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SLIDE 12
Paul Cézanne, French, 1839-1906. The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue, c. 1894-96. Oil on canvas, 64.2 x 80 cm. The James W. Corrigan Memorial, 1936.19
In The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue, Paul Cézanne has begun to compose in broad areas of shapes and colors. Summarized by flat planes of white paint, the pigeon tower rises dramatically above the barren land below. Its cylindrical shape is transformed into a series of planes. Blue, green, orange, and red strokes of paint surround the solid form of the tower to become the sky, the cypresses, the olive trees, and the tiled roofs of the adjoining buildings. The central position of the tower and its plain appearance contrast with the rich array of colors that encircle its massive form. Although Cézanne's interest in expressing the underlying structure in nature is emerging in this painting, he has not completely eliminated the sketchy brush strokes characteristic of impressionist works.
Between 1888 and 1892 Cézanne painted a variety of views of his brother-in-law's house at Bellevue, a short distance from Aix-en-Provence. Part of a group of buildings attached to the main house, the pigeon tower also appears in a painting by Auguste Renoir, who visited Cézanne at Bellevue in 1889. Although both artists chose the same view, their paintings are strikingly different; the hazy atmosphere of Renoir's painting is very far from Cézanne's monumental intellectuality. To Cézanne, nature's underlying structure is composed of solid geometric shapes of color.
Cézanne powerfully influenced 20th-century art. His abstraction of nature into solid shapes was a catalyst for Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, whose seminal invention, cubism, is a transformation of Cézanne's geometric shapes into many-sided or many-faceted solids. Cézanne's stylistic and intellectual innovations are a bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries.
Vivian Kung and Patricia Richmond
Teacher Resource Center
Department of Education and Public Programs
© 1997 The Cleveland Museum of Art |