Cleveland Museum of Art

The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue

Paul Cezanne

Date

1890

Medium

oil on fabric

Culture

France, 19th century

Department

Modern European Painting and Sculpture

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Paul Cezanne painted this composition in three horizontal planes: the azure blue of the sky; the luminous white of the tower and the farmyard buildings; and the burnt-orange shade of the foreground earth, whose color is indicative of the iron-rich soil of Provence. The shimmering greens of Cezanne’s favorite cypress and olive trees are interspersed across the middle ground. The composition is pared down to its essentials, devoid of extraneous detail; it exemplifies his ambition “to make something solid and enduring, like the art in museums.” Cézanne’s method of compressing space and simplifying forms into flattened, geometric shapes provided the foundation for both Fauvism and Cubism.

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