Paul Cezanne: Watercolor Collection Books

Paul Cezanne

Cézanne’s watercolors exhibit not only kaleidoscopic arrays of translucent color but also very light graphite pencil lines that contrast strikingly with the soft watery touches of color. These drawn lines have been largely overlooked in previous studies of Cézanne’s watercolors.

 

In this ravishing book, Matthew Simms argues that it was the dialogue between drawing and painting—the movement between the pencil and the paintbrush—that attracted Cézanne to watercolor. Watercolor allowed Cézanne to express what he termed his “sensations” in two distinct modes that become a record of his shifting and spontaneous responses to his subject. Combining close visual analysis and examination of historical context, Simms focuses on the counterpoint of drawing and color in Cézanne’s watercolors over the course of his career and as viewed in relation to his oil paintings. More than a tool for sketching or preparing for oil paintings, Simms contends, watercolor was a unique means of expression in its own right that allowed Cézanne to combine in one place the two otherwise opposed mediums of drawing and painting.

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

In the last years of his life Paul Cézanne produced a stunning series of watercolors, many of them still lifes. Still Life with Blue Pot is one of these late masterpieces that is now in the collection of the Getty Museum. 

In Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong places this great painting within the context of Cézanne’s artistic and psychological development and of the history of the genre of still life in France. Still life—like the medium of watercolor—was traditionally considered to be “low” in the hierarchy of French academic paintings. Cézanne chose to ignore this hierarchy, creating monumental still-life watercolors that contained echoes of grand landscapes and even historical paintings in the manner of Poussin—the “highest” of classical art forms. In so doing he charged his still lifes with new meanings, both in terms of his own notoriously difficult personality and in the way he used the genre to explore the very process of looking at, and creating, art. 

Carol Armstrong’s study is a fascinating exploration of the brilliant watercolor paintings that brought Cézanne’s career to a complex, and triumphant, conclusion. The book includes new photographic studies of the Getty’s painting that allow the reader to encounter this great watercolor as never before, in all of its richness and detail.

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne