U.C. Berkeley History of Art

Histart 190F.1

19TH-20TH CENTURY: CEZANNE AND ART HISTORY (4 units)

The course will focus on the life and work of a single artist, Paul Cézanne. Cézanne is worth dealing with in this way for several reasons. The main one is the sheer complexity and force of his paintings, which go on presenting a special challenge to description and interpretation. Students should realize that at the center of this class will lie repeated and careful looking at Cézanne's oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings, on the assumption that they propose an account of the world and our access to it that deserves, and repays, sustained attention.

The lecture title's coupling of Cézanne "and Art History" gives a clue to other reasons why a course of this kind seems worth doing. For a century Cézanne's art was taken as emblematic of the line of art we call "modern." For that reason Cézanne was written about repeatedly by an extraordinary range of writers, and the Cézanne literature provides us with strong examples of many of the basic strategies and procedures of art history and art criticism. There are, for instance, continuing attempts to pin down the precise chronology of Cézanne's paintings, in the belief that we shall not be able to give a convincing account of his intentions and purposes unless we have a clear idea (especially as regards key periods of transition in his career) which painting followed which. There are studies of Cezanne's sources, and of his interaction with other artists, notably Camille Pissarro. There are bold and interesting attempts to interpret Cézanne's art (especially his sketchbooks) using the tools of psychoanalysis. Philosophers have been drawn to Cézanne, sometimes seemingly taking him as a model of their own vision of epistemology or ontology. He has been the hero of certain strong writers on the visual arts -- for instance, Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg -- who are usually (somewhat glibly) described as "formalists." And so on. Looking at Cézanne, in other words, offers us a panorama (but also a singular, concentrated case) of what art historians and critics do; and the course will aim to display those different approaches, and think about their adequacy and inadequacy to the art they wished to understand.

(Mo)

Letters in bold following individual upper division course descriptions cite the History of Art major breadth requirement fulfilled by the course. (As=Asian, An=Ancient, Me=Medieval, R=Renaissance, B=Baroque, Mo=Modern.)