Art Chowder September | October 2016, Issue 5 | Page 40

T

he paintings of
Monet, Renoir, and
Pissarro were a departure from the highly
polished works of the
academic artists who
largely populated the
salons, but they were
still representational
and their novel style did
not require a whole new
theory of art to explain
their work. Post-Impressionism (a term
coined by Roger Fry,
whom we’ll meet in a
moment), on the other
hand, is another story.
Paul Cézanne (18391906) has often been
called “the father of
Modern Art.” He had
worked alongside the
early Impressionists for
a number of years, but
was not content with
the surface effect of
light and color. “I wanted to make out of Impressionism something
solid and lasting like the
art of the museums,” he
said in what may be his
most famous quotation.
In his mature works
Cézanne was after a
kind of internal compositional structure. But
what he was exactly
driving at was not readily apparent. His paintings neither supply an
illusion of depth, nor of
light and shade, nor of
naturalistic color.

40 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE

Paul Cézanne
Still-Life with Plaster Cupid
1894
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
Photo: Wikimedia commons

Paul Cézanne
Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine
c. 1887
Courtauld Institute of Art
Photo: Wikipedia