Carol Armstrong’s Cezanne’s Gravity wins prestigious award

Carol Armstrong's Cezanne's Gravity wins prestigious award

June 11, 2019

Congratulations to Carol Armstrong whose book Cézanne’s Gravity, published in 2018 by Yale University Press, has won the 2019 Robert Motherwell Book Award for an Outstanding Book on Modernism in the Arts, presented by the Daedalus Foundation. The prestigious award is judged by a panel of leading historians and critics.

The Daedalus Foundation describes Cézanne’s Gravity as “an original and ambitious reassessment of the art and influence Paul Cézanne. Whereas previous studies of the artist have often looked at his work in relation to its influence on Cubism and the development of abstraction, Carol Armstrong examines Cézanne’s painting from a phenomenological and historical perspective. In this remarkably rich book, Armstrong convincingly relates the spatial structures of Cézanne’s paintings to Albert Einstein’s notions of space and time, and to the expansive, evocatively non-narrative works of artists and writers such as Virginia Woolf, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Helen Frankenthaler. Written with an exceptionally fine combination of scholarly rigor and attention to the physicality Cézanne’s of paintings, this book also offers a new methodology for art historical inquiry outside linear narratives.”