Paul Cezanne - Study of Trees - Harvard Art Museum #1

 

Paul Cezanne Study of Trees 1904, oil on canvas

Jennie and I visited the Harvard Art Museum.  One of the paintings that attracted my attention was this 1904 painting from Cezanne.  At first it looked just like a pretty, colorful abstract image. I had previously seen the museum's Jackson Pollock and was focused on the application of the paint, the overall balance, the "white space."  But the text below the painting impressed me by the fact that this was a study, an attempt, at trying to capture something -- "the problem of dynamically depicting depth on the flat space of a canvas, which occupied the artist for most of his career."

Gallery Text:

Cézanne’s fascination with the complexities of human perception and his desire to transcribe the abstract properties of vision established him as the central figure linking nineteenth-century impressionism with early twentieth-century cubism. Study of Trees exemplifies the problem of dynamically depicting depth on the flat space of a canvas, which occupied the artist for most of his career. Energetically applied diagonal brushstrokes slice the space of the picture, producing the suggestion of movement in and out of depth, and dashed lines define the tree trunks on either side of a winding country road. Remarkably, the rough, unpainted areas of the canvas seem as animated as the daubs of paint flickering across the picture’s surface like leaves in shifting sunlight. At the time of its making, Study of Trees was at the vanguard of intellectualized, abstract painting.