Talks & Conversations

Paul Cezanne and Georges Seurat: Eyes in Service to the Mind

Part of Modernist Visions
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Pale beige, angular houses cluster at the center of the horizontal landscape painting. The hilly, rocky landscape around and below the houses is painted with cool blues and greens, and warm ivory and caramel brown beneath a pale blue sky. The artist applied the paint with regular, parallel, straight strokes.
Paul Cezanne, Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley near L'Estaque, c. 1883, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1973.68.1

Paul Cezanne once remarked: “There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.” In this lecture, senior lecturer David Gariff explores how this view would help to shape a new modernist vision of art. 

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