Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Paul Cézanne
French; 19th-century, 20th-century
Paris, France: Musée de l’Orangerie
90%
Dans le parc de Château-Noir. 1898-1900. Oil on canvas
This painting posits the total individuality of a dozen objects or more, then quietly, steadily proceeds to undercut all certainty, folding each element of the depiction into a quivering totality of surface effects. It's not just that Cézanne was an expert at sculpting space through his brushwork, however, but that he was capable of rooting his consummately deliberate markmaking in compositional structures that assert their own unique aesthetic character and strength, apart from (and despite the imposition of) the artist's muscular handling. Here, the trees create a screen near the front of the image, bounded at the upper right corner by a horizontal branch, locked in place by the crags at left, aerated up high by the dappled canopy. Each tree, many rocks, and even some of the landscape's contours have steady outlines. But behind and through and around all of this, flat strokes and hovering planes of paint make space for themselves apart from the space of what's represented. Paint pulls at the edges of objects and disregards their limits. It churns up the image. Where in space does that wedge of red near the canvas's left edge exist? Are there seven trunks, or ten? And yet the trees stay planted, the rocks refuse to move. The coexistence of stasis and flux is Cézanne's achievement. (TFS, 2026)
Paris, France: Musée National Picasso — Paris
71%
The Sea at l'Estaque. 1878-79. Oil on canvas
This is a mid-rate mature Cézanne. It's much more plainly about its individual structures than his best paintings, which tend instead to undermine structure by way of activating the overall surface of the canvas as the primary experiential unit or ground of compositional development. Still, there is a gainful surety of arrangement at work in this painting, and while Cézanne's handling doesn't go quite far enough, nor is it to be discounted entirely. Strokes in the dirt band at bottom, for instance, rhyme with the movements of the marks in the sea. Ultimately, however, the work's core dynamic has little to do with facture: it's in the toppling-forward of the sea-sky system that makes up the background, which is then delicately held in place by the trees' branches. Tension mounts and doesn't resolve, but in the end it comes across as an overdetermined instance of modernistic flatness — Manet mannerism, in a word. (TFS, 2026)