Czanne's Gravity

A transformative study, freeing the artist from outdated art historical narratives and revealing his work as newly strange again Czannes Gravity is an ambitious reassessment of the paintings of Paul Czanne (18391906). Whereas previous studies have often looked at the artists work for its influence on his successors and on the development of abstraction, Carol Armstrong untethers it from this timeline, examining Czannes painting as a phenomenological and intellectual endeavor. Armstrong uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyze Czannes 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 Czannes 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. Czannes Gravity attends to both the physicality of the artists works and the weight they bear on the history of art. This distinctive study not only invites its readers to view Czannes paintings with fresh eyes but also offers a new methodology for art historical inquiry outside linear narratives, one truly fitting for our time.