(piano playing) Voiceover: Since the Renaissance
I think of Michelangelo's David, the body had been sacrosanct, the human
body had been accorded the most attention, the most respect in the history of art. Voiceover: That's right, the body
was a primary vehicle for artists
to convey ideas and emotions. Voiceover: But at the very beginning
of the 20th Century, in the last
years of Paul Cezanne's life, he begins to deconstruct the body. Voiceover: We're looking at Paul
Cezanne's The Large Bathers in
the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The subject of bathers is
one that has a long history, think of paintings of Diana
and Actaeon, by artists like
Titian and Rubens, for example, artists like Degas were grappling with how
to paint the nude in a modern environment. I think Cezanne is also picking
up that challenge of how do
you paint the modern nude. Voiceover: When we think about
Cezanne we think about an artist
who began as an impressionist, who's emphasis might have
been on the modern world. Voiceover: Even though he's worked
on this series of bathers for years the figures are remarkably unfinished, where we see sized canvas
underneath in so many places, where faces and forms of the body are
barely sketched in or barely begun. The figures are being
manipulated and moved and shifted in order to fit in to some
overall composition that he has in mind. Voiceover: Cezanne seems to be
reaching for a kind of classicism, you had mentioned Titian and this
painting seems to be reaching
back to those grand traditions. Voiceover: Right and if you look
at the Titian of Diana and Actaeon, that Cezanne probably just saw a print of, it does seem as though Cezanne
is thinking back to that Titian, to architectural forms, to the
pyramid of the Renaissance, to the way that Titian opened up the
central space of that composition to bring our eye into a deeper
session of the landscape. Voiceover: Titian, the great,
late Renaissance Venetian
is known for his glazing, for his ability to create chiaroscuro,
to create the turn of the body, flesh that has a kind of translucency
and Cezanne's figures seem as
if they're made out of plaster, they almost seem as their fresco,
they are so flat and so unfinished. Voiceover: If we think about Titian we
think about the sensuality of the body, especially the female body and
here we have female figures
who are anything but sensual. They're architectonic, they seem frozen in
their poses, their bodies are elongated, in some cases malformed, in some
cases we seem to see multiple
sides of the body at once, this is anything but a luscious,
sensual Venetian image. Voiceover: Cezanne is also
refusing the mythic context. In the foreground we might be in
a classicized Arcadian landscape, but on the far shore we can see the back
of a horse and a man walking away from us, towards a church, and we realize
that this is modern France. So, there's this very peculiar
pictorial construction that's
offering us in the foreground, at this grand scale, this classicizing
Renaissance subject matter, and then in the distance, something
that might be an excellent [Provance]. Voiceover: And all painted where huge
areas of the canvas are unfinished, outlines of forms are unstable and
repeated and seem to move and shift. Cezanne seems to be modeling the forums
of the bodies with warm and cool colors instead of using traditional
[unintelligible]. He's building on impressionism,
doing something classical, and in a way setting the stage
for the abstraction that will
emerge in the 20th Century. Voiceover: That's the real achievement
of this painting, taking classical forms and making them subservient to
the abstraction of the canvas. Cezanne is not copying the
Titian, he maybe inspired by
it, he maybe referencing it he's not looking at nudes in
his study and being faithful
to the shapes of their bodies. Voiceover: This is not based on optical
experience, this is not based on a scene. Voiceover: That's right, this is opening
form that allows for abstraction. You can see why this kind of
painting, which was shown the
year after Cezanne's death, in the retrospective in Paris,
would have been so important
to Matisse and to Picasso. Voiceover: It was shown in
1907, the very year that Picasso
completes Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the first painting that begins
to deconstruct space and open up
forum in the early 20th Century. Voiceover: It is the foundation
of how and which cubism is built and so the possibility for
paintings to be about the act of
painting in a very formal sense as opposed to the representation
of nature that had been so much a
characteristic of the 19th Century. (piano playing)