Cézanne and Gauguin

Two painters who began near the Impressionists went in opposite directions after 1880. Paul Cézanne (1839 to 1906) is reported to have said he wanted to make Impressionism "something solid and lasting, like the art of museums." Paul Gauguin (1848 to 1903) wanted to leave behind the observed world for color, symbol and dream. Both opened roads into modern art. With Seurat and Van Gogh, they are called the Post-Impressionists.

Looking closely: The Basket of Apples

Describe. On a table covered with a rumpled white cloth sit a tipped basket of apples, a bottle and a plate of biscuits, with apples spilling across the cloth. Analyze. Look at the table: its front edge does not line up on the two sides of the cloth, as if it were seen from two heights. The bottle leans; the plate of biscuits tilts up toward us, seen more from above than the basket. The apples are built of small, parallel patches of color, warm against cool, so they feel round and heavy. Interpret. Cézanne was not making mistakes. He combined what he saw from several slightly different positions and adjusted shapes so the whole picture would hold together, solid and balanced.

Near his home at Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne painted the mountain of Sainte-Victoire again and again, more than thirty times in oil and dozens more in watercolor. In this late view, fields, trees and houses become blocks of green, ochre and blue laid side by side, and the mountain sits on top like a solid wedge, almost as near as the fields.

Gauguin

In Brittany in 1888, at Pont-Aven, Gauguin painted women in white bonnets who, after a church sermon, see the Bible story of Jacob wrestling with an angel. The ground is flat, unnatural red. A tree trunk cuts diagonally across the picture, dividing the women's real world from their vision. Forms are simplified and outlined in dark lines, like stained glass or Japanese prints, a style called cloisonnism or synthetism. Gauguin spent two months with Van Gogh in Arles later that year.