Cézanne, Paul - Still Life with Bread and Eggs (1865)

The Brutal Bread of a Young Rebel

Paul Cézanne was not interested in making you feel comfortable in 1865. While Napoleon III was busy polishing the boulevards of Paris to a high shine, Cézanne was in a dark studio, aggressively slapping thick layers of oil paint onto canvas with a palette knife. This was his Couillarde period. The term translates roughly to gutsy or ballsy. It was a visual assault on the refined, thin glazes of the academic elite.

Still Life with Bread and Eggs is a heavy, somber defiance of the Paris Salon. The palette is dominated by a brutalist use of black that feels more like the Spanish masters than the sunny pastures of his contemporaries. Everything in the frame feels permanent and immovable. The bread isn't just a snack. It has the weight of a stone. The eggs sit like cold marbles against a cloth that looks carved from lead.

Cézanne submitted this work to the Salon specifically to offend the jurors. He wanted to highlight the stench of the real world that the Second Empire tried to hide behind marble facades. It was the calm before the Impressionist storm, but Cézanne wasn't looking for light. He was looking for the bone structure of reality. Recent X-rays even show a hidden self-portrait buried under the surface, a ghost of the artist trapped beneath his own aggressive layers of paint. He died in 1906, long before the world fully understood that he was rebuilding art from the ground up.

References

Cincinnati Art Museum. Masterpiece Gallery: Still Life with Bread and Eggs.

Rewald, John. The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Abrams, 1996.

Danchev, Alex. Cézanne: A Life. Profile Books, 2012.

Cachin, Françoise, et al. Cézanne. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1996.

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