This seminar introduces students to the complex and fascinating painting of Paul Cezanne and looks at the very different ways his career has been thematized by critics, philosophers, and art historians, both during and following Cezanne's time. Cezanne has been celebrated by some as a great Classical painter, who restored to art timeless formal and structural principles after the individualism and relativism of Impressionism. Others have focused on Cezanne's status as a harbinger of modernist painting, whose emotional intensity and technical radicalism set the stage for 20th-century abstraction. Through analyzing Cezanne's paintings and correspondence, as well as primary and secondary accounts of his career we shall aim to come to terms with this colossal artist's legacy and judge his impact for ourselves. |