Ernest Hemingway never acknowledged the influence of any artist in any medium more generously than that of the French painter Paul Cézanne. From the 1920s, Hemingway’s character Nick Adams “wanted to write like Cézanne painted.” As an older writer, Hemingway visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art to gush about the painter's influence on his approach to writing.
One True Podcast turns to Carol Armstrong, professor of Art History at Yale and a leading Cézanne scholar, to help us understand how appreciating the artist's work can illuminate Hemingway’s approach to writing. Armstrong discusses Cézanne’s historical context, his modernist leanings, his interest in landscape and movement, and his own relationship with the written word. Join us to discover what Hemingway meant when he vowed to “do the country like Cézanne.”
This episode was recorded on June 15, 2020.