Paul Cézanne and His Influence on Cubism

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Paul Cézanne and His Influence on Cubism

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Kevin Estrada Jr
ARH 200-01
Prof. Fran Smulcheski
16 April 2014

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Cubism can be, and has been, defined as the world’s first style of abstract art. From it’s lack of landscapes and foreshortening to the multitude of geometric forms, Cubist art can be quiet hard to analyze. An abundance of geometric shapes and monochromatic colors can blur the object “in focus”, and it’s lack of three-dimensionality just exacerbates the analysis process. But art wasn’t always like this. Artists from the same and surrounding regions a few years prior were not creating art as abstract as the Cubists. In fact, the preceding artwork was neither abstract nor ambiguous in the slightest, so why the change? Cubist art deviated almost completely from the prior art forms, and at the forefront of this new form of art was a new way of thinking sparked by scientific findings by Albert Einstein and a Neo-Impressionist artist by the name of Paul
Cézanne.
Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, France in 1839 into a wealthy family, which helped him succeed in the vicious world of art. Like most artists of his time, Cézanne attended college to study art, but was simultaneously enrolled at the University of Aix to study law under the command of his father. Following his dual enrollment, he enrolled in the Académie Suisse to study paintings of artists. In the years to come, Cézanne experienced self-doubt, going between working at his father’s banking firm and submerging himself into the critical world of art returning to Aix and going away to Paris respectively - before finally moving to Pontoise to study with Pissarro, a well-known artist. It was then that Cézanne realized that he was not to be accepted by the rest.


1874: the first exhibition of La Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes, Peintres,
Sculpteurs, et Graveurs - a group of rejected artists who soon after deemed themselves the
Impressionists. Cézanne entered but was rejected from all of the other exhibitions except for the third. He was part of a new wave of artists who called themselves the Neo-Impressionists.1
The first Neo-Impressionist artists were George Seurat and Paul Signac. Developed in the late 19th Century after the disbandment of Impressionist group La Société, Neoimpressionists deviated from the unfinished style of the Impressionists and focused on the science of color.
Their predecessors had a focus on color but more to convey reality through the eyes of the artist himself, objectively. Many put emphasis on the fleeting moment of time - some artists, such as
Monet, used hasty dashed strokes of color on their canvas to depict such advances of time - while others focused on the perspectives of an object during different times of day - different lighting.
Yet, they all had more to do with the depiction of a state of mind during an event; thus, each artist had their own personal style. The Neo-Impressionists, however, took a more scientific approach to art. They had a main focus on color much like the Impressionists, but, much like the
Impressionists, had their own unique style. Georges Seurat was the closest of the NeoImpressionists to Monet stylistically, nevertheless he differed greatly. Seurat coined his style of painting pointillism, meticulous plotting of paint in the form of monochromatic dots of equal size.2 Scientific experiment and theory was used in Neo-Impressionist art, using optical principles of light and color to convey an ultimate reality. Scientifically, color occurs in the

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1 A&E

Networks Television. "Paul Cézanne." Bio.com. http://www.biography.com/people/paulcézanne-9542036?page=2#awesm=~oBZi4E9GMEzUuM (accessed).
2 Philip E. Bishop and Margaret J. Manos. "The Industrial Age." In Adventures in the Human Spir it. 7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014.

“visible region” of the electromagnetic spectrum, that is roughly from 400nm to 750nm in wavelength. Different shades of color were achieved by adding dots of pure color but of different wavelengths. The retina of the human eye is designed to average the wavelengths into one color, thus deciphering as a result, the divisions between objects as well: form was created through dots of color as opposed to lines.3 Paul Cézanne took this technique of object simplification a little bit further. Cézanne never aligned well with the other Impressionist painters, so much so that he removed himself from the Impressionists in 1877 (after the third Société exhibition) and worked in isolation. It wasn’t until almost twenty years later that Cézanne would publicly present his works of art. His differences with the Impressionist artists classified him as a Neo-Impressionist, but his style was much more radical than that of the other Neo-Impressionist artists. The depiction of modern life became popular during this time period and Neo-Impressionists and
Impressionists alike were creating work to convey such modernity. Cézanne, on the other hand, wanted to emphasize the difference between a painting and reality.1 Techniques from the renaissance have been made commonplace thereafter. Foreshortening, the art of making an object smaller or larger to convey distance, for instance, was a major technique used by artists to create the illusion of distance, or the third dimension [z-axis], on a two-dimensional piece of canvas.
Paul Cézanne felt that the use of illusionism took away from the media on which the artists paint.
He abandoned the idea of perspective drawing and emphasized the flat, two-dimensional nature 


1 A&E

Networks Television. "Paul Cézanne." Bio.com. http://www.biography.com/people/paulcézanne-9542036?page=2#awesm=~oBZi4E9GMEzUuM (accessed).
3 The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. "Neo-Impressionism (painting)." Encyclopedia
Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/408661/Neo-Impressionism (accessed).

of canvas. Instead, subtle use of aerial perspective - usage of warm and cool colors of nature to convey the advancement and recession of objects in a painting - was common in Cézanne’s work; to Cézanne, the composition of color was the most important aspect of art.4 But despite this belief in color, he studied something else on which the Cubists in the years to come would base all art: the study of the permanent structures of natural forms, namely the cylinder, sphere, and cone.
Many times over and over, and perhaps one too many, Cézanne painted Mont SainteVictoire after retreating home from the grueling Parisian art scene at the time. The small land mass just outside of his small hometown of Aix, France painted between 1902 and 1904 is depicted as “[a] solid arrangement of masses and planes.” What Cézanne had done was simplified objects, Mont Sainte-Victoire and the village/town at its base, down to planes or shapes, otherwise known as reductionism.2 He was very much into reductionism, and though he said that the composition of color was the most important, it seems as if reductionism was just as important to him. Countless paintings by Cézanne during the first years of the twentieth displayed his style of reducing object to their “natural form.” La Société disbanded years after plethora of exhibitions due to ever-growing differences in artistic outlook and, thus, style. After incessant urging by Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir - former members of La Société - Cézanne emerged from his nearly two full decades of self-quarantine and displayed many of his works.
His work became increasingly popular among the public. The annual Salon des Indépendants exhibition in Paris exhibited his work in 1899, 1901, and 1902, but the great man of Aix had an 


2

Philip E. Bishop and Margaret J. Manos. "The Industrial Age." In Adventures in the Human Spir it. 7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014.
4 "PAUL CÉZANNE - THE CHÂTEAU AT MÉDAN." Paul Cézanne. http://www.artyfactory.co m/art_appreciation/landscapes/paul_cezanne.htm (accessed).

entire room dedicated to his work and his work alone in the exhibition of Salon d’Automne in
1904. After Cézanne’s death on 22 October, 1906 due to illness, a large retrospective exhibition was held at the Salon d’Automne in 1907.1 It was at this retrospective exhibition where the young Pablo Picasso, co-founder of the next era of modern art, became enthralled by Cézanne’s work. It was the very shape that was most popular among works by Cézanne, the square, that became the derivation of the word describing the new modern art: Cubism”.
At the start of the 20th Century, artists were dealing with a dilemma: how to properly depict a world changing at the speed of light. Formerly, artists were dealing with how to depict modern life just as the Cubists were, but the change in depiction from that of Impressionists to
Neo-Impressionists is going from life as people saw it (casual events) to the depiction of more personal moments with a radical change in color to convey emotion and mood.5 However, the change from Neo-Impressionist art to Cubist art was much less conservative.
In 1905, Albert Einstein and few other colleagues founded the theory of relativity in which Einstein stated that the laws of physics are the same everywhere and the speed of light is a constant. With this, Einstein concluded that no observer’s experience of time is the same.2 Man of this era was experiencing time more dynamically: technology is booming, the car industry is starting to take off, and more intercultural interactions were taking place. With each culture having their own idiosyncratic perspectives and thus the distortion of the truth.6 So artists of this 


1 A&E

Networks Television. "Paul Cézanne." Bio.com. http://www.biography.com/people/paulcézanne-9542036?page=2#awesm=~oBZi4E9GMEzUuM (accessed).
2 Philip E. Bishop and Margaret J. Manos. "The Industrial Age." In Adventures in the Human Spir it. 7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014.
5 Apollinaire, Guillaume, and Peter Read. "Georges Braque." In The Cubist Painters. Berkeley,
Calif.:University of California Press, 2004.
6 "Cubism: A New Vision." www.mdc.edu. http://www.mdc.edu/Wolfson/Academic/ArtsLetters/ art_philosophy/Humanities/Cubism/cubism%20front2.htm (accessed).

time felt that they needed to depict life in their art as it was seen during their time: mysterious, skeptical, uncertain, confusing, analytical, relative, subjective. Everything is relative and subjective and so were the creations of the artists themselves.
A couple of years later two young artists by the name Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque encountered this problem head-on. They felt that they had to depict life as such, but how were they to do that? Well, in 1907 at the Salon d’Automne, it was because of Cézanne’s sketch titled
“The Bathers” that young Picasso became infatuated by his work. The treatment of the nude form in The Bathers influenced the nude form in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon greatly.2
He flattened the form much like Cézanne did and deconstructed the forms into a few planes, geometric shapes, and angles. Picasso in Les Demoiselles much like Cézanne in The Bathers gave up tired traditions of modeling and foreshortening and embraced the flat surface of the canvas before him. Braque upon seeing Les Demoiselles fell into a state of shock. He disliked the techniques (or lack of techniques in Braques’ eyes at the time) used by Picasso, but after many months looking back on the work, Braque embraced Picasso’s style and created a work of art similar to that of Picasso he titled “The Nude”.6 The two worked so closely together that it is said that their art was sometimes indistinguishable much like the art itself. This was the start of a beautiful partnership between him and Georges Braque and the start of Cubism.2
What people see Cubism as is the era of analytical cubism - analytical in that the art was supposed to be seen through “intellect”, not by the eye. The work by Braque, he called The 


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Philip E. Bishop and Margaret J. Manos. "The Industrial Age." In Adventures in the HumanSpir it. 7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014.
6 "Cubism: A New Vision." www.mdc.edu. http://www.mdc.edu/Wolfson/Academic/ArtsLetters/ art_philosophy/Humanities/Cubism/cubism%20front2.htm (accessed).

Portuguese, is essentially what Cubist art looked like for most of the period. It is a 46 1/4” x 32
1/4”, oil-based painting on canvas painted in 1911. In a simple glimpse of the work, one can identify multiple natural-brown geometric shapes and planes overlapping one another. The outlining of the planes and shapes are painted in seemingly quick brushstrokes, thus, making it sketch-like in appearance. The planes make it seem that if touched, the painting would cut due to its jagged and rigid look, and, today, it can be viewed in the Kunstmusuem in Basel.2
This work of art is not easily discernible, even for scholars. Here Braque very vaguely and subtly aligns the lines outlining multiple overlapping planes to create an underlying triangle to guide the viewers “intellect” down the triangle to its base. It is at the peak of the triangle where Braque has places a seemingly triangular beam (perhaps a beam of light since the seem is lightly colored brown) shining down from the top right of the canvas on the peak of the main triangle. And at the beam’s origin lies the letters “BAL” and the number “10,40”. “BAL” is shortened Portuguese for “dance” and 10,40 through historical analysis was evidently a drink tab.2 And between the numbers and letters is the outlining of the basic geometric forms of a wine glass which, altogether, signifies that the setting is most probably in a bar. That same triangular beam also takes the “intellect” back to the underlying main triangle using subtle linear perspective to what seems to be a face shown in profile, the leftward most face, and directly in front of the face, the rightward most face. If one were to take this “intellect” down to the base of the main underlying triangle, one can see that there are many most overlapping planes and the colors have gone from light brown, up top, to dark brown on the bottom. A diagonal line from the leftward side of the triangle juts down the canvas toward the bottom right to encompass
(more like entriangulate, if that were a word) a circle with crossing horizontal lines which looks
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Philip E. Bishop and Margaret J. Manos. "The Industrial Age." In Adventures in the Human Spir it.7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014.

to be a guitar played by a person to which the face above belongs - few horizontal lines coming from the right side of the canvas toward the “guitar” gives the “intellect” a sign that those lines may be the performer’s arms which are strumming the strings of the guitar. To emulate the fleeting affects of time, Braque places multiple circles and horizontal lines around the aforementioned circle and lines. What can now be identified as a possible bar-room performer, is shown in multiple exposure - this is that he/she is shown playing (giving the location of the guitar) from a plethora of angles/viewpoints.
Artists of this time were well-versed in the sciences and mathematics. The belief that an artist should be knowledgeable of science and math dates back to the Renaissance. With knowledge of Einstein’s theory of relativity and other findings, Braque portrayed this bar-room singer with a guitar in his of her most basic form in fleeting time through the usage of geometrics planes for form and the overlapping and repetitive patterns of planes and shapes to portray movement through time fleeting ever so quickly in one glimpse. One glimpse of this work and you see an entire performance pass by before you could even discern what had taken place on that very piece of canvas. This is exactly what Braque wanted in fact. Through Einstein’s and his colleagues’s findings, Braque conveyed his theory of relativity and space time through this work of art.6 The value behind the object seems to be one of concern, concern for the time in which
Braque and all of humanity in America and Europe due to the ever-changing and ever-increasing pace of life. Where is all of this going to take humanity? Where are all of us while this research and discovery is taking place? To Braque and other Cubists, we are right in the middle of it.
Einstein defined space-time as a mesh in which the entirety of the universe in contained, not fluid in intervals of space-time, but warped and fluxed so that the change in time is variable - not
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Philip E. Bishop and Margaret J. Manos. "The Industrial Age." In Adventures in the Human Spir it.7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014.

probable however, because Einstein is said to have said that God would never play dice with the creation of matter.2 Time is so variable that Braque in one work of art, in one piece of space-time has portrayed this theory to hold true in that even a bar-room performer is never stationary. His or her location is capricious and our perspective of the bar-room is just as capricious as her location just as life and our perspective of life is ever-changing with unprecedented speed due to the advancement of technology and scientific discovery. But where is Cézanne in all of this?
Cézanne’s legacy remains in the work of the Cubists. His soul lies in the deconstruction of the form of the bar-room performer and his/her guitar. If one compares Cézanne’s paintings of
Mont Sainte-Victoire, he went from nearly painting the mountain exactly as he saw it to the mountain’s basic underlying form: geometric shapes and planes. Cézanne’s influence can also be pinpointed in the multiple perspectives of the performer that Braque gives us. Cézanne liked to abstract art and so did the Cubists evidently. Also Cézanne’s deviation from perspective drawing, for which he is famously known, caught the interest of Cubists. He felt that a painting is not reality - it should not imitate reality but rather create reality we see/know it; therefore, a painting should not suggest depth or a third dimension. The surface of canvas is two dimensional and so is art work that is to be put on any given piece of canvas, around which Cézanne based his art work. He flattened space and emphasized decomposition and deconstruction of objects to twodimensional geometric. Braque and Cubists took this and created what defined modern life as being perceived through multiple facets, confusing, fleeting, and analytical. Braque and the other
Cubists are pure geniuses and have mastered the depiction of life during their time beautifully through intellect. 


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Philip E. Bishop and Margaret J. Manos. "The Industrial Age." In Adventures in the Human Spir it.7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014.

1A&E

Networks Television. "Paul Cézanne." Bio.com. http://www.biography.com/people/paulcézanne-9542036?page=2#awesm=~oBZi4E9GMEzUuM (accessed).

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Philip E. Bishop and Margaret J. Manos. "The Industrial Age." In Adventures in the Human
Spirit. 7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014.

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3

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. "Neo-Impressionism (painting)." Encyclopedia
Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/408661/Neo-Impressionism
(accessed).

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4

"PAUL CÉZANNE - THE CHÂTEAU AT MÉDAN." Paul Cézanne. http:// www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/landscapes/paul_cezanne.htm (accessed).

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5 Apollinaire,

Guillaume, and Peter Read. "Georges Braque." In The Cubist Painters. Berkeley,
Calif.:University of California Press, 2004.

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6

"Cubism: A New Vision." www.mdc.edu. http://www.mdc.edu/Wolfson/Academic/ArtsLetters/ art_philosophy/Humanities/Cubism/cubism%20front2.htm (accessed).