Cézanne's Letter in Art History Reexamined (Part 1):
Introductory Essay to My Research Program Modernist Art and Its Public

Takahiro UEDA, associate professor, college of letters, Ritsumeikan University

[abstract]

This paper aims at an introductory part of my research in progress Modernist Art and Its Public: 1863 to 1968, which deals with the (dis)course of Modernist Art History from counter-revisionist point of view.
Cézanne’s letter of 15th April 1904 to a painter includes famous sentence: “[T]reat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, with everything put in perspective ...” (original text in French will be indicated in main Japanese text). Traditional ‘reductionist’ reading of this sentence has authorized the view which regards him as the origin of the geometrical abstraction in linear development of modern art.
But ‘alternative’ reading will be proposed in this paper based upon both grammatical and contextual scrutiny. Being open even to the possibility of misreading, it focuses upon the usually untouched questions: (1) why, in fact, Cézanne’s late work does not contain such geometrical form as ‘the cylinder, the sphere, the cone’; and (2) how such an ambivalent phrase has fascinated the ‘public’ of his art so much.

　

This paper is published in Tohoku Geijutsu Koka Daigaku Kiyo (The Annual Bulletin of Tohoku University of Art and Design), No. 6 (July 1999): pp. 6-22.