Czanne: Landscape into Art

Czanne is the supreme landscape painter of modernity, and his famous dictum that painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing ones sensations defines the course of modern paintings extreme departure from fidelity to reality. Despite or because of this dictum, Czannes marvelously lucid sensations become all the more evident and dazzling when set against images of the locales he painted. Czanne: Landscape into Art, which reprises and expands the classic 1996 publication by Yale University Press, does precisely this. In this highly praised study, the scholar Pavel Machotka juxtaposes photographs of the sites of Czannes landscape paintings--whenever possible, from the same angle and at the same time of day that the artist painted the scenes--with reproductions of the relevant paintings, offering a uniquely practical analysis of the ways in which Czanne transformed reality into art. Since the original publication of this volume, new sites have been discovered--the result of scrutinizing collections of contemporaneous photographs and land registry records. These discoveries have added considerably to our knowledge of Czannes movements and have even helped to date his paintings more precisely. The new photographs, which range from postcards from the artists time or the authors own color photographs, allow for a richer and better informed consideration of Czannes oeuvre. In light of those discoveries, Machotka has rewritten the previous edition to offer a fresh, rich view of Czannes artistic aims and accomplishments. While there are a number of books that focus on this important artists landscape work, none is as closely informed by painterly perception or as exacting in its analysis as this one.