An analytical study of the work of Cezanne throwing light on the entire scope, individuality, and significance of his art.

Presents 100 color plates and 180 comparative illustrations, with bibliography, index, and biographies of the 66 artists represented in the exhibition. Explores three centuries (1615-1900) of French drawing beginning with the late mannerist style and continuing through the triumph of Impressionism. The collection was assembled by Louis-Antoine and Ve?ronique Prat of Paris. Works by Poussin, Lorrain, Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, David, Ingres, Daumier, Manet, Degas, Ce?zanne, and Seurat are presented. This work also includes a selection of French school drawing -- landscapes, portraits, as well as mythological, literary, and biblical subjects -- executed in a variety of media, including red and black chalk, graphite, and pen and ink. Eighteenth-century sketches, known as "pense?es" or ?first thoughts? are featured along with celebrated drawings, such as Nicolas Poussin s masterpiece of the 1640s, The Abduction of Proserpine by Pluto, and Magdalene in the Desert by Claude Lorrain.

"The work of the great French painter Nicolas Poussin (15941665) is most often associated with classically inspired settings and figures depicting solemn scenes from mythology or the Bible. Yet he also created some of the most influential landscapes in Western art, endowing them with a poetic quality that has been admired by artists as different as Constable, Turner, and Ce;zanne. As the British critic William Hazlitt noted in 1844, 'This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time'. This beautiful catalogue presents the first in-depth examination of Poussin's landscapes. Featured here are more than 40 paintings, ranging from the artist's early Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works, designed as metaphors or allegories for the processes of nature. Also included are approximately 60 drawings and essays by internationally renowned scholars who examine the painter's visual, literary, and philosophical influences as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon."--Publisher description.

Why do we keep returning to certain pictures? What is it we are looking for? How does our understanding of an image change over time? This investigates the nature of visual complexity, the capacity of certain images to sustain repeated attention, and how pictures respond and resist their viewers' wishes.

Employing the methodologies of the new art history as well as some tools provided by poststructuralism, historiography, and analytic philosophy, Poussin's Paintings offers a novel approach to the art of Poussin. David Carrier begins with a comprehensive analysis of Poussin's self-portraits, which provides the starting point for a critical discussion of the traditional strategies of Poussin scholarship and for an evaluation of the status of this artist. Carrier shows that Poussin can be properly understood only by seeing how his visual and political culture differs from ours. Carrier examines the traditional approaches of Poussin scholars, noting the limitations of their views and showing how they not only shape our image of the artist but also restrict out ability to properly grasp his concerns. Carrier also considers the important conceptual claims of connoisseurs and reveals how their work invokes an implicit theory of Poussin's development. Carrier then focuses on a group of paintings concerned with erotic themes, demonstrating the inadequacy of traditional accounts of these pictures. He extends his analysis to a discussion of Poussin's landscapes, which have a different and more important place in his development than the older accounts claim. Carrier places Poussin within the artistic and political culture of seventeenth-century Rome. He asserts that artists of the time were concerned with the problem of belatedness and that Poussin attempted to return to the tradition of the High Renaissance, reworking images from that tradition in response to his own visual culture. Carrier argues that Poussin's art is thus best understood as a response to that setting for baroque art, and he relates Poussin's work to the later tradition of French history painting.

This book gathers the commentary of people who knew the painter Paul Cezanne, especially in his later years. Now seen as one of the most influential of modern painters, in his 40s he returned to his village of Aix-en-Provence where, he worked in near obscurity and with great dedication until his death in 1906.

A transformative study, freeing the artist from outdated art historical narratives and revealing his work as newly strange again Cézanne’s Gravity is an ambitious reassessment of the paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). Whereas previous studies have often looked at the artist’s work for its influence on his successors and on the development of abstraction, Carol Armstrong untethers it from this timeline, examining Cézanne’s painting as a phenomenological and intellectual endeavor. Armstrong uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyze Cézanne’s work, pairing the painter with artists and thinkers who came after him, including Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Rainer Maria Rilke, R. D. Laing, and Helen Frankenthaler. Through these pairings, Armstrong addresses diverse subjects that illuminate Cézanne’s painting, from the nonlinear narratives of modernist literature and the ways in which space and time act on objects, to color sensation and the schizophrenic mind. Cézanne’s Gravity attends to both the physicality of the artist’s works and the weight they bear on the history of art. This distinctive study not only invites its readers to view Cézanne’s paintings with fresh eyes but also offers a new methodology for art historical inquiry outside linear narratives, one truly fitting for our time.

In the last years of his life Paul Cézanne produced a stunning series of watercolors, many of them sill lifes. Still Life with Blue Pot is one of these late masterpieces that is now in the collection of the Getty Museum. In Cézanne in the Study: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong places this great painting within the context of Cezanne’s artistic and psychological development and of the history of the genre of still life in France. Still life—like the medium of watercolor—was traditionally considered to be “low” in the hierarchy of French academic paintings. Cézanne chose to ignore this hierarchy, creating monumental still-life watercolors that contained echoes of grand landscapes and even historical paintings in the manner of Poussin—the “highest” of classical art forms. In so doing he changed his still lifes with new meanings, both in terms of his own notoriously difficult personality and in the way he used the genre to explore the very process of looking at, and creating, art. Carol Armstrong’s study is a fascinating exploration of the brilliant watercolor paintings that brought Cézanne’s career to a complex, and triumphant, conclusion, The book includes new photographic studies of the Getty’s painting that allow the reader to encounter this great watercolor as never before, in all of its richness and detail.

Drawing on a broad foundation in the history of nineteenth-century French art, Richard Shiff offers an innovative interpretation of Cézanne's painting. He shows how Cézanne's style met the emerging criteria of a "technique of originality" and how it satisfied critics sympathetic to symbolism as well as to impressionism. Expanding his study of the interaction of Cézanne and his critics, Shiff considers the problem of modern art in general. He locates the core of modernism in a dialectic of making (technique) and finding (originality). Ultimately, Shiff provides not only clarifying accounts of impressionism and symbolism but of a modern classicism as well.