Paul Cézanne

Paul Cezanne’s incomparable, architectonic rendering of light and color provided the foundation of his reputation as a forerunner of modernism. Which specific locations left such vivid impressions on this scion of a provincial banker’s family? What and who were the influences supporting and advancing his innovative oeuvre? In this affordable volume, acclaimed art historian James H. Rubin traces Cezanne’s life and work from A to Z, creating an image of a painter who aspired to “do Poussin over again after nature.” As the book's title indicates, Rubin also explicates and champions the Société Paul Cezanne’s campaign to remove the accent on the artist’s surname in accordance with its original Provençal spelling.
James H. Rubin (born 1944) is an art historian and professor at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, specializing in 19th-century art with a particular interest in French modernism. He has published 13 books, including Impressionism (Phaidon, 1999), Impressionism and the Modern Landscape (University of California Press, 2008), How to Read Impressionism (Abrams, 2013) and, most recently, Why Monet Matters: Meanings Among the Lily Pads (Penn State University Press, 2021).

There are some collectors who, through foresight and dedication, have built truly outstanding art collections and shared them widely as part of public museums. Among these were Samuel Courtauld in London, England, and Rasmus Meyer in Bergen, Norway. At the heart of each man's collection was a single artist whose work was their greatest passion: for Courtauld, it was the French painter Paul Cézanne and, for Meyer, it was Norway’s own Edvard Munch. This unique collaboration between KODE Art Museums in Bergen and the Courtauld in London celebrates these two remarkable collectors and two great artists by temporarily exchanging the collections. This volume tells the story of Cézanne’s rise to prominence. This publication not only presents 10 key works from the Courtauld along with Cézannes from Norwegian collections, it also brings them together with eyewitness accounts from the early years of his profound influence.

Winner of a PROSE Award | Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2022

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Although he is most often celebrated as a painter, Paul Cézanne’s extraordinary vision was fueled by his experiments on paper. In pencil and watercolor, on individual sheets and across the pages of sketchbooks, the artist described form through multiple probing lines; realized compositions through repetitions and transformations; and conjured kaleidoscopic color through layering of watercolor. It is in these material realities of drawing where we see Cézanne at his most modern: embracing the unfinished, making process visible and actively inviting the viewer to participate in the act of perception.

Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, this is the most significant effort to date to unite drawings from across Cézanne’s entire career, tracing the development of his practice on paper, exploring working methods that transcend subject, and devoting both curatorial and conservation-based research to these remarkable works.

This book brings to light new research into the work of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), based on close examination of the DNA makeup that constitutes the papers he used for his watercolors and drawings. The book features in-depth analyses of the works in the show by Fabienne Ruppen, as well as extensive commentary on Cézanne scholarship by Walter Feilchenfeldt, co-author of the artist’s new catalogue raisonné.

At the heart of the book are two watercolors that Cézanne produced from a large sheet of paper, which he divided in two sections for the purpose of capturing different landscapes, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, from 1885–87, and a Paysage Provençal. Reunited for the first time, these two parts of the same sheet exemplify Ruppen’s research methods and the way these enable us to reconsider the dating of Cézanne’s work based on forensic evidence.

In honor of the generous bequest by the late Karsten Schubert, founder of Ridinghouse, to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, this luxurious book, featuring a tipped-on cover drawing, focuses exclusively on Paul Cézanne’s (1839–1906) drawings and prints of diverse subjects: from portraits and bather scenes to landscapes and copies after past art. This important act of generosity means that the Whitworth now holds the best collection of Cézanne works on paper in the UK, including a version of every print produced by the artist.

With essays by renowned Impressionist scholars Richard Thomson and Christopher Lloyd and full catalog entries on all the works in the show, this volume demonstrates that the essence of Cézanne as an artist lies just as much in his lesser-known works on paper as in his paintings.