Pages misplaced
The book itself is good, but pages 17 - 32 were misplaced after page 48, it is too trouble and time consume to mail back to exchange or refund. Books like this should not sell to customers.
Interesting analysis
Many of Cézanne's paintings are essentially composed of flat, homogenous planes. He has no interest in textures and takes great freedom in choosing colours and distributing them patchwise. He also disregards proportions and perspective, making receding objects such as roads, mountains and hills stand up straight, so to speak, to the picture plane. Thus each plane in the painting "remains comparatively flat and parallel to the picture plane", but still the painting has a definite feeling of depth because of "the three-dimensional effect that a sequence of the same planes creates through overlapping" (plate XIII). "Cézanne's genius in organizing three-dimensional space is the basic foundation of his composition" and doing so by the plane colour patch approach agrees with the principle that a painting "must remain faithful to its own structure, to its fundamental two dimensions" (section XV). The organisation of space is achieved by the "tension" or "movement" created where planes overlap, and this is Loran's main framework for analysing Cézanne's paintings. With some imagination and many useful geometrical diagrams we can sum up the effects of the overlaps to a general movement; usually some sort of circular movement, always staying within the picture frame. Loran is very faithful to this point of view, even blaming Cézanne when it doesn't apply. In his analysis of a Sainte Victoire painting (plate X) he finds such a circular movement and concludes: "It is this circular movement that gives the painting it ultimate 'closed' effect. Actually, this canvas has many elements of open form ... personally, I find these latter elements insufficiently resolved and somewhat disturbing." Besides this analytic framework, Loran also makes more traditional analyses in terms of balance, dynamics, etc., and he also spends far too much time nagging about two pet topics: Cézanne's famous colour modulations are in fact of incidental importance and Cézanne anticipated Picasso and Braque.
An Extraordinary Book!
When I first read this book, over twenty-five years ago, I thought it was the most remarkable book ever written on how an artist composes and organizes his or her creative process. Over the years, I've returned to it many times. Having recently re-read the book I find I am still thrilled by Loran's ability to illuminate the special qualities within Cézanne's canvases. As an artist and art educator, Loran was in a unique position to comprehend how this artist balanced the formal, intuitive, and experiential aspects of composition. All of this comes through admirably and clearly. Although I imagine some people might find the graphic diagrams cold and remote from the vitality of Cézanne's painting, I think a close reading of the book demonstrates that an illustrative graphic can help us reach a deeper understanding of the artist at work, in this case Cézanne. If you are a fan of Cézanne, definitely read this book! If you are interested in understanding the artistic mind, definitely read this book.
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