CÉZANNE Landscape into Art by Pavel Machotka.
Designed by Gillian Malpass, Yale University Press. Released February 7, 1996
  • Lavishly illustrated with more than 100 colorplates
  • An exhibition on Cézanne, called by the New York Times "the hot new artist of the '90s," will be shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from May 25 to August 18
This beautiful book presents a new perspective on Paul Cézanne, one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century art. Pavel Machotka has photographed the sites of Cézanne's landscape paintings--whenever possible from the same spot and at the same time of day that Cézanne painted the scenes. Juxtaposing these color photographs with reproductions of the paintings, he offers a dazzling range of evidence to investigate how the great painter transformed nature into works of art.

Machotka, himself an artist, moves from painting to painting, examining textures and surfaces, pictorial rhythms, and inflections of tone. As he analyzes Cézanne's treatment of individual sites, their transposition into forms and colors, and the artist's responsiveness to the demands of each unique composition, we begin to see Cézanne as he saw himself: not as an early Cubist but as a painter who explored his motif for its rich compositional potential and presented a parallel and faithful conception of it. Using color to define form, while retaining hues that are anchored in reality, Cézanne achieved sensuous reconstructions rather than intellectual depictions like those of the Cubists.

While there are other books on Cézanne's landscapes, none is as closely informed by painterly knowledge and perception or as complete in its grasp of Cézanne's period and geography as this one. A visual delight, it is also an illuminating and original interaction with the artist's work.
 


Pavel Machotka is professor of psychology and art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has exhibited his own paintings at the Campbell-Thibaud Gallery in San Francisco and at other galleries, and his work was recently featured and reviewed in American Artist.

Reproduced from the Yale Spring 1996 catalog with permission.