In the exhibition hall of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, there is always a group of students who stop in front of "The Card Player" for a long time, the frozen posture of the two peasants in this painting hides the most profound revolutionary code in the history of modern art, Paul Cézanne (Paul Cézanne), as the core figure of post-impressionism, his works not only ended the dominance of the law of perspective since the Renaissance, but also opened the way for cubism and abstract expressionism How to reconstruct the essence of the visual world on canvas.
Still Life Apple Basket (1890-1894): The Awakening of Geometric Order In this work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where the slanted table top is wonderfully balanced with the misaligned fruit bowl, Cézanne deliberately breaks the focal perspective and allows different perspectives to coexist on a two-dimensional plane, and the seemingly randomly stacked apples are in fact carefully calculated spheres: each fruit emphasizes volume through the boundary between light and dark, the folds of the tablecloth are transformed into geometric folds, and the diamond pattern of the background wallpaper echoes the rhythm of the foreground.
This work subverts the decorative function of traditional still life painting, showing Cézanne's unique modeling logic, his idea of using cylinders, spheres, and cones to deconstruct objects directly influenced Picasso's cubist experiments, as art historian Meyer Shapiro said: "In these fruits, Cézanne finds the eternal structure of nature." "
Mont Saint-Victoire (1882-1906): a spiritual schema of the geological landscape On the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne spent more than twenty years depicting the same mountain over and over again, now in a late edition of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in which the mountain is broken down into intertwined patches of color, the slope of the pine trees in the foreground and the movement of the mountains form a dynamic equilibrium, and the painter abandons the aerial perspective and uses the juxtaposition of warm and cold color blocks to express the depth of space: the collision of ochre and ultramarine produces a trembling light effect, and the transition between olive green and earthy yellow suggests geological changes.
Cézanne wrote in a letter to Émile Bernard: "Nature always exists within", which is at the heart of Expressionism.
The Bath Ladies (1898-1905): An eternal dialogue between the human body and nature This large-scale work in the collection of the National Gallery in London shows Cézanne's ultimate exploration of the human form, in which the figures in the bathing scene are neither the ideal beauty of classicism nor the momentary capture of impressionism, but are transformed into an architectural-like composition, with curved limbs forming arch-like structures, and the vertical lines of trees forming a polyphonic symphony with the curves of the human body, and the whole picture is like frozen music.
Cézanne foresaw the departure of modern art from perfect anatomy, and the rustic sense of primitivism in the picture directly influenced Gauguin's Tahitian series, which art critic Clement Greenberg believes marks "the beginning of painting to get rid of literary narratives and return to visual essence".
The Card Player (1890-1892): a visual manifesto of existentialism In the version now preserved at the Musée d'Orsay, the figures of the two peasants are reduced to geometric modules, the slanted wine bottles form the central axis of the painting, the arms of the figures form a precise cross with the pipe, and Cézanne compresses the three-dimensional space into a puzzle of color blocks by reducing the contrast between light and dark: the blue coat echoes the warm and cold of the brown background, and the rhythm of the light of the white shirt and the cards creates a unique flat depth.
This philosophical treatment of everyday scenes gives ordinary events a sense of eternity, and the avoidance of the characters' eyes and the stillness of their postures suggest the spiritual alienation of modern people.
The House of the Hanged Dead (1873): The self-breakthrough of the Impressionist period This early work, in the Musée d'Orsay, documents the complex relationship between Cézanne and Impressionism, with sloping roofs and distorted perspectives still bearing expressionist traces, but the short brushstrokes have already revealed the rudiments of color analysis, and the blue-purple shades on the ochre walls foreshadow the later exploration of color structures, and the empty doors and windows in the painting are like missing answers, suggesting the artist's questioning of traditional painting rules.
Created during the transition period of Cézanne's participation in the Impressionist movement, this work retains both the heavy texture of Courbet and the beginning of the division of colors, as art historian John Rayward points out: "In this painting, we can see two Cézanne wrestling – the feelings of romanticism and the coldness of rational analysis." "
Standing in front of the Museum of Modern Art in New York's Mont Sainte-Victoire, the audience can still feel the trembling power of Cézanne's brushstrokes, this lone innovator spent forty years in the mountains of Provence to complete the revolution of visual cognition, from the geometric deconstruction of still life to the color architecture of landscapes, from the volume reorganization of the human body to the philosophical gaze of existence, each of his works is the key to open the door to modern art, as Roger Frye said in "Cézanne and the Development of His Style": "He taught us to see the world with new eyes." In that apple, we see the order of the universe. This order is not an imitation of nature, but a projection of the artist's mental structure, which is Cézanne's most precious legacy to posterity: art is never about reproducing what the eye sees, but about reconstructing what the mind perceives.
