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

ARAS Connections Issue 2, 2012
It shows, too, that vigorous logic in the sequence of planes, which evolve
in an unbroken succession throughout every part of the picture,
enforcing irresistibly upon the spectator's imagination their exact
recession at each point and enabling us to grasp the significance of all the
interplay of their movements |35|.
Expansion and monumentality
In Braque's still life (plate 6) the planes seem to expand towards the edges
of the canvas. The painting seems massive or monumental even as a postcard.
Monumentality is obvious in Modigliani's portrait (plate 14) and in the paleolithic
La Dame de Sireuil (plate 16). By contrast, when a painting is not plastic the
forms tend to contract, pulling away from the edges of the rectangle. Caravaggio's
The Lute Player (plate 9) illustrates this.
According to Hofmann:
Monumentality is an affair of relativity. The truly monumental can only
come about by means of the most exact and refined relation between the
parts |36|.
Of Cézanne's Card Players Fry said:
It is hard to think of any design since those of the great Italian Primitives
- one or two of Rembrandt's later pieces might perhaps be cited - which
gives us so extraordinary a sense of monumental gravity and resistance -
of something that has found its center and can never be moved ... The
feeling of life is no less intense than that of eternal stillness and repose ...
These figures have indeed the gravity, the reserve and the weighty
solemnity of some monument of antiquity ... gestures and events take on
a Homeric ease and amplitude |37|.
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