Post-Impressionism: Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) began his career as an impressionist but distanced himself from the rhetoric of the movement and worked independently. He is seen as the link between impressionism and cubism (the dawn of modern art) just as Manet was the transitional figure between realism and impressionism.

Mount Sainte-Victoire, 1885-1905.
He painted 60 versions of this mountain. He was searching for the perfect way to depict it. His mindset was clearly obsessive and geared towards abstraction. He believed that the bare essentials of human life and base formations of nature were a fixed set of geometrical forms as shown. He did not believe that art should represent reality but that it should speak its very own language: colour and shapes on canvas. The forms got increasingly more basic the more he experimented:

Still Life with a Plaster Cupid, 1895.

When I said he influenced the cubists and acts as the inbetween link this is the piece of art I was refering to. He had begun to experiment with different points of views at once in order to represent how we actually see space. This gives the impression that you may have walked around the table in this room and this is the overall memory you may have of it. The contortion of space was to be mastered by the cubists.