Les baigneurs, grande planche

About the Art

Cézanne explored the time-honored theme of nudes in a landscape throughout his life. This large print combines figures and landscape in a stage-like setting of grand proportion. For both the formal structure of the landscape and the company of awkwardly rendered bathers, Cézanne drew upon art historical precedents and his own imagination rather than natural observation. The painter exposed his artistic license in technique as well as composition: the shadows on the figures, rather than shifting to black, share the colors of the sky and serve as a means to flatten the sense of space; and the brushwork is a network of dapples and hatch-marks that is at once agitated yet extremely refined. While Cézanne respected traditional art, he did not represent the nude figure in classical proportions like his predecessors. He wanted to make an art that was “solid and durable like the art of the museums” but that also reflected a modern sensibility by 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.

FEATURED IMAGE
Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906), Les baigneurs, grande planche (The Bathers, large plate), 1896–1897, lithograph in colors on paper, sheet 16 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches (41.9 x 52.1 cm). Museum purchase, 1964.26