Pictorial Space throughout Art History: Cézanne and ... - ARAS

ARAS Connections Issue 2, 2012
The effect of a color depends on its tone (is it red or yellow or green?); its
warmth (red-orange is the warmest tone, blue-green the coldest); its saturation
(how much is it diluted with white, gray or black?); its brightness (how intensely
does it reflect light?); and its extent (how much surface does it cover?). Color
creates tensions between planes which must also be balanced (plate 15). If the
colors of a plastic painting are reduced to shades of gray (try looking at the black-
and-white reproduction in plate 1) the painting may still be plastic. Contrasts of
brightness and extent, together with the form, may be enough.
The final picture breathes: air circulates through the space which
surrounds the forms (fig. 11). The forms seem to expand. They look massive and
permanent. Every structure is related (by location, tone, contrast, proportion,
repetition, or direction of movement) to every other structure. Nothing is
included unless it is called for. The picture is an organic unit. Roger Fry (3) said
of Cézanne's landscapes:
His profound sense of a continuous plastic rhythm penetrates throughout
a whole composition. By some mysterious power he was able to give the
mountains, the houses, the trees, all their solid integrity, to articulate
them in a clearly felt space and yet to sustain a rhythm of plastic
movement almost unbroken from one end of the canvas to the other |28|.
A landscape by Cézanne and his motif
By comparing Cézanne's landscape The Sainte Victoire from Beaurecueil,
(Plate 2) with a photograph of his motif you can watch him constructing pictorial
space.
Cézanne selected elements from the motif to serve as planes in his
painting. The hillside in the right foreground and the high mountainside in the
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