Great artist experiments with tonal effects, light, mass, other qualities in over 100 drawings. A revealing view of developing master painter, precursor of Cubism. 102 black-and-white illustrations.

Published on the occassion of the exhibition "Paul Cezanne: The Basel sketchbooks", March - June 1988.

Although he is most often celebrated as a painter, Paul Cézanne's extraordinary vision was fuelled by his experiments on paper. In pencil and watercolour, on individual sheets and across the pages of sketchbooks, the artist described form through multiple probing lines; realized compositions through repetitions and transformations; and conjured kaleidoscopic colour through laborious layering of watercolour. It is in these material realities of drawing where we see Cézanne at his most modern: embracing the unfinished, making process visible, and actively inviting the viewer to participate in the act of perception. To date, exhibitions devoted to Cézanne have tended to focus on a single genre, a specific theme, or an isolated moment within the artist's oeuvre. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this is the first major effort to unite drawings from across Cézanne's entire career, tracing the development of his practice on paper, exploring working methods that transcend subject, and devoting research to conservation as well as curatorial fronts.

Reproductions and text present critical commentary on the artist and his work.

Foreword / Connie Wolf and Alison Gass -- Private to Public / Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant -- Understanding Diebenkorn / Steven A. Nash -- Two Sides of a Coin: Reflections on Artistic Practice / Enrique Chagoya -- The Ace of Spades / Alexander Nemerov -- (With)Drawing from Mastery / Peggy Phelan -- The Sketchbooks -- Notes to Myself of Beginning a Painting / Richard Diebenkorn

One of the founding artists of modern art, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) is now widely acclaimed as the preeminent painter of the late nineteenth century. Less well known is his groundbreaking work as a draftsman; relatively little scholarship has been devoted to this aspect of his oeuvre, which is rarely presented in exhibitions. The Kunstmuseum Basel's Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings) contains 154 sheets by Cézanne, making it the most comprehensive and significant collection of the artist's drawings in the world. The collection dates back to the 1930s, attesting to the museum's farsighted collection policy. Two thirds of these drawings come from dissolved sketchbooks, which were reconstructed in view of this presentation. The starting point and nucleus of Cézanne's creative thinking, they allow us to observe Cézanne's everyday practice as a draftsman up close. Early scenes of violence appear side by side with portrait sketches; copies after Delacroix or ancient sculptures alternate with landscapes and bathers. Repetition and slight variation of the angle from which he studied a motif enabled the artist to understand how perceptions formed and to develop entirely new pictorial registers. In his watercolors, Cézanne explored the dynamic interplay between line and color, casting off the constraints of the tradition. In his paintings, too, the line is vital. He often produced a preparatory drawing on the canvas and reworked it with the brush before executing the picture in paint. This book offers fascinating insights into this outstanding painter's creative process. Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Basel - Neubau, Switzerland (10.06.-24.09.2017).

'One of the most famous of modern art documents - a poetic primer, prepared by the artist for his Bauhaus pupils, which has deeply affected modern thinking about art . . . This little handbook leads us into the mysterious world where science and imagination fuse.' Observer