Paul Cézanne

I mean, I never underestimate the fact that people are being asked to do quite a lot in a comics exhibition.

It's much easier just to look at a Cezanne or a Picasso, go, oh, that's nice, and then look at another one.

But comics, unfortunately, I mean, you can obviously show single images and whatever, but I do think the narrative is what really ought to be what we're emphasizing in comic art exhibitions and ideally get people to engage with them and having a go at reading them, even if they're not terribly used to doing that.

And I don't think we should underestimate that.

But this book is a very big attempt to grapple with the sheer extraordinary creativity of this person over a lifetime of 80-plus years and from childhood onwards.

And she never seemed to have any doubts about trying something and moving in all kinds of directions.

But for me, the big... difficulty with Tova's work is that she and her life is that until around the latter decades she was convinced that painting was her calling and this is painting very much in a school that she loved the kind of colorist sort of Matisse inspired Cezanne inspired those kinds of great painters and but When you start looking, not just at her paintings, with exceptions, especially portraits, I would say, but a lot of her, she had a career in painting, but they were never going to be really things that people go, oh, that's a Tove Jansson.

You couldn't really tell.

Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't.

Like, you look at Cézanne's early work.

Cézanne could draw, and he became, you know, a modern deconstructive painter, abstract painter, okay? So a lot of these guys, whether it was Pollock or not, learned how to draw.

They were in figure class.

They were drawing from life.

Color is a conscious event resulting from the interplay between the observer and the observed.

The French post-impressionist artist Paul Cézanne wrote that color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

So what do philosophers make of all this? Well, there's a number of different takes people have, but in this video I'll be discussing two theories that I think capture the ancient disagreement between Newton and Goethe.

Let's start with the Newton side of things, and one of the most famous distinctions in all of philosophy, John Locke's primary and secondary qualities.

Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't.

Like you look at Cézanne's early work, Cézanne could draw and he became, you know, a modern deconstructive painter, abstract painter, okay? So a lot of these guys, whether it was Pollock or not, learned how to draw.

They were in figure class.

They were drawing from life.

I do like some of Picasso's stuff.

Cezanne, I know that, I mean.

one of the still lifes I show regularly to people when they're struggling with everything being perfect is the one where it's the table, the perspective's off, there's no modeling on the apple, the colors are wild, it's just not great.

And yet, I mean, it's worth 35 million or something more.

the life secrets of those who flailed early but succeeded by old age.

He starts off the article talking about Paul Cézanne and his struggles in his career.

Now Cézanne is considered one of the greatest painters of the last, you know, 200 years.

And this was an artist, a serious artist, who really wasn't gaining any success by middle age.