Paul and Georges in Art: Ways of Seeing
Through the Trees in l'Estaque by Paul Cezanne
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Big Trees at l'Estaque by Georges Braque
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You begin to see what Georges’ friend and gallery partner, Pablo, meant when he said “My one and only master...Cezanne was like the master of us all.”
L’Estaque is where Cezanne first confronted modernity and tradition. He painted 26 works there, between the mid 1860s and the early 1890s. When Monet and Renoir visited Cezanne there in 1882-3, they focused on the rocky crags of the village’s surrounding countryside. Their romantic “wilderness” sent Renoir into raptures.
Renoir's Rocky Crags at l'Estaque
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In the last 10 years or so, we have seen several of these “duets” of museum exhibits. They attempt to prove out the relation of Cezanne’s works to the modern art works of later artists --- such as that of Braque’s reworking of Cezanne’s l’Estaque, in what is termed “analytical cubism.” (1909-10). Had not the master, himself, famously said in 1904 that artists should “treat nature in terms of the cylinder, sphere and cone, all set in perspective”?
Before Braque began painting the landscape of L'Estaque, in southern France, the town had been a favorite subject for Cézanne, whose 1907 memorial exhibition in Paris had a great impact on the younger artist. This painting makes visible Cézanne's influence on Braque's developing Cubist style. Braque employs Cézanne's progressive gradations of color and flattened, inaccessible spaces.
Braque also did something else: he cut out the sky. Depth of space around objects became largely lost or, at best, ambiguous. He said,”It is not enough to make people see what one has painted; one must also make them touch it.”
Did Braque fragment forms and objects and then “reconstruct” them or was he more likely inspired to go with a spirit of experimentation...a “try on,” in order to see how things might work out as he went along?
As Cezanne had painted side by side with Renoir in L’Estaque, Raoul Dufy worked beside Braques during part of the summer of 1908, producing his own “Green Trees at L’Estaque."
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Dufy, however, was more influenced by Matisse than by Cezanne...he didn’t have the same impulses toward realism. His work in this era has been compared to “tapestry,” with stylized natural forms, arranged with decorative effect in a shallow setting. He would soon abandon his affection for Cubism.
So then we have to say that in those years Paul Cezanne “invented” Cubism with his late works at L’Estaque, don’t we?
Or was it Cezanne’s reconciliation of depth and roundness with his desire to preserve the flatness of the picture’s surface as a reality?
Whatever the artist’s sensibility at the time, he was transforming the visible order of nature through his inventions in art.
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Sid
My own art historian's take on these artists is that they are such superior draughtsmen that they were able to break the forms and make them new. We see it over and over in early 20th century art. Likewise the tropes--the classicizing tropes, the idealized landscape tropes, got turned inside out. This can only be accomplished successfully by someone who has internalized them to an exponential degree.
Let's keep the discussion going, CTyankee 
I'm going to go a little Hegelian and say "zeitgeist" here, for want of a better term. 1900? It was lightning in a bottle, and it was fairly steady until broken up by two wars that fractured everything.
Regarding Matisse, I don't see much that's non-traditional in his treatment of women (this was part of my Master's Thesis). Degas, on the other hand, perhaps by virtue of his unique privilege, had a remarkably clear eye for seeing what was right in front of him, and setting it to canvas/paper without judgment. So far as the rendering of women goes, Degas was far more radical than even Picasso (whom I view as 98% misogynist).
More art! More art!
