It seems like a lot of nonsense to me. These shapes appear to have been drawn completely arbitrarily with no real basis to them at all. They could be drawn anywhere on the painting. I find the whole thing to be nonsense, and quite pointless. His cone placements seem totally arbitrary and unrelated to the colors, forms, or images. The point of scaffolding is to support, not rattle around independently of the image. I understand the concept of distilling shapes and forms into geometrics and then building a pictorial reality upon that… I use it myself in figure drawing and sculpting.
I have also seen how an underlying line or shape can exist across various objects or color changes across a canvas. I recall a seascape painter whose name escapes me who carried the lines of a sail or a shadow on to the edges of the canvas with a change of color. His brushwork had a Monet quality of dabs of color working together.
Granted, this scaffolding was clearly obvious in the final image, but he could well have implied other shapes within his color. An interesting premise but not very edifying, if not downright obfuscating.
Questioning whether he was consciously applying knowledge is ridiculous; of course he was, if only by way of practice and experience. What disturbs me most is Impressionism, after some years, still being at the forefront of what is stale representative art.
Despite having held the stage for this long, too many contemporary writers, however indirectly, still promote Impressionism by reference. I am guilty of it myself. Such doings explain its longevity. In the classic The New Cezanne by Charles Biederman, he gives the understanding that Cezanne, in his later works, had come to identify with the painting itself as a flat plane and attempted to represent the complexity of the subjects he painted as the planes that they presented which were facing the viewer — as if rounded or receding shapes were flat forms when brought to the surface of the painting.
He was also intrigued by the use of warm and cool tones to create a sense of balance and depth. No doubt Cezanne used all sorts of compositional techniques, including the geometrics. One he really was expert with was creating harmony and balance with color.
I, too, am one of those painters forever fascinated by the works of Cezanne. We cannot claim that the view of Delacroix that inspired Cezanne represented a true evaluation of him. The guiding star that Cezanne followed shone far more steadily than the flawed jewel of Romanticism ever did. And Delacroix himself, how shallow his interpretation of Rubens! And so on… Yet this succession of creative misunderstandings was as nothing by comparison with the way that the twentieth century used Cezanne.
The interpretations to which his example was subjected in the years after converted art into something new, something he would certainly have accepted even less than he accepted Gauguin, an order of image and a function of style neither of which had ever existed before. May their misunderstandings also add new energy to our contemporary body of work we call ART. He did have a color approach to his work and did talk about reducing things to their basic shapes: spheres, cones, cylinders and cubes… which he did do so well.
Master painters throughout history have been great spatial designers and Cezanne carried on that tradition. I looked at Mr. Any artist examining and studying composition throughout the history of art would find Mr.
Boyce should allow himself to be swept through the non-hidden forms that perform symphonic movement of masses, planes, and color, so solidly perceived and executed. I understand from reading volumes on the Impressionists of the time, he was the granddaddy of painters to those who painted during his period. Your comments about hidden circles, cones, rectangles is amusing at best.
Every artist from childhood started drawing circles, cones and rectangles. My first drawing experience 55 years ago was from a morning television show by the artist John Negy, who started everyone with these shapes. He spent many sessions telling us about core shadows, reflected light and all this IS the basis of all objects every artist paints since the caveman. Artists from Michelangelo to Velazquez to Andy Warhol have painted images all based on circles, cones and rectangles.
Without being mundane, a head is based on a circle, an arm is based on a rectangle. In a previous email response I commented on the basis of sound drawing technique.
Fundamentally, all good drawing is based on these shapes in one form or another. Good design is based on these shapes.
We are all hiding these shapes within our paintings. Many of his still lifes are wonderful to look at but I feel he may have been experimenting and never quite got it right. These paintings are what we see today and have come to think are an approach or method and see something that is simply not there. But life and art is about questioning. All we do today is based on the past and artists that have come before.
New art movements have been created because of artists questioning their peers. The Ashcan artists rebelled against the past.
The Impressionists rebelled, The Renaissance happened because artists rebelled. Russian art today is a rebellious response to the oppression of Communism. I believe artists in particular have been brainwashed. Many have stopped thinking and have succumbed to being told what and who is a genius. I just want to add my two cents into the pot for the other side. If we are to look at Cezanne, we have to do so without rose colored glasses and examine truthfully not what history tells us but what our eyes and hearts and knowledge and experience tell us.
Every artist should be appreciated and understood for their contribution to art itself. Without art, life would be a dark shadow of a hollowed out tree. I too have been fascinated by his work, and there is geometry in it, but it seems more planar to me, at least in some of the images. How does Dewain decide where the cones are in the fruit still life? Or those cylindrical shapes in the landscape? Please elaborate! I enjoy the letters and answers, too.
Karen in Halifax. A whole new concept to struggle through. I wish that I were in front of the actual Cezanne works to think through this rather esoteric stuff. Methinks I have a whole new area of study to explore in the next few months while I recover from an accident that is keeping me from painting. Armed with the ideas and a printout of his pages, I can visit galleries and museums to view great works from another critical point of view thereby continuing on my painting journey and, also, provide my students with something else to confuse them!!!
At the same time, when I was in school early s my profs emphasized the geometric shapes within a painting that led the eye around the surface, or made the push-pull dramatic. I do not see the evidence that outlines these cones. Like Alcina, I cannot see the cones or the ovals as they are laid out by Boyce and I really tried.
As an artist, I know I have my own vision of composition but that it is even difficult to put into words for myself. We all have ways of structuring our work, but I find the cones and ovals that Boyce has laid over his work to be a silly bunch of academic deconstructionalist hooey. And, really, who cares? Persistence after failure can be esoteric, academic, technical…. Some people toss the word failure out of the English language and are forever mediocre. Then it might be more possible to see why those cones went where they did.
I will forever be grateful to that college painting professor who,each week, made the class diagram and trace the shapes and rhythms of paintings of major artists of the past. In Paris he saw the works of Picasso and other European modernists.
His fascination with that Post Impressionist master led him on a three-year odyssey through Cezanne country where Loran painted and photographed the countryside around Aix en Provence. So closely did he identify with Cezanne, that Loran arranged to live in his old house for three years. I see different shapes in the Cezannes than Boyce does. They appear to me, for the most part, to be absolutely random, and I would place them in totally different places. I think this is far-fetched and over-analysed.
But, of course, everything is subject to personal interpretation and this provides us with thoughts that provoke creative stimulus, and thankfully we all see things differently. Whether he used cylinders or Fruit Loops, Cezanne was an intuitive genius whose emotions cry out to me every day. I have no desire to paint like him, only to feel as he did. Sorry but I have to agree with Karen R. I have seen much better examples of his cubes and geometrical forms where nothing has to be drawn, you can simply notice it without any effort.
Cezanne was not the first to use geometric motifs to add structural strength to his compositions. The shapes that can be used for this purpose are not limited to those suggested by Dewain.
The analysis needs to be expanded to include the whole of the two dimensional surface. This is true of any painting that is a work of art. Unification is the main quality that separates the accomplished artist from the beginner. Bob Bissett. From my perspective, Boyce is seeing cones and cylinders where much more subtle rhythmic elements exist.
I am glad I read the comments. I am getting the Friend book. A language of color, lines and tones was his method to express the three-dimensional volume on a two-dimensional surface. Wendy Newbold Patterson Gray, Maine. What I felt when I was doing my Cezanne copy was that there was something very wierd with his perspective.
To cone or not to cone…is that the question??? Why do we feel compelled to dissect the works of Cezanne and every other breathing or deceased artist to try to discover the method to their techniques? If we are artists, does that also make us art critics? And, if so, does that mean we can critique the works of others just because we can critique ourselves?
Art is life for some. Art brings light into a sometimes drab reality! Cezanne was about color interplay and a whole lot more! If he thought about conical configurations, fine. Let us simply enjoy his creativity and celebrate it!
Is it really necessary to put it under a microscope like a bug in a lab experiment????? I think NOT! This whole discussion rather reminds me of a junior high school art class back in the day……….. I LOVE the newsletter, the books, etc. I love the works of Cezanne and most of the Impressionists. I just think this particular discussion is a bit like straining at gnats…….
Genius is incomprehensible. Dissect a rose and put it back together! Of course, there is geometry in the smallest atom, in every single snowflake. Nanotechnology has revealed a world that was there long before we were and will no doubt survive us all. The eye of the beholder shall judge the results. A rose by any other name …. He should be alive today, there is a veritable glut of the stuff. I find the formatting of this session of clickbacks and comments most confusing.
Please go back to the way they have been in the past. This does my heart good. I got a good laugh out of it. I DO believe in a good foundation under the work, and I do love hidden shapes that support the work. But all I could do was chuckle at the random placement of cones in the examples. In his Grammaire des arts du dessin , a highly regarded summary of academic thought, Charles Blanc discusses the cube and the sphere as models for young students to copy, but in philosophical terms that show how much the Platonic notion of geometric forms as the origin and essence of natural ones persisted in the later 19th century.
I mean to say that in an orange, an apple, a ball, a head, there is a culminating point; and this point is always—in spite of the tremendous effect, light and shade, color sensations—the closest to our eye.
The variation in the angles at which a flat surface presents itself to the eye is thus different only in degree from the angles at which the line of vision strikes a rounded surface. In the one in the Phillips Collection, for example, the color shifts perceptibly from orange to violet to blue to green not only on the rounded ginger jar, the floral drapery, and the white cloth, but also on the flat wall in the center that is so curiously framed and brought into prominence by the surrounding forms.
How, in fact, can its relevance to his practice be understood? And he tends to even when the motif contains strongly convergent elements, such as an alley of trees or a receding road. The difference is one in scale, between discreet foreground elements and unbounded distant ones. But in effect it becomes the more absolute difference between solids and spaces. On the contrary, he goes on in the same passage to advocate a means of suggesting depth that is perfectly consistent with his practice, though it has rarely been recognized as such.
Instead they should be understood as verticals both in depth and on the picture surface. It is also evident in certain late landscapes, painted after , in the gradual diminution in scale and spacing of the color patches that define most of the forms in the absence of a firm linear structure. This is a means that Mondrian, too, later employed, though in a more schematic form, in his Pier and Ocean pictures.
Theodore Reff is professor of art history at Columbia University. William Rubin, which will be published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this month in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. The show will be on view from October 7 to January 3,
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