Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-04, oil on canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris.

[v.dargain]

Something still lives . Thanks for posting .

[ValeriaBeauchamp-dk]

This was such a great video. Thank you for providing so much insightful information and in such a digestible way. I have a newfound love for this work because of you!

[maramel-jam]

thank you so much for this precise description of this painting....very useful as i am writing my masters thesis about cezanne and virginia woolf

[clumsydad]

I'm not sure what to think about this painting, but I do understand the historical context, and how Impressionism is here falling apart into Deconstruction, and that is well explained and illustrated. Thank you. ... And I think the style remains important as with the rise of photography and now digital media it is affirming to see and nearly feel paint at times, to remind us of the physicality of the medium, and a world where many trad crafts are in peril.

[PHLMusic]

Wonderful video! I was referred to it by Microsoft Rewards, and when I surfed over to YouTube to find it, I was excited to see that the painting is -- or was? -- just 20 miles from me! Same museum where I went to look at art as a college kid many years ago for my history of art classes at Penn. The painting you discuss is glorious, and I will make a trip over to the museum soon.

[Gaeakjk]

Thank you for your explanation!! Very useful for understanding of Paul Cezanne.

[Sasha]

Cézanne's apple and mountain fame made me wonder what I'd want to be known for as an artist..
And yes, this looks unfinished, but I like it more for that reason. You can tell this was quick and energetic - the type of painting I wish I had the courage to do. What I imagine myself doing when I finally get my little paint kit, lol.
I look forward to hearing more about cubism and other art styles. :)

[Subhadebu]

This painting reminds me of another Cezanne painting, the bathhouse I think. These paintings look wet, this world is full of watercolor emotions

[apesdays]

"This is what one must achieve. If I reach too high or too low, everything is a mess. There must not be a single loose strand, a single gap through which the tension, the light, the truth can escape. I have all the parts of my canvas under control simultaneously. If things tend to diverge, I use my instincts and beliefs to bring them back together again..
Everything that we see disperses, fades away. Nature is always the same, even though its visible manifestations eventually cease to exist. Our art must shock nature into permanence, together with all the components and manifestations of change. Art must make nature eternal in our imagination. What lies behind nature? Nothing perhaps. Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand. So I close this errant hand. I take the tones of colour I see to my right and my left, here, there, everywhere, and I fix these gradiations, I bring them together... They form lines, and become objects, rocks, trees, without my thinking about it. They aquire volume, they have an effect. When these masses and weights on my canvas correspond to the planes, and the spots which I see in my mind and which we see in our eyes, my canvas closes its fingers. It does not waver. It does not reach too high of too low. It is true, it is dense, it is full... But if I have the slightest distraction or feel the slightest weakness, particularly if I start readingntoo much into things, if I am swept along by a theory today which contradicts yesterday's, if I think when I'm painting, if I interfere, then bang, everything slips away."

Paul Cezanne (quoted from Cezanne - Taschen)

[jonaslundholm]

In previous videos you have been talking a lot about liners perspective, especially Brunelleschi. I was thought that Cézanne's greatest contribution to modernism was that he broke with the central perspective in his paintings. I don't know if this is true but perhaps you could talk a little about that in a video. :)

[EWKification]

Instead of thinking of artists as participating in a general evolution of how we think about the painted surface, it often makes more sense to think of them just developing and honing their own idiosyncratic vision, which is why we see artists as diverse as Monet and Picasso working in styles in their later years that the art critics and historians would see as several isms behind. Sure, there's some playing with the ideas everyone else is working on, but, it may be a bit misleading to think of Cezanne as flattening the picture plane or eradicating illusion (naturalist illusion, rather, and in favor of his own variety of illusion). It's a bit like looking at Van Gogh's contribution to art being his use of curlicues.

The bigger question is WHY was Cezanne flattening shapes (while at the same time emphasizing their angularity, and thus creating a different sort of space and depth). The answer can't be that he wanted to influence Braque and Picasso. Was his primary interest formal innovations in representation or how we think about it? I suspect some other motivation that's a bit less cerebral and a bit more human. Certainly in Gauguin's case –and he also flattened perspective – his practice was tied in with his living in Tahiti, and all that suggests. It would be odd to consider Van Gogh or Gauguin in light of their formal innovations, I'd think, as the personal is so powerful in their work.

I guess that stylistic innovation for its own sake in fine art came a bit later, along with the rhetoric to support it. I don't know, because I don't really get Cezanne in the way I do the other "Post Impressionists" who he is generally lumped into.

[BrianHutzellMusic]

Compare Marsden Hartley’s painting of the same scene: “Mont Saint-Victoire” (1927)

[alisapage]

The default English captions have so many mistakes that I cringed while watching, left a comment on the Khan website, and then proceeded to turn captions off.

[richardchabek]

He didn’t finish it
You guys come on
He started another painting and put that on the floor

[richarddaumas]

Il serait plus juste de parler du mont venturi sur lequel est érigée la sainte victoire. Comme il est plus logique de parler de Paris où est érigée la tour Eiffel et non pas la tour Eiffel comme capitale de la France. La montagne Sainte Victoire n'existe pas, c'est la massif du mont Venturi qui existe. Alors SVP un peu de respect pour notre massif et le monde provençal.