The Bather
1885
Paul Cézanne
Medium
Oil on canvas
Original Title
Le Grand Baigneur
Provenance
Lillie P. Bliss Collection
Style
Post-Impressionism
Viewing Notes
The Bather
is one of Cézanne's most evocative paintings of the figure, although
the unmuscled torso and arms have no heroic pretensions, and the
drawing, in traditional, nineteenth-century terms, is awkward and
imprecise. The bather's left, forward leg is placed firmly on the
ground, but his right leg trails and carries no weight. The right side
of his body is pulled higher than the left, the chin curves lopsidedly,
and the right arm is elongated and oblique. The landscape is as bare as a
desert, but its green, violet, and rose coloration refuses that name.
Its dreaming expanse matches the bather's pensiveness. Likewise, the
shadows on the body, rather than shifting to black, share the colors of
the air, land, and water; and the brushwork throughout is a network of
hatch-marks and dapples, restless yet extraordinarily refined. The
figure moves toward us but does not meet our gaze.
These disturbances can be characterized as modern: they indicate that while Cézanne had an acute respect for much of traditional art, he did not represent the male nude the way the classical and Renaissance artists had done. He wanted to make an art that was "solid and durable like the art of the museums" but that also reflected a modern sensibility incorporating the new understanding of vision and light developed by the Impressionists. He wanted to make an art of his own time that rivaled the traditions of the past.
From The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 24:
These disturbances can be characterized as modern: they indicate that while Cézanne had an acute respect for much of traditional art, he did not represent the male nude the way the classical and Renaissance artists had done. He wanted to make an art that was "solid and durable like the art of the museums" but that also reflected a modern sensibility incorporating the new understanding of vision and light developed by the Impressionists. He wanted to make an art of his own time that rivaled the traditions of the past.
From The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 24:
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