Editing Paul Cézanne (section)

==Method==
===Artistic style===
Cézanne's early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and includes many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted. Later in his career, he became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style. Nevertheless, in Cézanne's mature work there is the development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting. Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes. His statement "I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums",<ref>Paul Cézanne, Letters, edited by John Rewald, 1984.</ref> and his contention that he was recreating [[Nicolas Poussin|Poussin]] "after nature" underscored his desire to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition.

[[File:Paul Cézanne, French - The Large Bathers - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|right|''[[The Bathers (Cézanne)|Les Grandes Baigneuses]]'', 1898–1905; the triumph of [[Nicolas Poussin|Poussinesque]] stability and geometric balance]]
As with the old masters, for Cézanne the basis of painting was drawing, but the prerequisite for all work was subordination to the object, or the eye or pure looking: "All the painter’s intentions must be silent. He should silence all voices of prejudice. Forget! Forget! create silence! Be a perfect echo. […] The landscape is reflected, becomes human, thinks in me. […] I climb with her to the roots of the world. we germinate A tender excitement seizes me and from the roots of this excitement then rises the juice, the colour. I was born in the real world. I see! […] In order to paint that, then, the craft must be used, but a humble craft that obeys and is ready to transmit unconsciously."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Cézanne |first1=Paul |last2=Doran |first2=P.M. |title=Conversations with Cézanne |date=2001 |publisher=University of California Press |location=Berkeley |isbn=0520225171 |pages=137–141}}</ref>

[[File:Montagne Sainte-Victoire, par Paul Cézanne 108.jpg|thumb|left|''Montagne Sainte-Victoire'', 1904, [[Philadelphia Museum of Art]]]]
In addition to oil paintings and watercolours, Cézanne left behind an extensive oeuvre of more than 1200 drawings, which, hidden in the cupboards and folders of the studio during his lifetime only began to interest collectors in the 1930s. They form the working material for his works and show detailed sketches, observation notes and traces of Cézanne's sometimes difficult to decipher stages on the way to the realization of the picture. Their task, linked to the process of creating the respective work, was to give the overall structure and the object designations within the pictorial organism. Even in old age, portraits and figure drawings were made based on models from antique sculptures and baroque paintings from the [[Louvre]], which gave him clarity about the isolation of plastic phenomena. Therefore, the black and white of the drawings was an essential prerequisite for Cézanne's colour designs.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Adriani |title=Cézanne. Life and Work |page=80}}</ref>

Paul Cézanne was the first artist to begin breaking down objects into simple geometric shapes. In his much-quoted letter of 15 April 1904 to the painter and art theorist Émile Bernard, who had met Cézanne in his last years, he wrote: "Treat nature according to cylinder, sphere, and cone and put the whole in perspective, like this that each side of an object, of a surface, leads to a central point […]"<ref>{{cite book |last1=Adriani |title=Cézanne. Life and Work |page=47}}</ref> Cézanne realized his painting ideas in the paintings of Montagne Sainte-Victoire and his still-lifes. In his pictorial conception, even a mountain is understood as a superimposition of forms, spaces and structures that rise above the ground.<ref name="Paul Cézanne"/>

Émile Bernard wrote of Cézanne's unusual way of working: "He began with the shadow parts and with one spot, on which he put a second, larger one, then a third, until all these shades, covering each other, modelled the object with their colouring. It was then that I realized that a law of harmony was guiding his work and that these modulations had a direction preordained in his mind.”<ref>{{cite book |last1=Cézanne |first1=Paul |last2=Doran |first2=P.M. |title=Conversations with Cézanne |date=2001 |publisher=University of California Press |location=Berkeley |isbn=0520225171 |pages=80–81}}</ref> In this preordained direction, for Cézanne, lay the real secret of painting in the context of harmony and the illusion of depth. To the collector [[Karl Ernst Osthaus]] Cézanne emphasized on 13 April 1906 during his visit to Aix that the main thing in a picture is the meeting of the distance. The colour must express every leap into the depths.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Adriani |title=Cézanne. Watercolours |page=67}}</ref>

===Optical phenomena===
Cézanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials: he wanted to "treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone"<ref>{{cite book | last1 = Cézanne | first1 = Paul | translator-last1 = Danchev | translator-first1 = Alex | title = The Letters of Paul Cézanne | page = 334 | publisher = The J. Paul Getty Museum | location = Los Angeles | year = 2013 }}</ref> (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, an apple or orange a sphere, for example). Additionally, Cézanne's desire to capture the truth of perception led him to explore [[binocular vision]] graphically{{Citation needed|date=March 2024}}, rendering slightly different, yet simultaneous visual perceptions of the same phenomena to provide the viewer with an aesthetic experience of depth different from those of earlier ideals of [[Perspective (graphical)|perspective]], in particular [[One-point perspective|single-point perspective]]. His interest in new ways of modelling space and volume derived from the [[stereoscopy]] obsession of his era and from reading [[Hippolyte Taine]]’s [[George Berkeley#New theory of vision|Berkelean theory of spatial perception]].<ref>Rod Bantjes, ‘"Perspectives bâtardes": Stereoscopy, Cézanne, and the Metapictoral Logic of Spatial Construction’, ''History of Photography'', 41:3 (August 2017), 262–285.</ref><ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=rPOsDAAAQBAJ&dq=paul+cezanne%2C+Hippolyte+Taine&pg=PA65 Jon Kear, ''Paul Cézanne''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191227124313/https://books.google.com/books?id=rPOsDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65&dq=paul+cezanne,+Hippolyte+Taine&source=bl&ots=18GKcuKqeD&sig=Sfy-OU-CWbl6iAeztMwxbGC710E&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn0PXFm5jWAhUBNhoKHYzyAEcQ6AEIPTAI#v=onepage&q=paul%20cezanne%2C%20Hippolyte%20Taine&f=false |date=27 December 2019 }}, Reaktion Books, 15 June 2016, p. 65</ref> Cézanne's innovations have prompted critics to suggest such varied explanations as [[Disease|sick]] [[retina]]s,<ref>Joris-Karl Huysmans, "Trois peintres: Cézanne, Tissot, Wagner," ''La Cravache'', 4 August 1888.</ref> pure vision,<ref>Hans Sedlmayr, ''Art in Crisis: The Lost Center'', London, 1957. (original German 1948)</ref> and the influence of the [[Steam railroad|steam railway]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://tomokiakimaru.web.fc2.com/cezanne_and_the_steam_railway_1.html|title=Cézanne and the Steam Railway (1)|work=Tomoki Akimaru (Art Historian)|access-date=9 March 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170909191104/http://tomokiakimaru.web.fc2.com/cezanne_and_the_steam_railway_1.html|archive-date=9 September 2017|url-status=live}}</ref>

===Aller sur le motif, sensation and realization===
Cézanne preferred to use these terms when describing his painting process. First of all, there is the "motif", by which he not only meant the representational concept of the picture, but also the motivation for his tireless work of observing and painting. ''Aller sur le motif'', as he called his approach to work, therefore meant entering into a relationship with an external object that moved the artist inwardly and that had to be translated into a picture.

Sensation is another key term in Cézanne's vocabulary. First of all, he meant visual perception in the sense of "impression", i.e. an optical sensory stimulus emanating from the object. At the same time, it includes the emotion as a psychological reaction to what is perceived. Cézanne expressly did not place the object to be depicted at the center of his painterly efforts, but rather the sensation: "Painting from nature does not mean copying the object, it means realizing its sensations." The medium that mediated between things and sensations was the colour, although Cézanne left it open to what extent it arises from things or is an abstraction of his vision.

Cézanne used the third term réalisation to describe the actual painterly activity, which he feared would fail to the end. Several things had to be “realized” at the same time: first the motif in all its diversity, then the feelings that the motif triggered in him, and finally the painting itself, the realization of which could bring the other “realizations” to light. "Painting" therefore meant letting those opposing movements of taking in and giving, of "impression" and "expression" merge into one another in a single gesture.<ref>{{cite web|title=Relationale Ästhetik. Über den 'Fleck' bei Cézanne und Lacan, Zürich/Berlin 2005, S.&nbsp;265&nbsp;ff|periodical=|publisher=|url=http://www.michaelluethy.de/scripts/relationale-aesthetik-cezanne-lacan-bild-blick/|url-status=live|format=|access-date=15 August 2008|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220814072313/http://michaelluethy.de/scripts/relationale-aesthetik-cezanne-lacan-bild-blick/|archive-date=14 August 2022|last=Michael Lüthy|date=|year=|language=|pages=|quote=}}</ref> The "realization in art" became a key concept in Cézanne's thinking and acting.

===Dating and cataloguing===
The sometimes longer dates for creation in the catalogues of Cézanne's works do not always indicate that the exact dating cannot be clarified, even if Cézanne rarely dated his pictures, especially since he worked on some pictures for months if not years before he was satisfied with the result.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Becks-Malorny |title=Cézanne |page=60}}</ref> The artist himself regarded many of his paintings as unfinished, for painting was a never-ending process for him.

[[File:Cézanne, Geffroy.jpg|thumb|''Portrait of the Critic Gustave Geffroy'', 1895, [[Musée d'Orsay]]]]
Cataloging Cézanne's works turned out to be a difficult task. [[Ambroise Vollard]] made the first attempt, a multi-volume photo album, similar to his catalogue of [[Pierre-Auguste Renoir|Renoir]]. Vollard's catalogue never materialized however. Georges Rivière, the father-in-law of Cézanne's son published a biography of the artist in 1923 (''Le Maître Paul Cézanne'') that included a chronological and annotated list of many of the painter’s works. Conceived by the art dealer [[Paul Rosenberg (art dealer)|Paul Rosenberg]], the first complete [[catalogue raisonné]] was published by [[Lionello Venturi]] in 1936. The two volume ''Cézanne: Son Art, Son Oeuvre'' became the definitive catalogue of the artist's work for over five decades, although requiring a supplement as additional works were discovered and new scholarship and documentation introduced. Adrien Chappuis' ''The Drawings of Paul Cézanne – A Catalog Raisonné'' was published by Thames and Hudson in London in 1973 and has remained the classic source for the artist's graphic work.<ref name=compedit>{{cite web |title=About the Project |url=https://www.cezannecatalogue.com/section/?id=about |website=Cézanne Catalogue |access-date=20 July 2022 |archive-date=25 June 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220625100526/https://www.cezannecatalogue.com/section/?id=about |url-status=live }}</ref>

[[File:Lac d'Annecy, par Paul Cézanne.jpg|thumb|left|''Lac d'Annecy'', 1896, [[Courtauld Institute of Art]], London]]
[[John Rewald]] continued Venturi's work after his death. Rewald was tasked with combining Venturi’s planned supplement with his own research, an agreement that did not work out as intended. After years of studying Cézanne’s works, Rewald found that he not only disagreed with many of his predecessor’s dates but a number of his attributions as well. He therefore set about developing an entirely new catalogue raisonné.<ref name=compedit /> Rewald's ''Paul Cézanne – The Watercolours: A Catalog Raisonné'' was published by Thames and Hudson, London with 645 illustrations in 1983. The missing dating of the paintings (Rewald only found one) and imprecise formulations of the pictorial motif such as ''Paysage'' or ''Quelques pommes'' caused confusion. In his early treatment of the ''Venturi'' Rewald made a list of all the works that could be dated without a stylistic analysis, because Rewald rejected such an analysis as unscientific. He continued his list by following the various whereabouts of Cézanne that could be verified by documents. Another scheme of his approach was to rely on the memories of the people portrayed, especially if they were Cézanne's contemporaries. Based on his own interviews, he made chronological assignments. Among the works that could be dated with certainty were Cézanne's ''[[Portrait of Gustave Geffroy]]'', which the sitter confirmed as 1895, and ''Lake Annecy'', which the artist visited only once, in 1896.

Rewald died in 1994, he was not able to fully complete his work. When in doubt, Rewald's tendency was to include rather than exclude. This method was adopted by his closest associates, Walter Feilchenfeldt Jr., son of the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, and Jayne Warman, who completed the catalog and provided it with introductions. The catalog was published in 1996 under the title ''The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalog Raisonne – Review''. It includes the 954 works that Rewald wanted to record.<ref>{{cite web|title=''The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonne – Review.''|periodical=|publisher=|url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0422/is_2_80/ai_54073974|url-status=live|format=|access-date=12 August 2008|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080905151345/http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0422/is_2_80/ai_54073974|archive-date=5 September 2008|last=Richard Shiff|date=|year=|language=|pages=|quote=}}</ref> Feilchenfeldt, Warman and David Nash went on to produce the first complete catalogue of the artist work since with ''The Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings of Paul Cézanne, an online catalogue raisonné''.[https://www.cezannecatalogue.com/catalogue/index.php]