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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, The Red Rock
Paul Cézanne, The Red Rock, c. 1895, oil on canvas, 91 x 66 cm (Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris). Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Does anyone know how long it took to paint this painting?(1 vote)
- The time a specific work of art takes to complete is an interesting question to me. Obviously, with a work of art where scale or detail and constructive technique is primary, the time it took for the artist to execute the work is important to know. But even then, there are many complicating factors. Were members of the artist's workshop assisting? Did a sculptor employ masons or a foundry? What of preliminary sketches or related projects? It is also the case that artists often work on numerous canvases at the same time and very often go back to a painting even years later. Its also worth spending time examining the underlying assumptions embedded in this question. Are we bound to the Modernist idea of the individual genius even as we try to reconcile the loss of craftsmanship as a value in so much advanced art of the 19th and 20th Centuries? Do we want the artist to be a genius? Do we want to tie this notion of genius or the value of the painting itself to time of execution and if so, how does that work? Whistler's flip answer to this question in his libel trail against John Ruskin was, that it took him his entire life to paint the picture. Ruskin had accused him of simply flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public. That is, Whistler is stating it took him the whole of his experience and learning to have been able to produce this new thing in the world. For me, the most interesting question isn't how long it took Cézanne to produce this series of strokes on this particular canvas, but rather what did it mean to him and what has it come to mean for us.(20 votes)
Video transcript
(jazzy music) Male: We're in the l'Orangerie in Paris and we're looking at a late Paul Cezanne, The Red Rock. This is actually one of my favorite landscapes by Cezanne. Female: What makes it
one of your favorites? Male: He loved painting rocks, quaries and the forest. This is just so outrageous. You've got this huge abstract shape in the upper right corner, which is an overhanging rock ledge, but it is so unexpected and so weighty and abstract. Female: You said weighty,
but it has no bottom, so it feels to me like
it hovers in midair. Male: It's true, and
even as I said weighty, I was thinking we know it's heavy, we know it's massive, but actually in a pictorial sense maybe not so much. This is a painting where
Cezanne has perfected these short stippled brushstrokes, which create this
wonderful sense of the buzz of a very hot afternoon. If you've been in a semiarid environment like the south of France,
or maybe the desert in the western United States,
you can hear the insects. Female: You're right. It feels very much like
a very hot afternoon. I also sense the leaves
rustling a little bit in the dry, hot wind. Male: So, he's drawn
us into this landscape. He's given us this ochre path with these alternating bands of shadow. We're not that far away from Classical landscape of 17th and 18th centuries. Female: Our eye does travel down that path and we can almost feel ourselves walking through the space. Male: That's right, but
then something happens that upends that more
traditional recessionary space which is if you look at
the curve of the pathway, it starts in the center
and it's fairly large, and then it recedes and gets narrower as our eye moves into space, and bends ever so slightly to the right. But then you'll notice that there are the same colors that pick up in a similar arc, but now up in the trees. Is that a rock that's seen
through the trees, perhaps? But optically it plays fast and loose with the recession that we had been comfortable with a moment before. Female: There's lots in the
painting that does that. The violet that makes for those horizontal shadows that you just mentioned is carried up through the landscape. We're not meant, I think, to read space in the traditional way here. Male: I think Cezanne
is not only questioning the Classical landscape, but I think he's also questioning the
Impressionist landscape. Remember, he had shown
in the 1874 Exhibition, and then comes back down
to the south of France and begins these series of investigations. Cezanne here has given us a
space into which we can walk. At the same time, he
is simply, emphatically refusing to give us that space. That rock comes up and forward. Those trees and that sky create deep space but also resist deep space. There's just the sense
of completely turning all of the traditions of
landscape on its head; not necessarily knowing
where he's going, by the way. I think that this is really exploration, but exploration that is
also really beautiful. This is a painting that
is clearly creating the densest possible
field of color and form. That sense of density, that
focus on the paint itself on the surface and on
the two-dimensionality of the canvas, seems to me irrefutable. Look, for instance, at
the center where those warm, rich orange ochres are rising up and the way in which they're overlayed by the greens and those black purples. Female: It's very abstract. Male: It's incredibly abstract and incredibly dense. The paint itself is forthright. Female: That's true. Male: So it is about paint and dismantling the expectations of traditional landscape. (jazzy music)