Cézanne: Landscape into Art Hardcover – October 31, 2014

This is the revised edition of Pavel Machotka's book originally published by Yale University Press in 1996. The special distinction of the book was the juxtaposition of photographs of the sites of Cézanne's paintings with reproductions of the paintings themselves. Older, black-and-white photos by John Rewald and others were extensively supplemented by recent color photos by the author himself, always with the effort to reproduce the same angle and time of day of the painting, in order to provide a real sense of "landscape into art." In the preface to the new edition, the author refers to numerous sites that have been identified since 1996, in Aix-en-Provence and l'Estaque, in Auvers and Pontoise, in Melun and along the banks of the Marne and in other places that have been important in identifying Cézanne's movements, dating specific canvases, and illuminating certain aspects of his painting that had previously escaped notice. He mentions that he has eliminated some of the less interesting original material to make room for the best of the new and that his book is now more comprehensive, including additional documentary material ranging from postcards from the painter's time to the author's own more recent color photographs. I have never seen the original edition, and so I can't describe more closely how this new edition differs from the old or recommend that people who have the first edition acquire the new one as well. I can say, though, that it's an excellent book and that if you have the original, it would be well worth investigating the new version, and if you don't, you should definitely consider buying this one. The reviews of the first edition here were uniformly positive (thirty-four out of thirty-five stars), and I can only add my own praise to those comments. This book does for Cézanne's landscapes what the recent exhibition catalogue "The World is an Apple" did for his still lifes, i.e., it is a very close examination of the development of an important genre of the artist's work, but since it is a monograph, both its perspective and its organization are more unified. Given that about half of Cézanne's total oeuvre was landscape painting, one could argue that the evolution of his landscape technique is defining for the overall development of his art, and in fact many scholars have pointed to the basic similarities in structure between his landscapes and his still lifes. That similarity was even the object of another Cézanne exhibition that recently ran concurrently with the "Apple" one, the great "Site/Non-Site" display in Madrid, which concluded with an affirmation of Svetlana Alpers's perception that "if Cézanne's landscapes are like still lifes, so his still lifes are landscapes." (Both of those exhibition catalogues are reviewed on this website.) In any case, what Dr. Machotka has done in his book is nothing less than a careful and wonderfully lucid analysis of the development of the artist's landscape style.In a few brief introductory chapters, the author deals with some preliminary issues. Chief among these is his critique of the purely formal approach to the artist's work as represented by the familiar studies of Roger Fry and Erle Loran; in contrast, he emphasizes the vital role of the motif itself through an analysis of "Le Pont de Maincy" (1880). He discusses the "ultimately creative opposition" (16) in Cézanne's work between paintings with a narrative intent and those based on observation; differentiates between normal, everyday looking and the kind of looking required by painting; and discusses the kinds of motifs that Cézanne favored and the technical devices he used to transform his visions into paintings. The ensuing chapters follow the four evolutionary stages the author discerns, i.e., 1865-74, 1875-84, 1885-94, and 1895-1906. I found both the overall trajectory and the reasons for the period distinctions completely convincing. In broad terms, what he is tracing is the evolution of Cézanne's organization of the paint from the "parallel touches" of the early work (his equivalent to Theodore Reff's well-known notion of the "constructive stroke") to the larger color patches of the later work--and all that that transition implies in terms of compositional balance, resolution of pictorial tensions, color harmony, etc. Just to give one concrete example of his analysis, he discusses two views of the Bay of Marseille. The first, "La Baie de l'Estaque," is from 1881-82, and its obvious organizational principle is the "parallel touch," which "must serve to integrate surfaces that have almost nothing in common with each other [. . .] the water is painted with horizontal touches, the distant shore with touches that follow the slope of the rocks," and when the greens representing pines and bushes "are used to balance the water surface [,] the touches are vertical" (85 f.), etc. The second painting, "Le Golfe de Marseille, vu de l'Estaque," is from 1885, so we are no longer in the second of the stages mentioned above, but have entered into the third and are witnessing a change in style, essentially saying goodbye to the parallel touch, which has more or less outlived its usefulness: in this later painting, "the emphasis on intense color relationships took over from the orchestrating power of the parallel touch and made it superfluous" (86), i.e., we are on the road toward the larger color patches of the later works. Such observations of the author's are easy to corroborate by reference to the copious reproductions provided as the discussion goes on, so one can see right away what he is getting at. Altogether. some seventy sites/paintings are discussed.The juxtapositions of photographs and reproductions are interesting and often compelling, but what I found to be even more instructive and illuminating are the writer's careful, articulate descriptions of the paintings, which obviously benefit from his own experiences as an accomplished painter who exhibits regularly in Italy and his native Czech Republic. One senses the presence of something like a "painterly eye" in much of his commentary. When, for example, he finds that a tense and uneasy inclination in a painting is relieved by some balancing elements (126), or when he credits Cézanne with finding "a resolution which recognizes and respects the tensions it must resolve" (163), one feels that his identification of the problem and its solution may well come from having faced a similar dilemma in his own painting practice. But this obvious sympathy with the problems posed by the surface of the canvas is not the same as a purely formal analysis, for the motif is always palpably there and never lost sight of; one of the author's basic tenets is that Cézanne always gives "equal due to his vision and his invention" (20), and his own analyses are from the same dual perspective, since he knows that the painter always has before him, in somewhat equal measure, both his motif and his canvas. But of course it's never exactly 50/50: inevitably, Cézanne will sometimes favor the one and sometimes the other; that is consistent in his art, and it is probably only in the very late paintings, where the arrangement of the color patches is tending increasingly toward the abstract, that the pictorial needs of the canvas become a bit more liberated from the demands of the motif. In discussing the late patches as a flexible device that can do different things, Dr. Machotka points to the New York (Museum of Modern Art) version of the 1903-04 "Château Noir" and comments: "the painting is strongly tactile, musical in its implication, deeply, almost relentlessly, integrated. I sense in it a wholeness that transcends the appeal of the site -- a balance created by the painter with carefully placed patches that refer to nothing at all but have a distinct pictorial purpose, such as the bit of yellow in the upper right corner which resonates with the patch of ground in the lower left corner and sets up a visual diagonal opposed to the massive one of the sliding hill" (178). I have given that rather long quotation as an example of the clear and articulate description that enables the reader to follow the comments on the paintings.I have gone on at some length in this review, because I am very enthusiastic about this book. I have been looking at Cézanne and reading about him for many years, but somehow I missed the publication of the first edition and am delighted to have a chance to acquire the book in its revised version. I recently wrote that "The World is an Apple" catalogue was close to the top of my stack of three dozen or so books on Cézanne, and now it is joined by this one. In addition to the fine text and excellent illustrations, the volume contains a list of paintings, a good selected bibliography, and a comprehensive index. This is simply one of the best books I have seen on Cézanne, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

This book comes highly recommended by the reviewers but I must admit to being a little disappointed.Firstly the illustrations referred to in the text throughout the book are several pages in front of the reader. This is a relatively large and heavy book such that the reader is constantly having to flick backwards and forwards between text and illustration.This is annoying unless you are reading at the table.For someone who does most of his reading in bed it is a problem.The book traces the development of Cezanne's techniques, esp. his brush strokes, but I confess that anything else deep and meaningful was lost on me.Sure his composition is attractive and his landscapes are nicely balanced both in colour and form but efforts by the authorexplain distortions of perspective, etc. are unfortunately lost on me.Cezanne's paint strokes have been copied far and wide since the 19th century so I guess it is hard for us to relive the impact of his work at this time.I have ordered another Cezanne title through Amazon so I have not yet given up my search for the genius of Cezanne.

Machotka's "Cezanne: Landscape into Art" is now a classic study of the rich ways in which nature impacted the mind and artistic transmission of the acknowledged "father of Modern Art." This study which provided documentary evidence in the form of color photographs taken in precisely the same location used by Cezanne in painting his iconic works reminds the reader that modern art did not divorce itself from nature as many thinkers have claimed. In fact the evidence that modern art remains indebted to its father and his love of nature becomes abundantly evident in Machotka's seminal work. Every Post-Post Modernist is well advised to rethink arts relationship to nature; it is as unavoidable as ones own body and its natural reality. Landscape into art is the evidence that art itself cannot long subsist without a strong tie to its natural origins. Any renewal of art begins at its origins in the natural realm and at the side of its father Cezanne. William J. Havlicek PhD.

Although this is a great book for any art lover it is a must for the plein air (outdoor) painter. It demonstrates how Cezanne transformed his "motif", the scene he has selected, into a painting by showing photos of the motif side by side with his paintings. Machotka, an artist himself, discusses the artistic problems presented by each scene and Cezanne's various solutions as they vary over his development as an artist. Machotka is knowledgeable, thoughtful and writes well. This book will certainly extend your appreciation of Cezanne and if you paint plein air, will likely make you a much more observant and better painter. As a painter this is one of the few books on composition and technique that I recommend to other painters.

This is an amazing book. His important landscapes are reproduced here, and the quality of the print is excellent.The author included besides the landscapes photographs of the actual scene that Cezanne painted. This is probably the best art book I've purchased in a long time.

Excellent presentation and exploration of the interpretation of Cezanne's landscapes, sites. The author did a fantastic job locating the spots from where Cezanne observed and conveyed his images. The author's own thoughts and insights were instructive as well.The book was used in good condition, only the cover was poor.

Just received this volume immediately can tell that this is a Lesser quality overall in the reproductions compared to the first edition. They appear washed out somewhat. Also the cover is cheaper, almost paperback. Overpriced for what you get.

同じタイトルの本がありますかこちらは　色がとても美しくたくさんの写真が掲載されて楽しめます。

Cezanne is my favourite painter. This book about his landscapes, is special. I have always admired his detail in shadows and his use of shapes. This book takes what i admire a step further. It also adds photographs of what he painted. It allows a reader or viewer to see how his mind "entered" a landscape. Transition from impressionist to expressionist in a painting with elements of both. A rich book.

A Superb Study of Cézanne's LandscapesBy Kenneth Hughes on November 4, 2014Verified PurchaseThis is the revised edition of the book originally published by Yale University Press in 1996. The special distinction of the book was the juxtaposition of photographs of the sites of Cézanne's paintings with reproductions of the paintings themselves. Older, black-and-white photos by John Rewald and others were extensively supplemented by recent color photos by the author himself, always with the effort to reproduce the same angle and time of day of the painting, in order to provide a real sense of "landscape into art."In the preface to the new edition, the author refers to numerous sites that have been identified since 1996, in Aix-en-Provence and l'Estaque, in Auvers and Pontoise, in Melun and along the banks of the Marne and in other places that have been important in identifying Cézanne's movements, dating specific canvases, and illuminating certain aspects of his painting that had previously escaped notice. He mentions that he has eliminated some of the less interesting original material to make room for the best of the new and that his book is now more comprehensive, including additional documentary material ranging from postcards from the painter's time to the author's own more recent color photographs.I have never seen the original edition, and so I can't describe more closely how this new edition differs from the old or recommend that people who have the first edition acquire the new one as well. I can say, though, that it's an excellent book and that if you have the original, it would be well worth investigating the new version, and if you don't, you should definitely consider buying this one.The reviews of the first edition here were uniformly positive (thirty-four out of thirty-five stars), and I can only add my own praise to those comments. This book does for Cézanne's landscapes what the recent exhibition catalogue "The World is an Apple" did for his still lifes, i.e., it is a very close examination of the development of an important genre of the artist's work, but since it is a monograph, both its perspective and its organization are more unified. Given that about half of Cézanne's total oeuvre was landscape painting, one could argue that the evolution of his landscape technique is defining for the overall development of his art, and in fact many scholars have pointed to the basic similarities in structure between his landscapes and his still lifes.That similarity was even the object of another Cézanne exhibition that recently ran concurrently with the "Apple" one, the great "Site/Non-Site" display in Madrid, which concluded with an affirmation of Svetlana Alpers's perception that "if Cézanne's landscapes are like still lifes, so his still lifes are landscapes." (Both of those exhibition catalogues are reviewed on this website.) In any case, what Dr. Machotka has done in his book is nothing less than a careful and wonderfully lucid analysis of the development of the artist's landscape style.In a few brief introductory chapters, the author deals with some preliminary issues. Chief among these is his critique of the purely formal approach to the artist's work as represented by the familiar studies of Roger Fry and Erle Loran; in contrast, he emphasizes the vital role of the motif itself through an analysis of "Le Pont de Maincy" (1880). He discusses the "ultimately creative opposition" (16) in Cézanne's work between paintings with a narrative intent and those based on observation; differentiates between normal, everyday looking and the kind of looking required by painting; and discusses the kinds of motifs that Cézanne favored and the technical devices he used to transform his visions into paintings.The ensuing chapters follow the four evolutionary stages the author discerns, i.e., 1865-74, 1875-84, 1885-94, and 1895-1906. I found both the overall trajectory and the reasons for the period distinctions completely convincing. In broad terms, what he is tracing is the evolution of Cézanne's organization of the paint from the "parallel touches" of the early work (his equivalent to Theodore Reff's well-known notion of the "constructive stroke") to the larger color patches of the later work--and all that that transition implies in terms of compositional balance, resolution of pictorial tensions, color harmony, etc.Just to give one concrete example of his analysis, he discusses two views of the Bay of Marseille. The first, "La Baie de l'Estaque," is from 1881-82, and its obvious organizational principle is the "parallel touch," which "must serve to integrate surfaces that have almost nothing in common with each other [. . .] the water is painted with horizontal touches, the distant shore with touches that follow the slope of the rocks," and when the greens representing pines and bushes "are used to balance the water surface [,] the touches are vertical" (85 f.), etc. The second painting, "Le Golfe de Marseille, vu de l'Estaque," is from 1885, so we are no longer in the second of the stages mentioned above, but have entered into the third and are witnessing a change in style, essentially saying goodbye to the parallel touch, which has more or less outlived its usefulness: in this later painting, "the emphasis on intense color relationships took over from the orchestrating power of the parallel touch and made it superfluous" (86), i.e., we are on the road toward the larger color patches of the later works. Such observations of the author's are easy to corroborate by reference to the copious reproductions provided as the discussion goes on, so one can see right away what he is getting at. Altogether, some seventy sites/paintings are discussed.The juxtapositions of photographs and reproductions are interesting and often compelling, but what I found to be even more instructive and illuminating are the writer's careful, articulate descriptions of the paintings, which obviously benefit from his own experiences as an accomplished painter who exhibits regularly in Italy and his native Czech Republic. One senses the presence of something like a "painterly eye" in much of his commentary. When, for example, he finds that a tense and uneasy inclination in a painting is relieved by some balancing elements (126), or when he credits Cézanne with finding "a resolution which recognizes and respects the tensions it must resolve" (163), one feels that his identification of the problem and its solution may well come from having faced a similar dilemma in his own painting practice.But this obvious sympathy with the problems posed by the surface of the canvas is not the same as a purely formal analysis, for the motif is always palpably there and never lost sight of; one of the author's basic tenets is that Cézanne always gives "equal due to his vision and his invention" (20), and his own analyses are from the same dual perspective, since he knows that the painter always has before him, in somewhat equal measure, both his motif and his canvas. But of course it's never exactly 50/50: inevitably, Cézanne will sometimes favor the one and sometimes the other; that is consistent in his art, and it is probably only in the very late paintings, where the arrangement of the color patches is tending increasingly toward the abstract, that the pictorial needs of the canvas become a bit more liberated from the demands of the motif.In discussing the late patches as a flexible device that can do different things, Dr. Machotka points to the New York (Museum of Modern Art) version of the 1903-04 "Château Noir" and comments: "the painting is strongly tactile, musical in its implication, deeply, almost relentlessly, integrated. I sense in it a wholeness that transcends the appeal of the site -- a balance created by the painter with carefully placed patches that refer to nothing at all but have a distinct pictorial purpose, such as the bit of yellow in the upper right corner which resonates with the patch of ground in the lower left corner and sets up a visual diagonal opposed to the massive one of the sliding hill" (178). I have given that rather long quotation as an example of the clear and articulate description that enables the reader to follow the comments on the paintings.I have gone on at some length in this review, because I am very enthusiastic about this book. I have been looking at Cézanne and reading about him for many years, but somehow I missed the publication of the first edition and am delighted to have a chance to acquire the book in its revised version. I recently wrote that "The World is an Apple" catalogue was close to the top of my stack of three dozen or so books on Cézanne, and now it is joined by this one. In addition to the fine text and excellent illustrations, the volume contains a list of paintings, a good selected bibliography, and a comprehensive index. This is simply one of the best books I have seen on Cézanne, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This is an exceptional investigation of Cezanne's work based partly on comparing his paintings with early and modern photographs and partly on general discussion from earlier sources. Free of financial concern and unencumbered by superficial technical skills he pursued an exploration of the combination of the representation of nature's effects with the formal needs of the painted surface. This led to key innovations which influenced later artists. Following the text requires a good deal of referencing and re-referencing illustrations which are necessarily distributed through the book. This takes time but is well worth doing. It is the most stimulating and productive book on modern art I know. Cezanne had a natural ability to side step convention and his findings underpin much of 20th century art. I wish the illustrations were more accurate in colour but this is a common problem and not a major obstruction.

An excellent book in all ways. It was especially interesting to see the photographs of the approximate sites where Cezanne sat to make the paintings together with the modern coloured photographs of the scenes. The book arrived safely, infact I had a difficult job removing the protective packing.