Why Cézanne Found It Impossible To Finish This Portrait
It was no secret that Cézanne had trouble applying the final swipe of his paint-filled palette knife to his canvases. The artist, who has often been called the father of modern art, was a perfectionist who was never satisfied with his own work, even when his peers were bowled over by it. (For that matter, he also never trusted their compliments or praise.)
The artist ripped up nearly complete paintings that didn’t please him. He abandoned finished canvases in the fields in which he painted them. And countless other works he simply didn’t finish for reasons spanning from dissatisfaction and loss of interest to just plain procrastination.
“I would rather smash my canvas than invent or imagine a detail,” Cézanne once said.