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Vermilion : matière and what matters in Cézanne’s paintings
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Smith, Paul (2020) Vermilion : matière and what matters in Cézanne’s paintings. Word & Image, 36 (1). pp. 64-79. doi:10.1080/02666286.2019.1652010 ISSN 0266-6286.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2019.1652010
Abstract
This article argues that, in the early 1870s, Paul Cézanne began to make colours (including vermilion) his medium, whereas previously he had tended to treat them as inert materials, which he needed to force for effect. One factor in Cézanne’s change of heart was his receptiveness to the theme developed in the novels Manette Salomon (1867), by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and La Proie et l’ombre (1876), by Marius Roux, that failing to relate responsively to his medium can have catastrophic consequences for the painter. Another was Cézanne’s espousal of Camille Pissarro’s practice in the early 1870s of using ton to create ‘harmony’ for the express purpose of ‘modelling’. The relationship between Cézanne’s ideas about ton and three theoretical sources are then examined. Two are much earlier: Roger de Piles’s writings about colour harmony and its spatial effects; and the treatise Michel-François Dandré-Bardon wrote in the eighteenth century that applied de Piles’s ideas to ton. The other is the series of manuals the animal painter, Julien de la Rochenoire, published in the 1850s, which maintain that ‘relations’ between tons were crucial to ‘modelling’. How Cézanne used tons is then analysed in the painting Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (1877) (now in Boston). It is shown that colour relationships are more numerous and more finely integrated in this work than in its sister painting (in Stockholm), with the result that its harmony is especially tightly knit. This, it is maintained, allows it to model-shape at the same time as bestowing cohesion to the depicted scene. The article ends by considering how, unlike the de Goncourts’ Naz Coriolis or Claude Monet, who pushed painting to its limits in an attempt to capture the effects of shine and sparkle, Cézanne opted to play them down in order to give solidity to the world depicted in his paintings.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History of Art | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Word & Image | ||||||||
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis (Routledge) | ||||||||
ISSN: | 0266-6286 | ||||||||
Official Date: | 10 April 2020 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 36 | ||||||||
Number: | 1 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 64-79 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1080/02666286.2019.1652010 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | “This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Word & Image on 10/04/2020, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02666286.2019.1652010 | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 28 March 2019 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 25 November 2019 | ||||||||
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