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

ARAS Connections Issue 2, 2012
from the problem of structure. But a few painters remained strongly plastic,
particularly in the early Renaissance when the influence of medieval art was still
strong. In the early Renaissance these include Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Bellini,
Botticelli, Ducio, and Piero della Francesca. From the high Renaissance to the
nineteenth century examples include Raphael, Michelangelo, Giorgione, Titian
and Veronese, Brueghel, El Greco, Velásquez, Goya, Rubens, the later
Rembrandt, Poussin, Chardin, and Cézanne.
In the twentieth century the history of pictorial space was the history of
Cézanne's influence. Pictorial space was his main concern. Through him it was
rediscovered by painters of the School of Paris, including Seurat, Rousseau,
Léger, Modigliani, the young Mondrian, Matisse, Braque, Picasso, and Hofmann.
You have already heard Braque on the subject of Cézanne. Many painters
(Vlaminck and Derain, for example) did their best work early, when they were
most under Cézanne's influence. Matisse and Picasso were not modest men but
each acknowledged Cézanne as his master. Matisse said:
I thought: 'If Cézanne is right, I am right;' because I knew Cézanne had
made no mistake. There are, you see, constructional laws in the work of
Cézanne which are useful to a young painter. He had, among his great
virtues, this merit of wanting the tones to be forces in a painting, giving
the highest mission to his painting ... Cézanne, you see, is a sort of God of
painting |16|.
Picasso agreed:
He was my one and only master! Don't you think I looked at his pictures?
I spent years studying them ... Cézanne! It was the same with all of us -
he was like our father. It was he who protected us |17|.
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