Provençal Manor PUAM(5s)
Week 5 Landscapes (3) (1321 – 1325) 2/26 – 3/2/2023
ID 1323
Paul Cézanne French 1839-1906
Provençal Manor, about 1885
Oil on canvas.
This large house on a plain—its outbuildings and haystacks suggesting the prosperous farming operation of its owners—has a large chimney on one of the pavilions, perhaps from a bakery oven. The fields stretch out behind, rising on the sloping hills. Although the painting looks unfinished, it may have reached a point that satisfied Cézanne and beyond which he no longer wished to carry it. His definitions of “finished” and “Unfinished” were highly personal and specific to each of his works. To the eyes of the time, this was a disturbing lapse; to artists who came after, the areas of exposed canvas and unresolved spatial relationships were a revelation.
The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum
From the Placard: Princeton University Art Museum, NJ
During the last years of his life, Cézanne’s reputation had been steadily growing in Paris. He still kept his studio in the Villa des Arts and he was flattered that young painters had begun to admire his work, but he had no time for celebrity, preferring to return continually to Provence, where the motif that now most occupied him, the Mont Sainte Victoire, rose up before him, presenting a multitude of challenges. Cézanne remained humble in the face of his own work. As Rilke wrote, “it’s natural, after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one ‘judges’ it instead of saying it.” Here, he put his finger on the paradoxical quest for impersonality on which painters and poets of the early twentieth century, each in their different way, had begun. No serious painter who attended it was unaffected by the 1907 Cézanne exhibition; Picasso was no exception. Cézanne, he told the photographer Brassaï in later years, “was my one and only master! Don’t you think I’ve looked at his paintings? I spent years studying them. Cézanne! He was like the father of us all.”
Sue Roe: In Montmarte Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art, Penguin Press, 2016 pg. 206
Provençal Manor PUAM(5s)
Week 5 Landscapes (3) (1321 – 1325) 2/26 – 3/2/2023
ID 1323
Paul Cézanne French 1839-1906
Provençal Manor, about 1885
Oil on canvas.
This large house on a plain—its outbuildings and haystacks suggesting the prosperous farming operation of its owners—has a large chimney on one of the pavilions, perhaps from a bakery oven. The fields stretch out behind, rising on the sloping hills. Although the painting looks unfinished, it may have reached a point that satisfied Cézanne and beyond which he no longer wished to carry it. His definitions of “finished” and “Unfinished” were highly personal and specific to each of his works. To the eyes of the time, this was a disturbing lapse; to artists who came after, the areas of exposed canvas and unresolved spatial relationships were a revelation.
The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum
From the Placard: Princeton University Art Museum, NJ
During the last years of his life, Cézanne’s reputation had been steadily growing in Paris. He still kept his studio in the Villa des Arts and he was flattered that young painters had begun to admire his work, but he had no time for celebrity, preferring to return continually to Provence, where the motif that now most occupied him, the Mont Sainte Victoire, rose up before him, presenting a multitude of challenges. Cézanne remained humble in the face of his own work. As Rilke wrote, “it’s natural, after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one ‘judges’ it instead of saying it.” Here, he put his finger on the paradoxical quest for impersonality on which painters and poets of the early twentieth century, each in their different way, had begun. No serious painter who attended it was unaffected by the 1907 Cézanne exhibition; Picasso was no exception. Cézanne, he told the photographer Brassaï in later years, “was my one and only master! Don’t you think I’ve looked at his paintings? I spent years studying them. Cézanne! He was like the father of us all.”
Sue Roe: In Montmarte Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art, Penguin Press, 2016 pg. 206