From Library Journal
For most of this century, artists and scholars have been amazed by the richness of Cezanne's work. Painter and photographer Machotka (psychology and art, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) builds upon past scholarship to illuminate the individual landscape sites and their relationship to Cezanne's paintings through the use of early black-and-white photographs and new color photos that he took himself. He wants to see how Cezanne interpreted what he saw and explores the artist's interest in observing nature and creating a painting using the structure of the flat surface to draw a parallel to nature. Like Cezanne, Machotka observes and uses nature, and he stresses Cezanne's intent as an artist rather than analyzing the elements of his paintings. The 144 illustrations include photographs, color reproductions of the paintings, and full-page details showing brushstrokes, color, and texture. This book about a painter written by a painter will appeal to painters as well as students and scholars of modern art.?Ellen Bates, New YorkCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
This beautiful book presents a new perspective on C_zanne`s landscape paintings, comparing them to color photographs of the same sites. Machotka, himself an artist, provides a close and thorough examination of how Czanne transformed nature into art, and the result is an original and illuminating study of the great painter`s methods and techniques.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This beautiful book presents a new perspective on Paul Cezanne, one of the towering and most influential figures of nineteenth-century art. Pavel Machotka has photographed the sites of Cezanne's landscape paintings - whenever possible from the same spot and at the same time of day that Cezanne painted the scenes. Juxtaposing these color photographs with reproductions of the paintings, he offers a dazzling range of evidence to demonstrate how the great painter transformed nature into works of art. Machotka, himself an artist, moves from painting to painting, examining textures and surfaces, pictorial rhythms, and inflections of tone. As he analyzes Cezanne's treatment of individual sites, their transposition into forms and colors, and the artist's responsiveness to the demands of each unique composition, we begin to see Cezanne as he saw himself: not as an early Cubist, but as a painter who explored every aspect of his motif for its rich compositional potential and presented a parallel and faithful conception of it. Using color to define form, while retaining hues that are anchored in reality, Cezanne achieved sensuous reconstructions, rather than intellectual depictions like those of the Cubists. While there are other books on Cezanne's landscapes, none is as closely informed by painterly knowledge and perception or as complete in its grasp of Cezanne's period and geography as this one. A visual delight, it is also an illuminating and original interaction with the artist's work.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal