Rethiking Modern art]Ⅰ Syntactic device in Cezanne's [Basel Five Bathers]

Any smooth curve is a chain of arcs.
Arc is a part of a circle.
An arc can be differeciated from another arc of a different circle.
Arcs can make a scale like tone scale of music.
Some artists with such notion  balanced arcs in a composition by handling the circles of the arcs.


Cezanne rediscovered the scaling system for composition.
What cubism was influenced by is a historical problem.
What Picasso and Matisse learned from Cezanne's  [Bathers] is a formal problem, which is quantitatively answerable .
I have shown that Sharaku (Hokusai) used syntactic device (pivot structure) intentionally.
We can find the syntactic use in art  everywhere and everytime as it is universal.
It is ovbious that modern artists were inspired by Cezanne's syntactic device.
 I should be able to find the use of syntax in specific Cezanne paintings.
I chose this square brownish painting called [Basel Five Bathers].




    Cezanne  [Bazel Five Bathers]　1885-87


To see how the motifs are extended arc model is useful to start with.
As the contour is simple and mostly enclosed by black lines,
the arc model is easily made. 

Though most of  his paintings with bathers look representational with full of green and blue, this painting is strangely un-natural: the space has no illusion of classical perspective;
 the light is not natural;
 many parts of the bodies are outlined with black
and the impression of the whole is brownish like Cubist painting.
This painting must contain something which attracted Picasso and Matisse.
The garment in the lower left reminds me of [Avignon].
And Matisse's [Dance] has similar borderline of sky and ground.


There is a related sketch on the facing page of this reproduction in the exhibition catalogue [Bathers].
We can see that the position of the body parts in the painting are following the gridded sketch.
This square painting is very schematic; each shape of the nude in the sketch is a motif to be extended.

To see how the motifs are extended arc model is useful to start with.
As the contour is simple and mostly enclosed by black lines,
the arc model is easily made.
   [The Basel Five Bathers]  arc model      


Extending the arcs, the circle-arc model can be made.
     Cezanne     [Basel Five Bathers]  circle-arc model


Next,  I make the blue circle-arc model to see the pivots better.
        Cezanne     [ Basel Five Bathers ]  blue circle-arc pivot structure model
 


The intersecting points (pivots) are shown with yellow crosses.




The lithograph of [bathers] in 1887-89 is a better example to recognize arcs.
     Cezanne  [Bathers]  lithograoh  1887-89


It is easier to make arc model because all the contours of the nudes are drawn in line.
I used only seven circles.
     Cezanne  [Bather  lithograph]  arc model


Next I extend each arc to make a crcle
     Cezanne  [Bathers  lithograph]  circle-arc model


We can see the largest green circles and the second largest pink circles make basic structure
      Cezanne  [Bather  lithograph]  green circle-arc pivot structure model


There are three crosses on two deep green circles.     Cezanne  [Bathers lithograph]  pink circle-arc pivot structure model




The pink arcs are grouped in two areas: lower left and middle right.
When the the circles form a pivot structure the circle-arcs are balanced with a sense of harmony.


The greatest accomplishment of Cezanne is that he rediscovered the long forgotten visual- grammar, specially the scaling of arcs.
And the modern artists further developed their own syntax.
Next time I am showing that Matisse used the pivot structure deliverately for Dance Ⅱ.