Skull pyramid
The skull pyramid is the work of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). The still life (oil on canvas, 37 × 45, 5 cm) was created around 1901 and is privately owned.
To the picture
The small picture shows four skulls, stacked in a cone shape on a white cloth. Three are shown in ocher and green tones, partly lightened and broken with white. The background, in which the fourth skull on the right of the picture disappears, shows colors clouded by black, which on the left contains traces of red. The opaque to semi-dry application of paint, sometimes done with a broad brush, underlines the composition, laid out in light and dark areas.
The composition emphasizes the triangle formed from the skulls, which is linearly referenced in the white cloth and the dark-colored background (it is a carpet). The light neglects plasticity and rather emphasizes the shapes of the objects that form the subject on the surface: the circle and the triangle. The white base quotes the square.
Work context
Cézanne produced a whole series of mostly small-format still lifes, both in oils and in numerous watercolors . He has varied the old vanitas motif of the skull several times, including in a further pyramid on a carpet (the same one that is vaguely indicated here in the background). The skull also appears in several versions in the still lifes with apples, which he often prefers and designed in many variations.
Since the 1880s, Cézanne lived and worked in Aix-en-Provence in southern France, while his family was still in Paris . The famous views of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire and the greatest number of paintings and watercolors with still lifes were created in the late phase in southern France . Cézanne realized his ideas of painting in both groups of works: “ Treat nature according to cylinder, sphere and cone and bring the whole thing into the right perspective so that each side of the object, a surface, leads to the central point. “Two things, said Cézanne, exist for the painter: the eye and the brain.
reception
At the end of the 19th century, Cézanne's approach of understanding painting in terms of the forms inherent in nature and expressing it in conventional subjects such as portraits, landscapes and still life stood in opposition to both traditional academic painting and the ideas of the Impressionists who created the Had discovered color and the light to express the fleeting moment. Émile Zola , Cézanne's childhood friend, had in 1889 in L'Œuvre (Eng .: the work ), a novel from the Les Rougon-Macquart cycle , failed a painter who, because of his ingenious ideas, ended up bringing mischief to the canvas; this figure was inspired by the decades-long friendship with Cézanne and had ended it. The work of Paul Cézanne had a major influence on Pablo Picasso and his development of Cubist painting, as well as Henri Matisse .
literature
- Paul Cézanne: letters . Zurich 1962
- Cezanne . Connaissance des Arts, Paris 1995
- H. Eckstein (ed.): Artists on art . Darmstadt 1954
- Jane Watkins (Ed.): Cézanne . Catalog of the exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, the Tate Gallery, London and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1996; London: Tate Publishing, 1996.