Cezanne: Landscape into Art

This beautiful book presents a new perspective on Paul Cezanne one of the towering and most influential figures of nineteenth-century art. Pavel Machotka has photographed the sites of Cezannes landscape paintings - whenever possible from the same spot and at the same time of day that Cezanne painted the scenes. Juxtaposing these color photographs with reproductions of the paintings he offers a dazzling range of evidence to demonstrate how the great painter transformed nature into works of art. Machotka himself an artist moves from painting to painting examining textures and surfaces pictorial rhythms and inflections of tone. As he analyzes Cezannes treatment of individual sites their transposition into forms and colors and the artists responsiveness to the demands of each unique composition we begin to see Cezanne as he saw himself: not as an early Cubist but as a painter who explored every aspect of his motif for its rich compositional potential and presented a parallel and faithful conception of it. Using color to define form while retaining hues that are anchored in reality Cezanne achieved sensuous reconstructions rather than intellectual depictions like those of the Cubists. While there are other books on Cezannes landscapes none is as closely informed by painterly knowledge and perception or as complete in its grasp of Cezannes period and geography as this one. A visual delight it is also an illuminating and original interaction with the artists work.