Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life

by André Dombrowski

Overview

Cézanne, Murder and Modern Life offers an original approach to early French modernism, one informed by the art’s unprecedented psychological intensity. Focusing on the early work of Paul Cézanne, it offers a competing version for modern painting rooted in the evocation of emotive “expression,” emblematized by scenes of murder, sexual violence, and anxious domesticity. Mobilizing contexts rarely brought to bear on our understanding of art in the age of Impressionism, let alone the work of Cézanne, this book investigates the “culte du moi” and the conceptions of authorial function in art and literature, theories of neo-romanticism and early symbolism of the 1860s, as well as psycho-physiological analyses of the human mind and other positivist theories of modern sociality and instinctuality popularized during the Second Empire and early Third Republic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520273399
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/01/2012
Series:	The Phillips Collection Book Prize Series , #3
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Andre Dombrowski is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. This book is winner of the 2009 Phillips Book Prize

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Violent Beginnings: The Murder
2. “I Is Another”: Self-Portraiture and the Modernization of Olympia
3. Poetry, Portraiture, and Interiority: Paul Alexis Reading to Émile Zola
4. Art Arranged for Piano: The Overture to “Tannhäuser”
5. The Emperor’s Last Clothes: Cézanne, Fashion, and L’Année terrible
Epilogue: The End of Violence
Notes
Further Reading
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Life is beautifully produced. The use of illustrations is materly."

Times Higher Education Supplement - Alex Danchev

Throughout the arguments are supported with a stunning array of contextual information, including both the expected and unexpected. . . . Recommended.

Choice - E. K. Mix

"That André Dombrowski has contributed a highly original and persuasive interpretation of Cézanne’s early work is indubitable."

H-France Review

"Probing . . . very rewarding . . . [enables] a more complete view of the origins of modernist painting."

Journal of Modern History - Allison Morehead

"Throughout the arguments are supported with a stunning array of contextual information, including both the expected and unexpected. . . . Recommended."--Choice

From the Publisher