Cézanne in front of "The Large Bathers" in his studio at Les Lauves

A fundamental conflict characterised both the theories and practices of painting in nineteenth-century France. On the one hand, allegiance to an inherited tradition of Italianate clair-obscur provided the rationale for painting dark to light: modelling in a subtle gradation of blended half-tones separated thinly glazed, transparent shadows and opaque impasted lights. In contrast,...

Unlike family members or sympathetic fellow artists, all with ready-made allegiances, portrait sitters with a more detached professional or social relationship to the artist implicitly make greater demands for themselves. This challenge to his autonomy was felt acutely by Matisse. In the transaction of portraits with...

Modernism and materialism go together. This does not mean, any more than with modernism and socialism, that the fellowship was always recognized or welcomed at the time; or that, even when it was, artists agreed on which version of materialism to follow and exactly how. Cézanne, for instance, seems to have missed the point of Seurat’s atomism (possibly because he had too few opportunities to see Seurat’s paintings firsthand). Malevich thought the Constructivists were clanking along with …