What was Cezanne doing that was so revolutionary?

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Paul Cezanne ranks as one of the most celebrated artists of the  19th century, and is known as the father of modern art.  Cezanne’s revolutionary and masterful work inspired, and continues to inspire, generations of artists. Cezanne painted from intense observation, but it seems he was seeing differently than the other painters at the time, and differently from any painter before. So what was he doing that was so revolutionary?

First, I make no claims that I understand everything Cezanne was doing. I know a bit about some aspects of art, but I’m certain there is still an infinite amount that I have yet to learn, and another infinite that I will never know. Heck, even Cezanne himself didn’t understand everything that he was doing at the time! Now that my disclaimer out of the way, here are some ideas to think about:

Cezanne made his process visible. Cezanne shifted the focus of his paintings from rendering the object for the final product to a focus of process, of struggle, searching and finding, a continuous study undisguised within the final result. In doing this, he invites us to struggle and search along with him as he creates, as if he was there with us, and still working on the painting. No matter how finished a Cezanne is, it’s as if they are still in active conversation with us, and with his frank observations.

Cezanne acknowledged the flat space of the picture plane, while also using color and contour to coax individual objects into three dimensional form. At his best, his fruits are more round and his tables more flat, within their relationship with the two dimensional canvas. In this strange dualism, the acknowledgement of flat while threatening the round to roll off the edge brings his paintings a fabulous interest and tension, but more precisely, they became more direct and honest than the traditional illusionary paintings.

Cezanne combined drawing and painting. Of course other artists had drawn on their canvases before, but Cezanne did it in a different way, with bits and daubs here and there to call attention to moments of flatness and moments of form. Drawing in a painting also calls attention to the process of making a painting, and is usually viewed as signaling an unfinished painting since drawing is typically a way of making initial sketches and adjustments.

Cezanne breaks the form. Instead of representing each form within itself, he used daubs of color and fragments of line to guide the viewer’s eye through the object’s perimeter and to the space nearby, without losing the dualistic illusion of three and two dimensional space.

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What does “break the form” mean?

Typically when people draw and paint, they work on each object. For example, to draw an apple on a table, the artist might draw the outline of the apple, then the outline of the table. To break the form, an artist could draw part of the apple, then part of the table, then part of the space around the apple, then another part of the table, then the apple, and so on, moving around the canvas. (Related methods are “lost and found” and “point to point.”) Those careful but fragmented observations, and the movement across the canvas instead of across the apple “breaks” the forms. The object is no longer a whole thing to be observed and rendered. The whole thing is the canvas, not the apple. This allows for the artist to follow a series of smaller observations while also considering the whole, and opens the process up to movement in the making of the painting, such as when Cezanne would change the position of his easel to observe a portion of his still life, then move to another place to observe a different section, so the height of the table can change in relationship to the apple. So can the color. This is what lead to cubism, and can be seen today in modern art. For example, you can see it clearly in the “disrupted realism” style, such as Stephanie Pierce’s painting below.

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