Paul Cézanne - Man with crossed arms 1900
Man with crossed arms 1900
92x72cm oil/canvas
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
<< Previous G a l l e r y Next >>
From Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York:
Paul Cézanne’s shimmering landscapes, searching portraits, and complex still lifes may be viewed as the culmination of Impressionism’s quest for empirical truth in painting. His work was motivated by a desire to give sculptural weight and volume to the instantaneity of vision achieved by the Impressionists, who painted from nature. Relying on his perception of objects in space as visually interrelated entities—as forms locked into a greater compositional structure—Cézanne developed a style premised on the oscillation of surface and depth. Each tiny dab of color, as demonstrated on the mottled apples in Still Life: Flask, Glass, and Jug, indicates a spatial shift while simultaneously calling attention to the two-dimensional canvas on which it rests. This play of illusion, along with the conceptual fusion of time and space, has led Cézanne to be considered the foremost precursor of Cubism.