Cézanne’s Gravity is an ambitious reassessment of the paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). Whereas previous studies have often looked at the artist’s work for its influence on his successors and on the development of abstraction, Carol Armstrong untethers it from this timeline, examining Cézanne’s painting as a phenomenological and intellectual endeavor. Armstrong uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyze Cézanne’s work, pairing the painter with artists and thinkers who came after him, including Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Rainer Maria Rilke, R. D. Laing, and Helen Frankenthaler. Through these pairings, Armstrong addresses diverse subjects that illuminate Cézanne’s painting, from the nonlinear narratives of modernist literature and the ways in which space and time act on objects, to color sensation and the schizophrenic mind. Cézanne’s Gravity attends to both the physicality of the artist’s works and the weight they bear on the history of art. This distinctive study not only invites its readers to view Cézanne’s paintings with fresh eyes but also offers a new methodology for art historical inquiry outside linear narratives, one truly fitting for our time.

Co-winner of the 2019 Robert Motherwell Book Award, sponsored by the Dedalus Foundation

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Manet, a founding father of modernism, is one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century art. In this absorbing book, Carol Armstrong looks closely at Manet’s works to uncover a novel and compelling view not only of the artist but also of modernity itself. As she places his art within frameworks of color, the feminine Other (the “Manette” in “Manet”), and consumerism, Armstrong greatly expands and revises our understanding of this artist as a painter of modern life.

Surveying most of Manet’s diverse output, the book addresses along the way his methods of self-presentation, his exhibition strategies, the relation of his etchings and paintings, the significance of his relationships with the model Victorine Meurent and the painter Berthe Morisot, the painterly construction of identity and gender difference, and much more. At the same time, the book considers contemporary writings by Baudelaire, Zola, the Goncourts, and others who dealt with issues relating to artistic identity and modernity, painting, the model, and femininity. Armstrong concludes that Manet’s work demonstrates consistent preoccupations with defining and contradicting his own signature style of painting and with the gendering of costume, color, and the making of his art. These preoccupations, she shows, suggest a new understanding of Manet’s oeuvre.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*