The Art Service Industry, part 4

Cezanne

Cezanne

Now as we move through the centuries although there are peaks and troughs the general direction of this graph is onward and upward. And we eventually arrive at the Impressionists and the next big step along this journey.

When I was a student in the sixties suggested reading was Herbert Reed a Concise History of Modern Painting. In the opening pages he refers to Cezanne and suggests that he was the first artist to be objective: ‘let us ask why in the long history of art it had never previously happened that an artist should wish to see the world objectively'. Firstly, I hope I have made it abundantly clear that the entire period of the Renaissance was devoted to the retinal image. But secondly, has this much respected and influential historian never heard of Vermeer or seen his ‘Maid with a milk jug’.