Friday 23 March 2012

Paul cezanne - society criticism [ 2nd draft ]

o   Society Criticism
Paul cezanne believed that the artist’s success in solving techniqal problems should guide the artist in rendering his sensation. In 1863 He came up againist the salon jury , when he sent a painting that was rejected.
During the early decades of the twentieth century, An american early modernist art criticism was formed around Cezanne’s works. They used the pivotal term “ plastic’’to describe the solidity of form in Cezanne’s pictorial images.Harvard professor of psychology and philosophy William understood “ plastic ’’ to imply both the flexibility of matter yielding to pressure and the physical property characteristic of a concrete form, such as the one found in Cezanne’s painting.
By the early of 1899 the association between Cezanne and modern art by the American audience was developing. For example; Morton Schamberg, traced the whole tendency of the modern movement to Cezanne. In 1910 Charles Caffin pointed to the significance of plasticity and construction in cezanne’s work and then refered him as an artist who started the modern painting on a new use of color. Next, another critic had determined that form was a psychological factor and that cezanne’s artwork has a plastic reality and outwardness which the imagined object wholly lacks. Clement Greenberg’s first forays into Cezanne criticism can seem harsh, he described a late “ Chateau Noir” as sublime but one of three paintings , and the rest of the artworks were not measured up. He argued that  “ the problem that preoccupied Cezanne that of translating volume and distance to a flat surface without denying its flatness ’’ and he concluded that Cezanne had been too far ahead of his time.


Cezanne became an artist who was submissive to nature, he has changed from a romantic rebel to a cultural revolunationary.Though he was judged incompetent and insolent by most contemporary critics, he understood, respected, and made extensive use of the greatest masterpieces of the past. At the same time that cezanne was suffering alienation from both avant-garde and academic Paris, he suffered a number of  personal blows that further affected his art. Elderfield has observed that generalizations about cezanne’s art are difficult to make because of the artist’s different responses to the specific motifs befpre him, but three principles of pictorial invetion such as :

1)    Holding illusionism
2)    Use of tectonic facture or passage
3)    A consistent concentration upon the edges of things.


1 comment:

  1. Still I need to see the in-text references and the bibliography so that I can keep up with your resources as I read the essay.

    ReplyDelete