Full Description
With his distinctive paintings of landscapes, figures and still lifes, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) profoundly influenced the Cubists and the direction of twentieth-century art in general. In this lively account of the artist's life and work, Mary Tompkins Lewis traces Cezanne's career from his early years in Aix-en-Provence, struggling to become a painter in the face of opposition from his father, through his time in Paris studying the Old Masters and working with the Impressionists, to his later, reclusive years back in Provence, when he produced the pictures that made him the precursor of a new art. However important Cezanne's work was for later generations, Lewis argues that his legacy can be fully understood only in the context of both the social and historical circumstances of late nineteenth-century France, and the regional aspirations and tensions of Provence. This is the first study of Cezanne to bring biographical, formal and larger contextual approaches to bear on the artist's full career. In doing so, Lewis has shed new light on Cezanne as an artist of his own time and place.
Contents
The early years in Aix; Cezanne in Haussmann's Paris; the early narrative paintings; landscapes in the 1870s; the early nudes and bathers; portraits and still lifes in the 1870s; painting and politics in the 1880s; the years of consolidation; late figures, genre and portraits; the final decade; epilogue.
