Order Description
Choose some early cubist landscapes (early Braque/Picasso)as case study, and then use Cézanne’s work to back up. Argue that landscape is a crucial genre at the beginning of their embrace of Cubism.
Lanscape: use of passage, Cézannesque color palette, short/constructive brushes, redo nature in basic forms, spacial ambiguity (requires the audience to cognitively put them together), flatness, tonality. (However I think the landscape of Cézanne appears to be more spontaneous, in a sense he painted all over the canvas simultaneously, whereas the analytical cubist landscape seems more thought-through and cognitively constructed.)
Since this is almost common sense–the fragmentation, the flatness, the reduction of color palette, etc. I’m thinking about the idea of “primitivist”, primitivist in a sense of the way that Cézanne paints, or in other words, the “naked eye experience” of some sort. Cézanne tends to eliminate the mediation, tries to present rather than represent.
Please refers to :
William Rubin’s essay: Cézannisme and the beginnings of Cubism,
Patricia Leighten’s book: Cubism and Culture, p.51-61
