Nathalia Brodskaya
Список книг автора Nathalia BrodskayaCézanne
Since his death 200 years ago, Cézanne has become the most famous painter of the nineteenth century. He was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839 and the happiest period of his life was his early youth in Provence, in company with Emile Zolá, another Italian. Following Zolá’s example, Cézanne went to Paris in his twenty-first year. During the Franco-Prussian war he deserted the military, dividing his time between open-air painting and the studio. He said to Vollard, an art dealer, “I’m only a painter. Parisian wit gives me a pain. Painting nudes on the banks of the Arc [a river near Aix] is all I could ask for.” Encouraged by Renoir, one of the first to appreciate him, he exhibited with the impressionists in 1874 and in 1877. He was received with derision, which deeply hurt him. Cézanne’s ambition, in his own words, was “to make out of Impressionism something as solid and durable as the paintings of the museums.” His aim was to achieve the monumental in a modern language of glowing, vibrating tones. Cézanne wanted to retain the natural colour of an object and to harmonise it with the various influences of light and shade trying to destroy it; to work out a scale of tones expressing the mass and character of the form. Cézanne loved to paint fruit because it afforded him obedient models and he was a slow worker. He did not intend to simply copy an apple. He kept the dominant colour and the character of the fruit, but heightened the emotional appeal of the form by a scheme of rich and concordant tones. In his paintings of still-life he is a master. His fruit and vegetable compositions are truly dramatic; they have the weight, the nobility, the style of immortal forms. No other painter ever brought to a red apple a conviction so heated, sympathy so genuinely spiritual, or an observation so protracted. No other painter of equal ability ever reserved for still-life his strongest impulses. Cézanne restored to painting the pre-eminence of knowledge, the most essential quality to all creative effort. The death of his father in 1886 made him a rich man, but he made no change in his abstemious mode of living. Soon afterwards, Cézanne retired permanently to his estate in Provence. He was probably the loneliest of painters of his day. At times a curious melancholy attacked him, a black hopelessness. He grew more savage and exacting, destroying canvases, throwing them out of his studio into the trees, abandoning them in the fields, and giving them to his son to cut into puzzles, or to the people of Aix. At the beginning of the century, when Vollard arrived in Provence with intentions of buying on speculation all the Cézannes he could get hold of, the peasantry, hearing that a fool from Paris was actually handing out money for old linen, produced from barns a considerable number of still-lifes and landscapes. The old master of Aix was overcome with joy, but recognition came too late. In 1906 he died from a fever contracted while painting in a downpour of rain.
Cassatt
Mary was born in Pittsburgh. Her father was a banker of liberal educational ideas and the entire family appears to have been sympathetic to French culture. Mary was no more than five or six years old when she first saw Paris, and she was still in her teens when she decided to become a painter. She went to Italy, on to Antwerp, then to Rome, andfinally returned to Paris where in 1874, she permanently settled. In 1872, Cassatt sent her first work to the Salon, others followed in the succeeding years until 1875, when a portrait of her sister was rejected. She divined that the jury had not been satisfied with the background, so she re-painted it several times until, in the next Salon, the same portrait was accepted. At this moment Degas asked her to exhibit with him and his friends, the Impressionist Group, then rising into view, and she accepted with joy. She admired Manet, Courbet and Degas, and hated conventional art. Cassatt’s biographer stressed the intellectuality and sentiment apparent in her work, as well as the emotion and distinction with which she has painted her favourite models: babies and their mothers. He then speaks of her predominant interest in draughtsmanship and her gift for linear pattern, a gift greatly strengthened by her study of Japanese art and her emulation of its style in the colour prints she made. While her style may partake of the style of others, her draughtsmanship, her composition, her light, and her colour are, indeed, her own. There are qualities of tenderness in her work which could have been put there, perhaps, only by a woman. The qualities which make her work of lasting value are those put there by an outstanding painter.
Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard was the leader of a group of Post-Impressionist painters who called themselves the Nabis, from the Hebrew word meaning “prophet”. Bonnard, Vuillard, Roussel and Denis, the most distinguished of the Nabis, revolutionised decorative painting during one of the richest periods in the history of French painting. Bonnard’s works are striking for their strong colours and candidness.