Cézanne

But even in his most Impressionistic works he could never accept entirely the system of painting in tiny, divided brushstrokes which enabled Monet and Pissarro to achieve a sense of the continual changes of air and light.

In addition, he was not satisfied with such unconditional dependence on the chromatic range provided by nature. He wanted to find a synthetic solution to all the harmonies offered by nature, and he strove for constructively well-thought-out space in a painting.

Only in 1872 did he set out to work regularly in the open air.

But Cézanne fully realized the need of mastering the light-and-air medium and to this end was prepared to forego some of his discoveries. That was one of the reasons why he became close to the Impressionists in the 1870s.

For an artist with Cézanne’s keen sense of the dramatic complexity of the world, a simple representation of the visible was insufficient. He would constantly modify and deform figures, emphasizing in them what he thought to be most important and creating compositions with unstable equilibrium.

He was immersed in an imaginary fantasy world, consumed by the desire to express an irresistible flood of human passion.

Often Cézanne would take a knife and scrape off all he had managed to paint during a day of hard work, or in a fit of exasperation throw it out of the window.

They are the tragedy of his whole life — a tragedy of constant doubting, dissatisfaction, and lack of confidence in his own ability.

In each succeeding work he would try to overcome the imperfection of the previous one, to make it more finished than before: “I am long on hair and beard but short on talent.”

Cézanne himself, with his constant laments about the impossibility of conveying his own sensations, prompted critics to speak of the fragmentary character of his work. He saw each of his paintings as nothing but an incomplete part of the whole.