"’It’s like a playing card,’ wrote Cézanne of the Mediterranean fishing village L’Estaque, where he stayed in 1876: ‘red roofs against the blue sea.’ Those words illuminate this painting. A playing card is a flat surface with no pretensions to be anything else: hearts or clubs, the images are simply shapes on a plane. The way he paints the houses and sea here creates a similar effect. The sea doesn’t recede in waves like an ocean painted by Turner but stands up in a solid wall of blue. This unyielding hard water is juxtaposed with the yellow walls, red roofs and oval leaves of the ‘foreground’ in a way that makes them all seem equal, just like symbols on a playing card. Cézanne exhibited this painting with the impressionist group yet he is pushing further than they did, into a sun-blasted future where space no longer exists.”
2011 August: Paul Cézanne, 2014 November: Cézanne: Landscape into Art, 2015 March: Madame Cézanne, 2017 June: Portraits by Cézanne, 2017 November: Inside Paul Cézanne’s Studio, 2018 April: The Lurchingly Uneven Portraits of Paul Cézanne, 2021 July: Cézanne Drawing
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