Pyramid of Skulls

The pyramid of skulls is the work of Paul Cézanne ( 1839-1906 ). The Still Life (oil on canvas, 37 x 45, 5 cm) was built around 1901 and is privately owned.

To image

The small picture shows four skulls, on a white cloth to the cone shape stacked. Three are in ocher and green tones, brightened and broken with white partly represented. The background in which the fourth skull disappears right of the picture shows Black with cloudy color that contains left traces of red. The opaque to semi-dry paint, partially executed with a broad brush, underlined by its composition, created in bright and dark areas.

The composition emphasizes the triangle formed from the skulls, the linear white in the cloth and the dark colored background ( it is a carpet) is referenced. The light neglected the plasticity and rather emphasizes the shapes of the objects that make up the subject on the surface: the circle and the triangle. The white backing cited the square.

Work related

Cézanne has a whole series of mostly small still life made ​​, both in oil and in numerous watercolors. The vanitas motif old skull he has repeatedly varied, inter alia, in another pyramid on a carpet ( the same that is vaguely indicated in the background here ). In several versions of the skull appeared also on the repeatedly made ​​by him preferred and in many variations Still Life with Apples.

Since the 1880s he lived and worked Cézanne in Aix -en- Provence in southern France, while his family still resided in Paris. In the late phase in the south of France the famous views of the Montagne Sainte- Victoire and the largest number of paintings and watercolors created with still life. In both groups of works Cézanne realized his ideas of painting: "You treat nature in accordance cylinder, sphere and cone and put the whole thing into perspective so that each side of the object, an area leading to the central point. " Two things, Cézanne said, give it to the painter: the eye and the brain.

Reception

Cézanne's approach to understand the painting of the nature inherent forms here and express in traditional subjects, such as portrait, landscape and still life, was at the end of the 19th century both in contrast to the traditional academic painting and the ideas of the Impressionists, the color and the light had discovered the expression of the fleeting moment. Émile Zola, Cézanne's childhood friend who had 1889 in L' Oeuvre (English: the work ), a novel from the Les Rougon Macquart cycle, frustrate a painter who brings only mischief on the screen due to its brilliant ideas at the end; this figure had been inspired by the decades-long friendship with Cézanne and had this finished. The work of Paul Cézanne, however, significantly influenced Pablo Picasso and the development of Cubist painting as well as Henri Matisse.