@mastersthesis {8222,
	title = {The Impression to Excess: Color and Drawing in Cezanne},
	year = {1998},
	school = {Harvard},
	abstract = {The Impression to Excess: Color and Drawing in Cezanne is an examination of the relationship between color and drawing in Cezanne{\textquoteright}s art. It traces a shift in the artist{\textquoteright}s career from an ambition, in his mature work (1880-1895), to fuse the functions of color and line in a single stroke of paint, to an affirmation of their discontinuity in his late work (1895-1906). In four chapters I explore the stages of this shift.
I begin with a discussion of Cezanne{\textquoteright}s technique of painting with modular strokes of paint, a technique that was consolidated around 1880 as a reaction against the Impressionist reduction of painting to pure color. The so-called "constructive stroke," I argue, signifies a recovery of a unity of color and line in a single mark.
In chapter 2 I address the simultaneous appearance of unfinish in Cezanne{\textquoteright}s paintings as a by-product of this atomistic technique of painting with modular strokes of paint. Examining the structure of absence and presence that results, I argue that unfinish submits Cezanne{\textquoteright}s paintings to a temporality of infinite waiting.
In chapter 3 I discuss Cezanne{\textquoteright}s work in watercolor. I try to show how his work in this medium is a meditation on the strange composite identity of the medium itself, in which a painting, based on a chromatic system of figuration, is literally superimposed upon a drawing, which operates according to a tonal figurative system.
Finally, I examine Cezanne{\textquoteright}s late work in oil. I set this work in the context of a general trend toward decorative flatness in painting in the 1890s, exemplified by Gauguin, Bernard, Denis, and Anquetin. Against Greenberg, I argue that, rather than affirming the flatness of painting in his late paintings, Cezanne resists it instead. He accomplishes this by generating a depth of field in the physical surface itself of his late oil paintings, thereby exploiting a discontinuity between color patches and painted contours.
The Impression to Excess tries to show how this shift in the artist{\textquoteright}s ambitions from continuity to discontinuity of color and drawing signifies a shift in priorities away from the visual experience of the depicted motif and towards a concentration on the phenomenology of the surface of painting itself. Consequently, I show at each step along the way how Cezanne increasingly places the analogy between painting and vision in doubt as his career develops.},
	keywords = {19th- and Early 20th-Century European Art},
	author = {Simms, Matthew}
}
