Cézanne works on paper

henri matisse once called fellow artist paul cezanne the father to us all after you watch this story from our rita braver you'll understand why he would return to the same subjects again and again forests and trees fruit and faces bathers in and out of water for the renowned french artist paul cezanne it was all about the effort i can't seem to express the intensity which beats in upon my senses he said [Music] if you look closely at these works you see the way he moves a pencil across the paper and he's always searching for something he's thinking about it as a bigger project because jody heltman is a senior curator at new york's museum of modern art now host to a landmark exhibit of cezanne's drawings and watercolors how many works are there in the exhibit there's over 250 and they come from all over the world even just these two this is from germany she says that though cezanne is best known for his paintings a few of which are scattered through the exhibit it's not the works on canvas but those on paper including pages from one of his sketchbooks that really show how cezanne thought drawings often are closer to the mind and the hand of the artist and they were especially intimate for cezanne who's working these sketchbooks all the time and carrying them with him cezanne was born in 1839 to a well-to-do family in excellent provence in the south of france his father wanted him to be a lawyer he finally just spoke with his father and said i'm going to be an artist and he went to paris it was the height of impressionism what was it like for him well i think he was always struggling there's always this sense of kind of the work of art that it didn't come easy to him that he had to try harder than everyone else cezanne showed his work with the impressionists though he didn't really consider himself one and didn't get along with most of them they found him a little rude and uncommon he played up that countryness that otherness that that from the south he would spend most of his life back in the south of france his parents didn't accept hortense v k the artist's model he married until the couple had a son it was a famously difficult marriage though he often sketched and even painted her there's a sadness there's a kind of tenderness and i think even in a household that might not have been a perfect marriage i think there's something about that intimacy that is very moving in this room cezanne spent much of his time rambling through the forests and countryside near his home what about a work like this which i think is a study of monster victoire which he did over and over and over again he's trying to understand the shape of the mountain but he isn't ever quite getting it and here in the museum's lab conservator laura neufeld is putting some of the works under a giant microscope to see how cezanne made them interweaving pencil and watercolor in a revolutionary way traditional watercolor artists were encouraged to draw very lightly so that when your paint goes on your sketch disappears and it looks like you didn't have to do that step but he didn't do that that is absolutely not his style at all the pencil was a different tool it was a way to continue expressing form throughout the process of using color in fact these close-ups of geometric forms help explain why cezanne is considered a pioneer paving the way for cubism and abstraction sometimes people describe him as kind of the beginning of modernism he's working at the end of the 19th into the 20th century so he's kind of leads us into what happens in 2011 a version of cezanne's card players went for 250 million dollars but he never sold much during his lifetime and though he became a major influence on younger artists he was increasingly withdrawn paul cezanne died in 1906 at age 67 after being caught in a storm while working in his beloved countryside it's a self-portrait more than a century later jody houtman hopes this exhibit will help viewers appreciate the significance of paul cezanne's work this other way of making art that is about thinking and studying and grasping and searching and that's what i think makes these works truly remarkable

Channel: CBS Sunday Morning

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Keywords: CBS Sunday Morning, CBS News, news, french, painter, paul cezanne, 1839, 1906, pioneer, cubist, abstract, art, revolutionary, style, drawing, rita braver, new york, museum, of modern art, watercolor, sketch, paper, landmark, exhibition, cezanne drawin

Id: 4yWaGjyCl5E

Length: 5min 9sec (309 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021