The landscape “Mount St. Victoria” is a light, bright work. Pastel, azure shades give a sensual, romantic feeling. The canvas is distinguished by simple shapes and compositional solutions. The landscape is characterized by diversity. In the foreground are small houses arranged in close proximity to each other. The distant shot builds the image of Mount St. Victoria.
The painting is characterized by color flow, play, and a kind of color shift. The sky, clear and cloudless, is written in a single tone without intermittent shade transitions. The silhouette image of the mountain is framed in a rich, deep blue color. Mount St. Victoria resembles a large hummock of ice, which colors and adds cold shades surrounding reality. Blue, lilac shades create light shadows and a ghostly glow from windows in houses. The hilly, uneven space of the French landscape awakens this diversity and color dynamics, complicating and enriching the pictorial range.
The landscape turned out to be multicolored, but without excessive variegation or decorativeness. On the contrary, the canvas is characterized by a soft, smoothed color scheme, without splashes of color or sharp contrasting excesses. There is a lot of etude, light, airy in the picture. The relationship of all the echoes, color and light-shadow nuances appears as a complex, uneasy harmony.
The landscape fabric of the canvas is dominated by blue, golden and green shades. The light is built in such a way that it pierces the entire space of the canvas, saturating it with the warm golden velvet of the sun's rays. The volume of the painting is given by the thin contour outlines of buildings, mountain peaks, and the lines of a hilly surface. Such a contour stroke looks unobtrusive and gives the necessary depth and volume to the image. You never tire of looking at the landscape and admiring the interesting color combinations. The picture plane of the landscape is accurately painted with multi-colored crayons. Mount Saint Victoria - a nice place French Provence, reminiscent of fairy-tale landscapes, embodying children's fairy-tale dreams filled with peace and a peaceful, joyful existence. The image of Mount St. Victoria is distant, brought into the background and does not appear as central image, but rather as a built element of the composition. The cold, inaccessible mountains of Provence come into a peculiar contradiction with the image of houses that are filled with life, household chores and worries. The image of the houses trembles with colors and the warm breath of life, while the image of the mountain is distinguished by a single color, excluding overlaps of color, obsessive rattling, flickering of light and shadow.
Paul Cezanne
Mount St. Victoria, view from Lov (Landscape at Aix)
1904-1906
Canvas, oil
60×73 cm
State Museum fine arts named after A.S. Pushkin
Origin
Gift of the artist to Eugene Carriere, Paris. Since 1906 in the Vollard Gallery, Paris. November 19, 1906 acquired by S.I. Shchukin in the Vollard Gallery, Paris. Until 1918 - collection. S.I. Shchukina, Moscow; then the 1st Museum of New Western Painting; from 1923 - GMNZI; since 1948 - Pushkin Museum.
Inv.: Zh-3339
Inv. GMNZI: 210
Description
Painting executed in last years the artist’s life is a kind of result of the development of Cezanne’s landscape concept. The master’s favorite motif—the view of Mount St. Victoria—is captured from the side of the Lov hills, where the artist’s new house-studio, built in 1901, was located. He loved to work nearby on a gentle hillside, producing eleven canvases with this motif. It was here that Maurice Denis captured Cezanne in photographs and in his painting “Cezanne at Work on a Motif.”
The free painting style, reduced to pure expressiveness of forms and colors, as close as possible to non-objectivity, makes the painting considered the most avant-garde among Cézanne’s landscapes and turns it into a kind of creative testament, which he left to the art of the 20th century, which resolved the problem of abstraction. The intrinsic pictorial merits of the painting were one of the first to be felt by the art critic Pavel Muratov, who wrote back in 1908: “The painting of this painting is so beautiful, so amazingly strong that any piece cut from it will be high.” a work of art how will they be a wreck antique statue" Undoubtedly, the courage of Cezanne’s creative expression found an echo in Sergei Shchukin, who bought the painting almost immediately after it arrived at the Vollard gallery.
Artist
Paul Cezanne
1839, Aix-en-Provence -
1906, Aix-en-Provence
Paul Cezanne
A painter of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, who had a huge influence on the masters of the 20th century, including Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Pablo Picasso. He exhibited with his impressionist friends, but in our time his work is usually classified as post-impressionism.
Born in Aix-en-Provence. He studied at the Bourbon College in Ex, where he became friends with Emile Zola (the friendship was interrupted by the publication in 1886 of Zola's novel "Creation", where the personality traits of Cézanne were reflected in the image of Claude Lantier). In 1856 he began attending the Drawing School in Aix. In 1861 he went to Paris, studied at the Suisse Academy, where he met Camille Pissarro and Armand Guillaumin. He also met with Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Frederic Basile, Pierre Auguste Renoir. During the years of the “romantic” period, he was influenced by Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet. Collaboration with Pissarro in Pontoise and Auvers (1872-1873) opened the impressionistic period of Cézanne's work. Participated in the first and third exhibitions of the Impressionists (1874, 1877). In 1882 he exhibited at the Salon, in 1889 and 1900 at the World Exhibitions in Paris. In 1895, Ambroise Vollard organized his first solo exhibition. In 1888-1900 he worked alternately in Aix and Paris, in recent years - in Aix. The late period of creativity, usually called synthetic, was distinguished not only by a persistent desire for constructiveness, but also by increasing expressiveness. He painted landscapes, still lifes, figurative compositions and portraits.
- walking within the city to places associated with the life of Paul Cezanne and his family. You can walk.
Cezanne's Road
If you wish, you can go by car around, finding all the new places that once caught the eye of Paul Cezanne with their beauty.
To the east, along The Road of Cezanne Mount Sainte-Victoria opens: 75 km around the mountain range, starting from Tolone, through the Trois-Saute bridge to Meirey and the boat station at Fuvaux, also famous by the artist’s brush.
Mount Saint Victoria:
Queen of the landscapes of his childhood, his muse artistic creativity, Mount St. Victoria is his lifelong masterpiece: 44 oil paintings and 43 watercolors are held in the world's famous museums and private collections. The most famous paintings written from this magnificent panorama located on the Marguerite road to the Lov hills.
The city of Aix-en-Provence has organized a route “Land of Artists”: opposite the mountain, nine of the most beautiful reproductions of Cézanne’s “Saint Victoria” on tiles invite contemplation...
- Causeway des Daisies, located 16 minutes' walk north of Cezanne's studio.
- Walk along Avenue Paul Cezanne, go around the roundabout of the Cezanne portal, turn left, climb the stairs leading to the Artists' Square (private residence, please respect the peace of the inhabitants). Parking for tourist buses on Avenue Filippi: follow the parking signs located at the entrance to the residence. GPS: 43°32’49 N — 5°26’40 E
Majestic view of the mountain range from Beaurecueil and Saint-Antonin-sur-Bayon.
15 km south is the town of Gardanna: Cézanne lived here between 1885 and 1886.
In the Frères hills there is a trail marked by a presentation of paintings that present the painter's structural concept. Museum under open air was created at the artist's place of work. Beautiful view of St. Victoria from the road to the Notre-Dame-des-Maurs chapel.
30 km south of Estac: Cézanne worked and lived here intermittently between 1864 and 1885. Here you will see another favorite place of the master.
Along the "artists' route" you will discover the Bay of Marseille, immortalized by many famous artists, including Braque, Deurin and Dufy.
Published: June 3, 2009Around 1896-1898 La montagne Sainte-Victoire Oil on canvas. 78.5x98.5 GE
Post, in 1948 from GMNZI; formerly the Vollard Gallery; from 1907 - collection of I. A. Morozov (purchased from Vollard for 20,000 francs); Since 1918 - MNZH-2; from 1923 - GMNZI
A comparison of the painting with a photograph of the motif taken by Rewald in 1935 shows that it accurately reproduces the actual details. Cézanne resorted to significant perspective distortion, pushing the mountain forward greatly. A special, “energy-intensive” understanding of perspective, which was designed to capture the full power of color, distinguishes the Hermitage landscape from other images of Mount St. Victoria. The unusual spatiality of the landscape is especially striking when compared with the later, Cleveland, version from Art Museum in Cleveland, where the mountain, seen from almost the same point of view, extends much further into the interior.
The painting is quite badly damaged in the upper and lower parts because before it came to Ivan Morozov it did not have a stretcher and was stored rolled up. It is known that it was in this form that Vollard managed to obtain many of the master’s canvases. The most convincing dating of the painting was given by Revald: 1896-1898. He found out that when creating the landscape, Cezanne looked at the mountain from the road from Tholonet (in his catalog the painting is called “Le Mont Saint-Victoire au-dessus de la route du Tholonet”) - Halfway from Tolon to Mount St. Victoria is the Black Castle , where the artist rented a room to work - on the canvas this house is hidden behind the trees.
With inner trepidation, I stood on the very spot on Lov hill from which Paul Cézanne painted dozens of famous landscapes with Mount Sainte-Victoire.
Mount Sainte-Victoire - view from Lov hill in September
Looking at the beautiful and majestic Saint Victoria, I suddenly realized one of the main problems of landscape art. In order to correctly evaluate the artist’s work, the viewer must see with his own eyes the original of the natural object depicted in the landscape.
Mount Sainte-Victoire - view from the hill of Lov. Provence in September. This big pine tree was seen by Cezanne.
Cézanne pines on the hill of Lov (Provence in September) Read the previous post about Cezanne and Sainte-Victoire.
This review is devoted to the fourth and final period in the artist’s work - the synthetic period. In the nineties and zero years, Cezanne uses all the skills and techniques he has developed over his entire previous life. This is no longer realism, impressionism or constructivism. It was during these years that the artist laid the foundation for a new artistic space For contemporary art XX century.
One of the objectives of this study is to clearly show the transformation artistic techniques Cezanne using the example of one constant subject: the Sainte-Victoire mountains in Provence. In the next 12 works, the artist gradually takes us into the space of cubism, unprecedented for that time, anticipating the triumph of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
Cezanne and Mount Sainte-Victoire - works No. 62-73
Work No. 62
Getting sick diabetes mellitus When it becomes difficult for an artist to carry heavy paints and objects, he increasingly turns to watercolors, which he had abandoned for a while. Towards the end of his career, Paul Cézanne learned to work quickly and accurately, which is especially important for watercolors, which do not tolerate processing, unlike working with oils. In addition, it was more in keeping with his impetuous and hot-tempered nature.
Paul Cézanne -Mount Sainte-Victoire (watercolor) -1902 (Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA) Work No. 63
The famous "Bathers" with Mount Sainte-Victoire in the background.
Paul Cezanne - Bathers. Mont Sainte-Victoire in the Background-1902 Work No. 64
Views of the mountain are becoming more and more laconic, with nonessential details and unnecessary flickering being eliminated. Only the most essential remains, reflecting the beauty of Provençal nature, its silence, silence and power.
Paul Cezanne - Sainte-Victoire vue de la colline des Lauves, 1902-1906 (Zurich Kunstmuseum) Work No. 65
“...Paul Cezanne walked slowly, very slowly, peering and pondering what he saw in front of him. Not a single extra stroke, not a single extra detail, everything was carefully thought out and fitted. Those who are in late period watched the master work, they said that he could watch for hours, and then make just one stroke and again immerse himself in what was in front of him….
Paul Cézanne - View of Mount Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves (watercolor) -1903 ...Changes in his manner become noticeable only many years after the onset next stage. Even art historians sometimes find it difficult to attribute one or another of his paintings to a specific year and period, so slow were the changes in his artistic manner, he walked so slowly...” (Tina Guy)
Work No. 66
Sometimes it seems to me that Cezanne is simply putting together a picture from mosaic pieces.
Paul Cezanne - Sainte-Victoire vue de la colline des Lauves - 1904-06 (Basel Kunstmuseum) Work No. 67
His watercolors are delightfully light, precise and transparent. He often does not paint over the paper, leaving white spots that look like a single whole, enhancing the effect of transparency of the drawing.
Paul Cezanne - Mont Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves, watercolor, 1900-1906 Work No. 68
One of the common theories explaining Cézanne's love for this landscape appeals to the unique game sunlight on the slopes of the mountain: bright sun Provence, the position and color of the mountain in different combinations give completely different shades. Sainte-Victoire can be severe black, soft pink or carefree lilac.
Paul Cézanne La Montagne Sainte-Victoire -1897 (Detroit, Institute of Art, USA) Work No. 69
Paul Cezanne - La Montagne Sainte-Victoire -1904 Work No. 70
Paul Cezanne - Mont Sainte-Victoire (watercolor) -1904 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Work No. 71
“Lines parallel to the horizon convey space, lines perpendicular to the horizon impart depth to the picture,” wrote Cezanne. Thus, he completely overturned traditional ideas about perspective, which were shared even by the innovating impressionists.
Paul Cézanne La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves, 1902–06 (Philadelphie, Collection Annenberg) When looking at Cezanne's landscapes, you get the impression that you are inside the space depicted in the picture, which seems to either narrow or expand, becoming much more dynamic.
Work No. 72
“...Trying to depict as accurately as possible what he saw, he himself became part of his paintings, as if placing himself in the center and showing the viewer objects from different sides at the same time: now from below, now from above, now from the side. Picasso would later adopt this technique...” (Tina Guy)
Paul Cézanne La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves -1902–06 (Kansas City, Rockhill, Nelson, Atkins Museum) Work No. 73
From a combination of red, yellow, purple and blue shades a mountain is born; under Cezanne’s brush the colors seem to transform into one another. Masterfully using the play of light and shadow, the artist creates something material. He doesn't transmit real image, but only uses the forms and colors of the landscape necessary for a holistic picture.
Breaking the image into simple geometric components and changing the real color to the one actually felt in later works Cezanne predetermined the future development of Cubism and Fauvism.
Paul Cézanne -La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves-1904-06 (Pearlman Foundation) “Pure drawing,” wrote Cezanne, “is an abstraction. Drawing and color are inseparable. The right tone immediately gives color and relief. The more harmonious the color, the more accurate the drawing. Contrasts and matching tones are the whole secret of drawing and modeling.”
(To be continued)