Monday, February 21, 2011

The Card Players

This interesting slide show explains what Cezanne was trying to do with his series of paintings of men playing cards. He sought to get away from stereotypical paintings of tavern ribaldry, full of class cues and moralism, and depict the men as men, not examples of some social type. They are thoughtful, not rowdy, and the mix of low and high signals -- working men's attire on the left, the gold drapery on the right -- cuts through assumptions about the appropriate ways of depicting different sorts of people:
Cézanne's quietly radical art put everything into question: genre, finish, setting, scale, mood, and color.

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