Paul Cezanne (Rizzoli Art Classics) - Softcover

Although widely regarded in the twentieth century as the great forerunner and prophet of a cerebral and abstract modern art, Paul Cezanne belonged to the generation of the Impressionists, with whom he shared an attachment to picturing nature and an insistence upon personal expression and immediacy of sensation as the foundations for his art. Richard Shiff, director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin, traces the construction of Cezanne's reputation by early critics and by the symbolist artists who saw in him a precursor of their own tendencies, and explores the multiple meanings of Cezanne's paintings both for his contemporaries and for audiences today.