintre qui de son temps était raillé (peut être par des gens comme vous ..) ceaznne a titre la sainte victoire ! Tu vas pas nous chier une carrière non plus Paul tu peux continuer à peindre Merciii pour ta ténacité Qui est devenue génie
Something still lives . Thanks for posting .
This was such a great video. Thank you for providing so much insightful information and in such a digestible way. I have a newfound love for this work because of you!
I'm not sure what to think about this painting, but I do understand the historical context, and how Impressionism is here falling apart into Deconstruction, and that is well explained and illustrated. Thank you. ... And I think the style remains important as with the rise of photography and now digital media it is affirming to see and nearly feel paint at times, to remind us of the physicality of the medium, and a world where many trad crafts are in peril.
thank you so much for this precise description of this painting....very useful as i am writing my masters thesis about cezanne and virginia woolf
Cézanne's apple and mountain fame made me wonder what I'd want to be known for as an artist..
And yes, this looks unfinished, but I like it more for that reason. You can tell this was quick and energetic - the type of painting I wish I had the courage to do. What I imagine myself doing when I finally get my little paint kit, lol.
I look forward to hearing more about cubism and other art styles. :)
"This is what one must achieve. If I reach too high or too low, everything is a mess. There must not be a single loose strand, a single gap through which the tension, the light, the truth can escape. I have all the parts of my canvas under control simultaneously. If things tend to diverge, I use my instincts and beliefs to bring them back together again..
Everything that we see disperses, fades away. Nature is always the same, even though its visible manifestations eventually cease to exist. Our art must shock nature into permanence, together with all the components and manifestations of change. Art must make nature eternal in our imagination. What lies behind nature? Nothing perhaps. Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand. So I close this errant hand. I take the tones of colour I see to my right and my left, here, there, everywhere, and I fix these gradiations, I bring them together... They form lines, and become objects, rocks, trees, without my thinking about it. They aquire volume, they have an effect. When these masses and weights on my canvas correspond to the planes, and the spots which I see in my mind and which we see in our eyes, my canvas closes its fingers. It does not waver. It does not reach too high of too low. It is true, it is dense, it is full... But if I have the slightest distraction or feel the slightest weakness, particularly if I start readingntoo much into things, if I am swept along by a theory today which contradicts yesterday's, if I think when I'm painting, if I interfere, then bang, everything slips away."
Paul Cezanne (quoted from Cezanne - Taschen)
@@DirtyBottomsPottery You could also attribute that description of artists to any great thinker. The method is just as important as the final product, as they go hand in hand intellectually. Cezanne revolutionized 20th century art from his original and vastly anonymous views towards how to perceive form.
Thank you for your explanation!! Very useful for understanding of Paul Cezanne.
This painting reminds me of another Cezanne painting, the bathhouse I think. These paintings look wet, this world is full of watercolor emotions
Yo tengo ese cuadro
In previous videos you have been talking a lot about liners perspective, especially Brunelleschi. I was thought that Cézanne's greatest contribution to modernism was that he broke with the central perspective in his paintings. I don't know if this is true but perhaps you could talk a little about that in a video. :)
Cezanne's complicating of linear perspective is probably best seen in his still life paintings since a landscape such as this, with little architecture, offers few of the right angles that linear perspective depends upon. Its a good point and would make sense to address more directly in a video. Thank you for the suggestion.
I think this series feels inspired by Hokusai's Views of Mt Fuji and along with that, the move away from central perspective which was not necessarily used in the Eastern art that was being imported at the time (and very popular among post impressionists).
The unusual framing seems to provide the desired effect, showing these mountains as a passive yet ever present anchor in the lives of people around them :)
STUNNING MASTERCLASS
So glad the video was helpful!
BRILLIANT.
ABSOLUTEMENT.
Instead of thinking of artists as participating in a general evolution of how we think about the painted surface, it often makes more sense to think of them just developing and honing their own idiosyncratic vision, which is why we see artists as diverse as Monet and Picasso working in styles in their later years that the art critics and historians would see as several isms behind. Sure, there's some playing with the ideas everyone else is working on, but, it may be a bit misleading to think of Cezanne as flattening the picture plane or eradicating illusion (naturalist illusion, rather, and in favor of his own variety of illusion). It's a bit like looking at Van Gogh's contribution to art being his use of curlicues.
The bigger question is WHY was Cezanne flattening shapes (while at the same time emphasizing their angularity, and thus creating a different sort of space and depth). The answer can't be that he wanted to influence Braque and Picasso. Was his primary interest formal innovations in representation or how we think about it? I suspect some other motivation that's a bit less cerebral and a bit more human. Certainly in Gauguin's case -and he also flattened perspective - his practice was tied in with his living in Tahiti, and all that suggests. It would be odd to consider Van Gogh or Gauguin in light of their formal innovations, I'd think, as the personal is so powerful in their work.
I guess that stylistic innovation for its own sake in fine art came a bit later, along with the rhetoric to support it. I don't know, because I don't really get Cezanne in the way I do the other "Post Impressionists" who he is generally lumped into.
My art blog: artofericwayne.com/
Sometimes something in ancient artwork strikes me as surprisingly modern. It bumps me out of the historical altogether and makes me wonder about the human mind. Great artists always seem to be working on the same questions. And it always seems to involve setting aside the answered.
Totally agree with you. I think Cezanne was just paiting what he thought was beautiful (patches of different colors) and ignoring the academic rules of space illusion ,atmospheric perspective etc.
He was NOT intentionlly to flat the image. He just didn't like the rules traditionally applied to render the illusion of depth or perspective. All the rules make painting applying a formula and developing some kind of iconic assumption of what should be looked like to be easily understood by human brains as a perfect scenario. So the rules make an ideal model but NOT what eyes actually see.
In a lovely summer day when the air is very clear, there's no need to apply the techniques to render atomospheric perspective. He wanted to paint what he actually saw or what he thought should be just because he thought it was beautiful.
When we are out there seeing a wonderful landscape, it's the colors and shapes of the scene that make us comfortable. Somehow it's less important what is what and how far it is away from us. Depth is not important! We need not to think. It's just a visual experience.
The artist is painting what is enough to record that subjective feeling. Also painting a highly finished (licked) paiting maybe is too laborious. And earlier the impressionists had made examples to leave the paintings unfinished (broad brushstrokes). They are OK to paint to that rough detail because what is important is already there. They are not making photographic copies. Since in his early years Cezanne was not well accepted by the Parisien art system and didn't care much whether there was a marketing value of his works, he just painted what he liked.
I think that's why his paitings resulted as flat.
Cezanne looked at nature and tried to record the objective truths of what he saw. No stylizing or even (later on in his life) thinking about composition, it was more about reflecting the real world onto canvas. He was very much aware of his own innovations however, take this quote from him in regards to his way of perceiving nature:
"This is what one must achieve. If I reach too high or too low, everything is a mess. There must not be a single loosw strand, a single gap through which the tension, the light, the truth can escape. I have all the parts of my canvas under control simultaneously. If things tend to diverge, I use my instincts and beliefs to bring them back together again..
Everything that we see disperses, fades away. Nature is always the same, even though its visible manifestations eventually cease to exist. Our art must shock nature into permanence, together with all the components and manifestations of change. Art must make nature eternal in our imagination. What lies behind nature? Nothing perhaps. Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand. So I close this errant hand. I take the tones of colour I see to my right and my left, here, there, everywhere, and I fix these gradiations, I bring them together... They form lines, and become objects, rocks, trees, without my thinking about it. They aquire volume, they have an effect. When these masses and weights on my canvas correspond to the planes, and the spots which I see in my mind and which we see in our eyes, my canvas closes its fingers. It does not waver. It does not reach too high of too low. It is true, it is dense, it is full... But if I have the slightest distraction or feel the slightest weakness, particularly if I start readingntoo much into things, if I am swept along by a theory today which contradicts yesterday's, if I think when I'm painting, if I interfere, then bang, everything slips away."
Paul Cezanne (quoted from Cezanne - Taschen
inventing his own authenticity
Compare Marsden Hartley’s painting of the same scene: “Mont Saint-Victoire” (1927)
The default English captions have so many mistakes that I cringed while watching, left a comment on the Khan website, and then proceeded to turn captions off.
Have another look - ! There are human generated captions as well. Sorry about the confusion.
He didn’t finish it
You guys come on
He started another painting and put that on the floor
For real all I see is an unfinished mountain
Il serait plus juste de parler du mont venturi sur lequel est érigée la sainte victoire. Comme il est plus logique de parler de Paris où est érigée la tour Eiffel et non pas la tour Eiffel comme capitale de la France. La montagne Sainte Victoire n'existe pas, c'est la massif du mont Venturi qui existe. Alors SVP un peu de respect pour notre massif et le monde provençal.
Merci pour l'écriture et pour la clarification. Néanmoins, c'est ainsi que les peintures sont titrées et discutées.
@@smarthistory-art-history Cézanne n'a jamais peint que le fronton du mont Venturi où on ne distingue que la croix de Provence et le prieuré de Sainte Victoire d'où la confusion des termes et de réduire le mont Venturi à la seule Sainte Victoire. Il serait temps de rendre au mont ce qui appartient au mont.
Merci pour la clarification. Apparemment, nous avons du travail à faire!
@@smarthistory-art-history Pourquoi préfère-t-on dire « la montagne Sainte Victoire » plutôt que « Le mont Venturi » ? Tout simplement parce que cela sonne mieux à l'oreille de la bourgeoisie et de l'éducation nationale. En effet, bien que Mistral ait imposé le provençal comme une langue à part entière, la capitale a vu d'un très mauvais œil cette initiative. De plus la bourgeoisie locale, soucieuse de singer celle de Paris, a mis au banc notre langue provençale faite pour les bouseux et les sans dents. Tant et si bien que le nom de notre massif faisait tâche dans le vocabulaire des précieux. Le Mont Venturi, si cher à nos ancêtres provençaux, devint une sorte de patois pas très propre ; alors que « Sainte Victoire » est plus glorieux, il y a Victoire dans ce nom et, Sainte, qui le rend majestueux. De plus, le fils du marchand de chapeaux à l'angle du passage Agard et du cour Mirabeau, peintre oisif, connu sous le nom de Paul Cézanne, s'évertua à nommer le mont Venturi La Sainte Victoire en ne peignant que le fronton du mont. C'est tout bête et tout con. D'ailleurs, aujourd'hui, certains tentent de redonner au provençal une certaine existence. Je le sais car je suis allé aux cours de provençal et j'en suis vite repartit tant la langue enseignée n'avait rien à voir avec celle que parlait mes grands parents. Déjà, plus d'accent ! Parler le provençal avec l'accent parisien (c.a.d. Sans accent, lisse, impersonnel) n'a plus aucun sens puisque cette langue est pleine de toniques et de respirations. La phrase « à caga à la vigne et ritourne la clè à l'oustaou » doit être prononcée avec des toniques sinon ça devient ridicule et sans aucun sens. Il faut dire « A Kaga la VIgna É riTOURno la Klé A l'ousTAou » Car à cette époque il n'était pas question de mettre les WC dans la maison. Mon grand père trouvait cette pratique anti-hygiénique et jamais de sa vie il n'aurait accepté cette infamie. Voici donc pourquoi le mont venturi a disparu du vocabulaire français, par snobisme, tout simplement.
Oui et bien on respect ce massif en le grimpant et y dormant dans le gîte lorsqu on pouvait le faire! !!
Faire autant de manières
c est la tendance aujourd hui
Appréciez les peintures du peintre qui de son temps était raillé (peut être par des gens comme vous ..)
ceaznne a titre la sainte victoire ! Tu vas pas nous chier une carrière non plus
Paul
tu peux continuer à peindre
Merciii pour ta ténacité
Qui est devenue génie