Village of Gardanne, Paul Cézanne Poster

Village of Gardanne, 1885. Cézanne here juxtaposes the blocky geometries of the townscape with the curling organic forms of rolling hills and vegetation. The shifting planes of the angular roofs and subtly shaded facades anticipate the experiments of the Cubists in the early twentieth century. Cézanne investigates tone as well as form, matching the warm ochers, oranges, and reds of the architecture with the cool, smoky blue-green of the foliage. An unfinished work with large visible expanses of cream base coat, this picture provides insight into Cézanne’s working process, with traces of graphite underdrawing and tentative squiggles of black paint. Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and that Cézanne "is the father of us all" cannot be easily dismissed.