Paul Cezanne and Modernity

It is the contribution of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), a French painter, whose single-minded determination to view world objectively gave birth of the modern movement in art. Cézanne wanted to see the world as an object, without any intervention either of the tidy mind or the untidy emotions. His immediate predecessors, the Impressionists, had seen the world subjectively- that is to say, as it presented itself to their senses in various lights, or from various points of view. Paul Cezanne a Post-Impressionist painter whose work bridged the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic expressions to a new and reality of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic analytic enquiry. Cezanne created the foundation for a neo-critical and analytic approach toward artistic expression. He tried to deal with the complexities of visual perception. Cezanne’s Mont Saint Victoire tried to explore the new reality through- balance, depth of field (plate 2B), ‘solidity of forms’ (plate 2C), Solid Geometric Forms- sphere, the cylinder and the cone..." and multidimensional perspectives (plate 2A).

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)

Plate 3 Arrangement in Yellow and Grey Effie Deans (1877)