Denise Weinman The arts of the Renaissance era were highly inspired from the new way people were thinking of themselves, their surroundings and their religion.“Renaissance,” defined as “rebirth,” represented European culture from about fourteen hundred to the mid sixteenth century. It is largely credited to the literature and philosophy of Ancient Greece and Rome that inspired new interest in art and sculpture with respect to the individual and with the natural world. Art took a complete shift away from religion as individuals were inspired to understand what it really meant and looked like to be human. Seventeenth century Baroque artwork came about largely from the effort of the papacy to evoke intense emotion in magnifying and glorifying the Catholic religion. It is because of the majority patronage of arts by the papal courts that most works once again began to focus around religion in all of its grandeur. The early nineteenth century became known as the romantic era, a time of heightened political influence and industrialization. The Romantics were a group of writers, artists, composers, and thinkers, that challenged these influences to say that the human feels, as in emotion, before thinking, that the heart was just as important as the head and emphasized the emotion in individuals by focusing on the beauty of nature, the power of love, the world of dreams, the exotic, the mysterious and the strange. With the focus on natural goodness and empathy for the oppressed, it helped to celebrate the self and glorify nature in a time of extreme poverty amongst the people. The arts of the latter half of the nineteenth century gave way to Realism, then to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Artists such as Monet and van Gogh began to express the everyday world as if to capture the subject’s beauty at that particular moment in time. Through realism, artists attempted accurately with detail to reproduce nature and contemporary life. The idea of imagination was rejected as an outlook toward art. This soon gave way to Impressionism, these same artists, amongst others, took to their real life views

2 Weinman of the world and made them into their own “impression” of the subject. Painting had become a majority of the artwork during these times and the artists experimented with colors and light in an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality for the human eye to see. Post- impressionism extended this concept but rejected the style as it was just too restrictive. The artists of realism, amongst others, began to form personal art which reflected the artists’ emotions about a subject. The twentieth century gave way to a variety of style. In the beginning, art focused on three main points with painting and sculpture. These were expressionism, or art that was emotional and concerned with human feelings, abstraction, which concentrated on structure and order, and fantasy, which was personal and concerned with the individual’s imagination. These three forms of art opened the door to a wide variety of types and styles, to a new level of artistic freedom with types including photorealism, op art, pop art, and postmodern art which focused on questioning tradition especially in relation to political, gender, and social issues. Paul Cezanne’s “The Card Players” was a series of five separate oil on canvas paintings, created over the years of 1890 to 1892. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) was born in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence whom in his lifetime was considered a curious and minor contributor to the Impressionist movement, and before his death in 1906, was referred to only briefly or in a belittling manner. During the 1860's, Cezanne was able to establish himself as a painter but was denied from institutions of the arts and from artistic exhibitions. Unlike artists such as Monet or Picasso, Cezanne’s influences were made up of very few admiring painters and collectors. It was not until after his death that Cezanne became so iconic, with his works being called landmarks in art. Cezanne struggled with his paintings due to the idea of maintaining the

3 Weinman object as an entity clashing with his desire of “continuity of texture” by forgetting the idea of the object. With the twentieth century, he became regarded as a leading figure in the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements and had great influence upon modern art. Sadly, it was not realized until now that he had an early hold on the ability to create intense feelings with color over a surface. The series of paintings, “The Card Players,” was created while Cezanne was residing at his parents estate outside of Aix-en-Provence. Each painting was meant to represent the admiration of character he felt for the people of the region, as he strove toward the most powerful expression that he could provide. The peasants and laborers from the estate became his models, and uncharacteristic of his normal style, he studied each of his models on an individual basis to be transferred to canvas later. The local peasants filled him with admiration as he saw them as firm, unwavering, and monumental. Of the people Cezanne said, “I love above all else the appearance of people who have grown old without breaking with old customs.” It is arguable as to which canvas paintings came first then second, and so on, but it is one belief that Cezanne was deliberately eliminating and reducing color in an experiment to find what could be achieved by tone. The largest and most complex painting of the series is housed in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses an image that Cezanne apparently tightened composition, reduced the size and left out a character. The final three paintings are believed to be latter images in which he cut away at detail. They reside, one in the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery in London, one in The Musee d’Orsay in Paris and one belongs to a private collector of the royal family in Qatar. This version was sold in 2011 for 250-300 million dollars, making it the most expensive piece of artwork ever sold.

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Works Cited Benton, Janetta Rebold, and Robert DiYanni. "Pages 128,145,177,223,245 and 269." Handbook for the Humanities. 1st ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014. N. pag. Print. Textbook pages provided information on the arts of the Renaissance era, Baroque era, and the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. "The Card Players, 1890-92." N.p., Dec. 2008. Web. . Site used to provide biography of "The Card Players." "Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)." Burlington Magazine Sept. 2006: 583-85. Web. Article provided biography of Paul Cezanne. PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. . Site provided biography of Paul Cezanne. ""Realism," "Impressionism," and "Post-Impressionism"" Encyclopedia Brittanica. N.p., n.d. Web. Each article subject was used to provide a description of the arts within that particular time period. White, Renee M. "Cezanne's Card Players at the Met." New York Amsterdam News 15 Mar. 2011: n. pag. Print. Site provided biography of "The Card Players."