The Village of Gardanne

The Village of Gardanne at the Brooklyn Museum was painted in 1885-86, when Cézanne spent an extended winter working in the small town south of Aix-en-Provence. Gardanne's specific character — a medieval village built on a limestone hill, its cubic houses stacked against the slope with a Romanesque church tower visible from the surrounding plain — provided him with a subject that seemed to demand the geometric pictorial language he was developing. He produced numerous canvases and watercolors of the village from different angles and distances during this concentrated campaign, and the Gardanne series is now recognized as one of the most important sequences in his landscape production. The formal qualities of the Mediterranean hill town — its cubic volumes, ochre and white walls, terracotta roofs, and vertical tower — were directly anticipated by Cézanne's approach, which sought the underlying geometry of all subjects. Later commentators noted the structural similarities between the Gardanne paintings and early Cubism, and Braque's own work at the hillside village of L'Estaque fifteen years later seems directly indebted to Cézanne's example in Gardanne.

Cézanne built form through disciplined, parallel brushstrokes applied in systematic patches, constructing volume and depth without conventional chiaroscuro. His palette is cool and considered — ochres, blue-greens, muted earth tones — while his fractured perspective.