1890
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue is a 1890 unspecified by Paul Cezanne, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a tall white pigeon tower rising above rust-red earth, olive trees, and a bright blue sky. Cézanne painted this spot again and again—each time stripping away more detail until only the shapes and colors mattered. The iron-rich soil gives the ground its deep orange glow, a signature of his home in Provence. To see how he built a whole world from simple blocks of color, look up impasto.
Paul Cezanne painted this composition in three horizontal planes: the azure blue of the sky; the luminous white of the tower and the farmyard buildings; and the burnt-orange shade of the foreground earth, whose color is indicative of the iron-rich soil of Provence. The shimmering greens of Cezanne’s favorite cypress and olive trees are interspersed across the middle ground. The composition is pared down to its essentials, devoid of extraneous detail; it exemplifies his ambition “to make something solid and enduring, like the art in museums.”
Cézanne’s method of compressing space and simplifying forms into flattened, geometric shapes provided the foundation for both Fauvism and Cubism.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Paul Cézanne was born on January 19, 1839, in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a hatter turned wealthy banker.
See the richer artist page
