Cézanne: Landscape into Art

Cézanne: Landscape into Art

C©zanne is the supreme landscape painter of modernity, and his famous dictum that €œpainting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one€s sensations€ defines the course of modern painting€s extreme departure from fidelity to reality. Despite or because of this dictum, C©zanne€s marvelously lucid €œsensations€ become all the more evident and dazzling when set against images of the locales he painted. <I>C©zanne: Landscape into Art</I>, which reprises and expands the classic 1996 publication by Yale University Press, does precisely this. In this highly praised study, the scholar Pavel Machotka juxtaposes photographs of the sites of C©zanne€s landscape paintings--whenever possible, from the same angle and at the same time of day that the artist painted the scenes--with reproductions of the relevant paintings, offering a uniquely practical analysis of the ways in which C©zanne transformed reality into art. Since the original publication of this volume, new sites have been discovered--the result of scrutinizing collections of contemporaneous photographs and land registry records. These discoveries have added considerably to our knowledge of C©zanne€s movements and have even helped to date his paintings more precisely. The new photographs, which range from postcards from the artist€s time or the author€s own color photographs, allow for a richer and better informed consideration of C©zanne€s oeuvre. In light of those discoveries, Machotka has rewritten the previous edition to offer a fresh, rich view of C©zanne€s artistic aims and accomplishments. While there are a number of books that focus on this important artist€s landscape work, none is as closely informed by painterly perception or as exacting in its analysis as this one.