Innovation of Lived Perspective
The Card Players by Paul Cezanne
The inconsistent use of perspective noted in the image above reveals Cezanne's innovative departure from previous renderings of perspective, including Impressionist representations of perspective. Cezanne famously remarked that he wanted to "make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums," and he tried to achieve this effect through the use of what philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, called "lived perspective." Rather than trying to capture the impression of a brief, fleeting moment in time, Cezanne sought to depict all the various perspectives that can be seen as one observes an object over time. Cezanne recognized that when we look at objects, we naturally move our heads and shift our perspective. To accomplish this sense of naturally shifting and moving observation, Cezanne moved his easel around as he painted and attempted to construct a combination of those perspectives. In doing this, Cezanne's ultimate goal was to render scenes in the way that humans actually engaged with and observed them.
Cezanne's use of "lived perspective" is even clearer in Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses. In this picture, shown in the first image, Cezanne painted several apples and a pot of primroses on a white tablecloth draped over a wooden table. However, if one draws a straight line across the table ledge from one corner to the other, as shown in the second image, it is clear that this table does not line up. This is because in reality, when we observe this scene, our eyes move and our perspective may change slightly from one corner of the table to the other. To capture this effect, Cezanne shifted his perspective and his easel in the middle of creating this painting.
Cezanne's innovative use of perspective was later adopted and taken to an extreme by Cubists, such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. These artists broke down different 3-dimensional perspectives into shards, laying them down together onto the flat, 2-dimensional surface of a painting. In Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso fractured the forms of the five women into various different perspectives and layered them on top of a broken down, jagged background. For example, this painting simultaneously shows the backside of the woman in the bottom right corner of the painting as well as the frontal view of her face. The combination of several different perspectives is even clearer in Reservoir at Horta de Ebro, which clearly draws from the painting, Gardanne, by Cezanne. Gardanne was a town near Provence, and the flat geometric rooftops that Cezanne recorded are easily translated into Picasso's Cubist rendering of a town with rooftops. In Reservoir at Horta de Ebro, this painting, rather than converging on a single point, the lines defining the structures in the picture clearly belong to different perspectives and angles that were combined on one canvas.