How Did Paul Cazanne Impact On The Large Bathers

Paul Cézanne was a post-impressionist artist, who influenced many others in his life time and beyond. His commitment with form and use of colors to delimit figures kept the attention of many young authors. One of his most influential works, The Large Bathers, had impact in great names of movements like Fauvism and Cubism, for instance. More specifically, Bonheur de Vivre by Henri Matisse and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso are two paintings that had directly impact from that Cézanne’s masterpiece. In this essay, I’ll comment the relationship between these three paintings, focusing on how Cézanne’s in specific influenced the others. Paul Cézanne brings classical forms and subjects to a modern way of painting in The Large Bathers. In this painting, Cézanne choose the subject of bathers and the female nude, two of the more often represented components in arts (Harris & Zucker, n.d. A.). However, he did change the way of portraying such things, challenging the classical style by adapting to the modern time. For instance, the female bodies have an unfinished aspect, and are represented in a distorted way, sometimes even elongated (Harris & Zucker, n.d. A.). The result is the possibility, for the first time, of abstraction from the female nude, which was frequently

From it, Matisse directly took the idea of using the landscape as a stage, with trees in both sides and highlighted female nude figures in the middle (Harris & Zucker, n.d. C.). However, in Matisse’s work, the sensuality of the female nude is recovered with curved lines, emphasized by colorful contours. Color, in fact, is a remarkable aspect of this Fauvist painting—they are used to reach expressiveness of emotions, not to be faithful to reality (Harris & Zucker, n.d. C.). Thus, this painting was deeply influenced by Cézanne’s The Large Bathers, without losing its unique way of portraying the same