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Europe 1800 - 1900
Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 5
Lesson 4: Post-Impressionism- Introduction to Neo-Impressionism, Part I
- Introduction to Neo-Impressionism, Part II
- Neo-Impressionist Color Theory
- Seurat, Bathers at Asnières
- Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
- Seurat, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884”
- Van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin
- Think you know van Gogh? The Potato Eaters
- Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
- Van Gogh, The Bedroom
- Van Gogh's Irises: Getty Conversations
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- The Pont-Aven School and Synthetism
- Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les misérables)
- Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon, or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel
- Gauguin, Nevermore
- Gauguin, The Red Cow
- Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching
- Gauguin, Oviri
- Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
- Gauguin and Laval in Martinique
- An introduction to the painting of Paul Cézanne
- Why Is This Woman in the Jungle?
- Cézanne, The Bather
- Cézanne, The Basket of Apples
- Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid
- Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid
- Cézanne, The Red Rock
- Cézanne, Still Life with Apples
- Cézanne, Turning Road at Montgeroult
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Cezanne, Card Players
- Cézanne, Bathers
- Cezanne, The Large Bathers
- Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge
- Post-Impressionism
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Cézanne, Still Life with Apples
Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, 1895-98 (MoMA). Speakers: Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Why are two enthusiastic amateurs conversing in this video? At times the female makes a little sense, but her reference to straight realism being "bankrupt" is insane. Can she be speak here and not be aware of Antonio Lopez Garcia, born Spain 1936,in quality equal of The Old Masters(0 votes)
- Beth Harris and Steven Zucker are not amateurs bub, they are very helpful and you should be thankful that they take time to do these videos.(38 votes)
- Did any of the Impressionists or post-impressionists use cameras before painting? Ken McGovern(3 votes)
- Degas was known to be a huge fan of photography. Here is another link related to his "new passion of photography..."
http://www.metmuseum.org/research/metpublications/Edgar_Degas_Photographer(1 vote)
Video transcript
(jazzy music) Male: We're on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City. We're looking at Paul Cezanne's Still Life with Apples from 1895-1898. Female: The three year
span suggests that he worked on this repeatedly over the course of several years. Male: Except it's not finished! Female: No, not at all. In several areas, in fact,
the canvas is quite bare, and the rest of it is quite sketchy. Male: It's really sketchy. And you're right, this tablecloth in the foreground is just, well it's not raw canvas, but it's sized canvas. The drapery on the upper left is the same. The pitcher on the right side, lots of the white canvas coming through. Even the areas which are painted seem as if it's only a
preliminary first coat. I think that we could say
that it was badly drawn. Female: Yes, absolutely. Male: The pitcher is tipping to the left, the ellipse that forms
the edge of the bowl is completely sort of
deformed, and the edge of the glass, we seem to
look down at the glass even as we look across
at it, much too much. Female: And the fruit on the table looks like it should fall off. There's no sense of gravity. Male: Cezanne could draw beautifully, and according to the
traditions of the 19th century. So this is purposeful. It's this deliberate what? Female: It's a deliberate breaking open of the possibilities of
what painting could be here at the close of the 19th century. I think an idea that the
tradition of European painting, of it being a very
mimetic, very real image that reflected what
the artist saw, I think that that was obviously
completely bankrupt by the late 1880s and 1890s. Male: That's so interesting
because the still life itself, as a subject, is
a, first of all lowly; it has not had any real significance since the 17th century, and he's resurrecting the still life as a form, but if
you think about the still life, that was one of the
attributes of the still life in the 17th century was a kind of really heightened naturalism. Female: That's true; how
real everything could look. Male: If you look at the [unintelligible] of the Dutch tradition. Yet, Cezanners are going at this in a very different way. Female: Entirely different. Male: So linear perspective and those traditions of hyper-realism
as they had been refined over the centuries
into the 19th century was very much still dominant. Yet, Cezanne here is not
finishing the canvas, is playing fast and loose with drawing, and is creating an environment that I think is very perplexing. It must have been extremely perpelexing for viewers in the 19th century, but even for us, creates
a kind of tentativeness when we look at it, yeah? Female: I think he's finding his way. I think he knows that those traditions are bankrupt, and I think he's looking for another way to paint. Male: And another way to see. Female: And another way to see and another way to
experience, that's true. Male: That's it, that's it. I think there's also an
implicit invitation here, to move into this canvas
visually, in a sense, the way he experiences these forms. In the 19th century,
according to the traditions that had been in place
for so long, the artist would stand in a particular point in space and make sure that everything was in accord with that perspectival point. Female: Right. Male: What Cesanne seems to be doing is to allow us to move through the canvas and to, in a sense,
experience it as we might as our vision actually begins to meander. Is it possible here
that Cezanne is actually giving us a series of
pathways and alternatives and a more complex set of views? Female: I think it is.
I think that the bigger question here is how
that becomes important or why that becomes important at the dawn of the 20th century, at the
end of the 19th century; that something about the experience of the individual, something
about the subjectivity of the experience of
space, of time, of seeing. I think that the weight of those things and the bankruptcy of
that mimetic tradition, that copying of nature tradition, something about those issues becomes really critical at the
end of the 19th century. Male: I think that that's exactly right. I think that subjectivity is critical to understanding Cezanne. At the same time, I think there's a series of sort of underlying,
other sort of visual realities that have come into
play in the modern world. Female: Photography. Male: Photography. The momentariness of
the glimpse of the city, of the speed of transportation, and in a sense the
making complex of vision. Female: Exactly, and Cezanne
is taking that vision, that idea of the complexity of vision, and really working it
and thinking it through, and eliminating the
sort of spiritual stuff that Gauguin adds to it and the psychological material that van Gogh adds to it, and thinking about it in a
very sort of rigorous way. Male: And of course this will have an enormous impact on the next century when Matisse and Picasso and others will look back to this work. It really is the foundation for cubism and for so much of the abstraction, and the formal, you're absolutely right, sort of the formal investigations of vision that go after. Female: Yup. (jazzy music)