Corsican Landscape

By 1928 Paul Cézanne had been dead for more than 20 years, and his way of building a landscape out of plain, solid blocks had become a model for a whole generation of younger painters. Franziska Zach, an Austrian painter of 28, took it in on her journeys through Ireland, the south of France and Corsica in 1928 and 1929. You can see it in these houses. They are stacked one behind another as white cubes and wedges of roof, with almost no detail. The space works in layers, from a pair of trees in the foreground, past the houses and an arched gateway, to a band of sea under a heavy sky. The colours are held back to ochre, rust brown and grey-green blue. She signed the canvas low down on the left, simply "Zach", beside the tree trunks.