Self Portrait

       Paul Cezanne was a contemporary of the impressionists, but he went beyond their interests into a new sense of mass, composition, and the intersection of planes. His work is divided into time frames as he developed his artwork. From 1864 to 1870 his paintings form what is called his early romantic period. Extremely personal in character, it deals with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in somber colors and extremely heavy paint. After this period, Cezanne began to assimilate the principles of color and lighting of Impressionism, loosening up his brushwork. In the late 1870s Cezanne entered the phase known as 'constructive,' characterized by hatched brush strokes that build up the mass in the painting. He continued in this style until the 1890s when the paintings became more architectural in their solidity and thrust, and the space and atmosphere more charged with mass and energy of their own. In his last phase, Cezanne worked on a few basic subjects: still lives, successive views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and landscapes. The bathers were based on the male nude from memory, earlier studies, and sources of art from the past. Monte Sainte-Victoire was a nearby landmark that he could see looking out his studio window across the valley.
         By the time of his death in 1906, Cezanne's art had begun to be shown all across Europe and it became influential to younger working artists of the Fauves and Cubist movements. His work was so original and ground breaking that he continued to be influential into the twentieth and now into the twenty first century.

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