Cezanne - Landscape into Art

Cezanne is the supreme landscape painter of modernity, and his famous dictum that "painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations" defines the course of modern painting's extreme departure from fidelity to reality. Despite or because of this dictum, Cezanne's marvelously lucid "sensations" become all the more evident and dazzling when set against images of the locales he painted. Cezanne: Landscape into Art, which reprises and expands the classic 1996 publication by Yale University Press, does precisely this. In this highly praised study, the scholar Pavel Machotka juxtaposes photographs of the sites of Cezanne's landscape paintings--whenever possible, from the same angle and at the same time of day that the artist painted the scenes--with reproductions of the relevant paintings, offering a uniquely practical analysis of the ways in which Cezanne transformed reality into art. Since the original publication of this volume, new sites have been discovered--the result of scrutinizing collections of contemporaneous photographs and land registry records. These discoveries have added considerably to our knowledge of Cezanne's movements and have even helped to date his paintings more precisely. The new photographs, which range from postcards from the artist's time or the author's own color photographs, allow for a richer and better informed consideration of Cezanne's oeuvre. In light of those discoveries, Machotka has rewritten the previous edition to offer a fresh, rich view of Cezanne's artistic aims and accomplishments. While there are a number of books that focus on this important artist's landscape work, none is as closely informed by painterly perception or as exacting in its analysis as this one.