Paul Cezanne's Post Impressionism

Probably, every newly emerging style tries to distance itself from the old tradition. It revamps it, breaks it into pieces, borrows some, ridicules the others, turns the preceding style into a parody, and often it treats it like the enemy trying to diminish its value and importance as much as possible in order to stem strong from it and become something independent. It always happens between the old and the new, and majority (if not all) artistic styles emerge in this way.

Paul Cezanne’s Post-Impressionist painting of 1906 The Large Bathers (there were several editions of Bathers, and two of them were titled Large Bathers), from which in turn Fauvism and Cubism consequently stemmed, was his major protest against gedonistic era of Impressionism.

In the same year, he responded to Cezanne’s experiments with his highly avant garde by that time painting called Le Bonheur De Vivre (The Joy of Life). Hi did borrow from Cezanne the idea of theatrical stylization: his painting also looks like a cheap theatrical curtain with its out of perspective nude figures whose postures refer to the famous paintings of the past. Matisse’s painting is very sensual and wildly erotic, it uses the typical for Fauvism wild color palette. The forms of the surrounding environment (shapes of trees at the pastoral) replicate the curves of the nudes. Same as Sezanne’s painting, The Joy of Life is highly cheap-decorative, abstract, it takes the Cezanne’s image deconstruction ideas further – it dissolves the objects and blends them into the environment. (“Matisse, Bonheur de Vivre”, n.d.) I would say that Matisse’s masterpiece The Joy of Life is very “green” (speaking today’s language) because it proclaims how the simple life within a pastoral could be ideally beautiful. The whole painting is so curvy and warm, that it is almost delirious if to look at it long; and in spite of its schematic background, it is very spacy, meaning that the viewer can probably step into this bucolic picture and become a part of the

The painting depicts the real prostitutes from the red-light street district often attended by Picasso. The background of the painting is extremely compressed, almost non-existent. The nudes, some of them also replicate the earlier masters’ postures including one of Matisse’s nude, but painted very fractured and decomposed, sharp, and wearing African tribal masks symbolizing the fear of Venereal diseases and aggression. The nudes are striped out of their beauty, they are scary and demanding at the same time. (“Picasso, Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon”, n.d.) Same as Cezanne’s and Matisse’s masterpieces, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon are highly theatrical (without that I think they will be almost unbearable to watch). Cubism takes decomposition of images to the new level unseen before and in turn opens the road for Abstractionism, which will hit the art world just in a couple of years (Wassily