Main content
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
© 2023 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid
Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid, oil on canvas, c.1895 (Courtauld Gallery, London) Speakers: Beth Harris, Rachel Ropeik, and Steven Zucker For more: http://smarthistory.org/Cezannes-Still-Life-with-Apples.html. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Were painters such as Cézanne a direct influence on later Cubist painters like Picasso and Braque? It seems like Cézanne's "The Red Rock" (shown later in this playlist) and his "Quarry Bibémus" are spearheading that direction.(7 votes)
- "Cézanne is the father of us all" - Picasso/Matisse(16 votes)
- Did the common public "get" this art? I mean, did they really understand this art the way we believe we do today after all these years of study? I can easily understand why an amateur might see this painting as rubbish, but at the same time I can see a Parisian public loving the "new" and the "different"...(3 votes)
- How would one distinguish fine art from trash?(2 votes)
- That is a good question!
Firstly, I do think it has got something to do with an individual's way of seeing that artwork; their perspective of it that would ultimately lead them to either criticize or ardently admire it.
In the case of this painting of Cezanne's and what I have observed from those of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, it seems that they have very consciously and with deliberate calculation laid out their own rules and followed them. They wanted to deviate from the conventional, academic principles of making art. It is not that they were unable to follow conventional methods of painting, it's just that they chose not to.
And I think it is in that choice itself that their artistic thought shines through. Their consequent execution of their artworks is a testament to it!(1 vote)
- Does anyone ever look at the works of Cezanne, Ganguin, and the like and think "this artist was the post-impressionist incarnation of a troll"? Because I sometimes wonder if they were just messing with people...(1 vote)
Video transcript
(jazzy music) Male: We're in the Courtauld Galleries and we're looking at Still
Life of Plaster Cast. It dates to the middle of his career. Female 1: I do think
it's a little bit hard to find one point of view that works for this whole painting. If you look at the table in the foreground with these fruits and
this little plaster cast, then that seems to have
been painted from one angle, and if you look toward the background then all of a sudden
it's is that the floor or is that a piece of drapery? It's hard to unify. Male: Okay, so maybe we should
start in the foreground. We have this plaster cast of a putti, of this little angelic figure; no arms. He's rather cute. He's a little elongated and he's in a kind of contrapposto so
that he's actually moving. What Cezanne seems to
have done is to actually accentuate the turn of
his body, which becomes a kind of axis for the entire painting. Then something even more
interesting happens, which is that as you move back, you see a series of stacked canvases, perhaps the stretcher bar of a canvas that's facing away from us, a canvas seen at an oblique angle just in
back of the putti's back. We can actually make out a
figure on the upper right. Then there's a piece of fruit. Female 1: A giant piece of fruit. Male: Which is on the floor, perhaps? Or is it a ball? It seems to come forward. What that does visually is it pushes the entire canvas up
and forward in the back and really denies any
kind of spacial depth. Female 2: It then completes the circle around the painting by
bringing your attention back to the foreground that you've kind of been tipped back into. Also, because the subject of that painting that we see a little
bit of in the background is facing back towards
us, and we have the fruit on the floor, maybe,
which is kind of connected back to the fruit on the
table in the foreground, so it does make the composition complete. Female 1: Everything seems
to be shifting slightly. The cupid figure, as you
said, seems to twist, or Cezanne exaggerates that twist. The figure in the back that's part of a painting, I presume. Male: That's rendered, yeah. Female 1: Seems to be moving. If you look closely at
the outlines of the fruit, they seem to sort of slightly shift. Nothing seems to be stable. Everything is in flux. Male: What kind of intentionality
is in back of this? Why in the world would Cezanne
want to do such a thing? It's such a complicated and problematic rendering and space,
and there are alignments that make it even more quirky. For instance, if that's an
onion, a very large onion bulb, in the lower left, just in
back of the putti's feet, the skin of the onion seems to end and the green starts just at the line where we see the floor end. That line continues up and picks up the opposite hip of the putti, and then the groin picks up the edge again of the canvas. There's this whole series
of almost Degas-like intersections that play fast and loose with our expectations of space. Female 1: Which clearly
points out that it's not that Cezanne didn't know what he was doing by mixing all these points of view and twisting everything
around; that it was a conscious artistic
choice, and this is still a carefully composed
image, even though it's not necessarily how we traditionally
think of a still life. Male: For instance, the
table being at the angle of the foot that comes
towards us, but I'm seeing as the hips turn in a
sense space turning as well as defined by the canvas in back of it. Then is it possible
that the face is aligned even with the canvas in back of that so that the reality is constructed by the figure within it? Female 1: Is it insane to be thinking of Matisse's Red Studio right now? This is an artist's studio. We have stacked canvases. We have images that the
artist is working on, pieces of still life, and we have a canvas that's unified by a
close to single tonality of blues, with some reds and greens. There's something about,
perhaps, an interpretation of the space of the artist's studio from a more personal point of view, although it's hard to read
the personal into Cezanne, because it seems to much about space and construction and shape. Male: Although some art historians, I'm thinking Myra Shapiro, certainly bring the personal in through
the forms in the still life. I would suspect that Matisse was working through issues that
Cezanne is raising here and in other canvases of this time, with the dismantling of space, but I think they have to do, really, with the subjectivity
of the viewer in space, and do we actually construct
space as we move through it? And is space, in fact,
a much more subjective and constructed set of issues as opposed to the sort of ideal
architectural understanding? Female 1: You can see why the Modernists of the early 20th century
would pick up on this because there's something even in a way more radical in this
reassembling of space. (jazzy music)