Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne, (born January 19, 1839, Aix-en-Provence, France—died October 22, 1906, Aix-en-Provence), French painter, one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne’s art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the conventional values of painting in the 19th century because of his insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself, regardless of subject matter. See also the Britannica Classic by Roger Fry: Cézanne.
Early life and work
Cézanne was the son of a well-to-do bourgeois family. He received a classical education at the Collège Bourbon in Aix. In 1858, under the direction of his father—a successful banker determined to have his son enter the same profession—Cézanne entered the law school of the University of Aix-en-Provence. He had no taste for the law, however, having decided at an early age to pursue some kind of artistic career, and after two years he persuaded his father, with the support of his mother’s entreaties, to allow him to study painting in Paris.
The early 1860s was a period of great vitality for Parisian literary and artistic activity. In 1863 the emperor Napoleon III decreed the opening of a Salon des Refusés to counter the growing agitation in artistic circles over painters refused by the Salon of the Académie. The works of the Refusés were almost universally denounced by critics—a reaction that consolidated the revolutionary spirit of these painters. Cézanne, whose tastes had soon shifted away from the academic, became associated with the most advanced members of this group, including Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas.
During this period Cézanne began to develop a style that was violent and dark; he painted scenes with harsh extremes of light and shadow and with a looseness and vigour that are remarkable for the time but that can be traced to the influence of Delacroix’s swirling compositions. The sensitive dynamism of this youthful period, with the inner feverishness that it reveals, foreshadows the daring innovations of Fauvism and of modern Expressionism, particularly the works of Maurice de Vlaminck and Georges Rouault.
Impressionist years
In July 1870, with the outbreak of the Franco-German War, Cézanne left Paris for Provence, partly to avoid being drafted. The Cézannes settled at Estaque, a small village on the coast of southern France, not far from Marseille. There he began to paint landscapes, exploring ways to depict nature faithfully and at the same time to express the feelings it inspired in him. He began to approach his subjects the way his Impressionist friends did; in two landscapes from this time, Snow at Estaque (1870–71) and The Wine Market (1872), the composition is that of his early style, but already more disciplined and more attentive to the atmospheric, rather than dramatic, quality of light.
In January 1872 Marie-Hortense gave birth to a son. Soon afterward, at the invitation of Camille Pissarro, Cézanne took his family to live at Pontoise in the valley of the Oise River. There and at the nearby town of Auvers he began seriously to learn the techniques and theories of Impressionism from Pissarro, who of his painter friends was the only one patient enough to teach him despite his difficult personality.
In 1874 Cézanne returned to Paris and participated in the first official show of the Impressionists. Although the paintings that Cézanne showed there and at the third show in 1877 were the most severely criticized of any works exhibited, he continued to work diligently, periodically going back to soak up the light of Provence. He made sojourns to Estaque in 1876, and in 1878 to Aix-en-Provence, where he had to endure the insults of his tyrannical father, whose financial help he needed to survive since his canvases were still not finding buyers.
Development of his mature style
During this period of isolation, from the late 1870s to the early ’90s, Cézanne developed his mature style. His landscapes from this period, such as The Sea at L’Estaque (1878–79), are perhaps the first masterpieces of the mature Cézanne.
Cézanne was to use essentially the same approach in his portraits. Some of the best known are Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Armchair (1890–94), Woman with Coffee-Pot (1890–94), and The Card Players (1890–92). This last painting portrays a theme that Cézanne treated in five different versions. Except for the card-player paintings, in which the sober dignity of the men is well expressed, there is no attempt in Cézanne’s portraits to hint at the sitter’s character. In most cases he treats the background with the same care as the subject and often violently distorts facial colour to bring it in harmony with the total composition. Cézanne also applied his principles of representation to his extraordinary still lifes, of which he painted more than 200. He organized them as though they were architectural drawings, giving the most familiar objects significance and force through the intensity of the colour and the essential simplicity of the form.
After his father’s death in 1886, Cézanne became financially independent. He had married Marie-Hortense six months earlier, and, after a year in Paris in 1888, Marie-Hortense and their son moved there permanently. Cézanne himself then settled in Aix except for a few visits to the capital, to Fontainebleau, to Jura in Switzerland, and to the home of Monet in Giverny, where he met the sculptor Auguste Rodin. In 1895 the art dealer Ambroise Vollard set up the first one-man exhibition of Cézanne’s work (more than 100 canvases), but, although young artists and some art lovers were beginning to show enthusiasm for his painting, the public remained unreceptive.
Final years
As the 19th century came to a close, Cézanne’s art was increasing in depth, in concentrated richness of colour, and in skill of composition. He felt capable of creating a new vision. From 1890 to 1905 he produced masterpieces, one after another: 10 variations of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, 3 versions of the Boy in a Red Waist-Coat, countless still-life images, and the Bathers series, in which he attempted to return to the classic tradition of the nude and explore his concern for its sculptural effect in relation to the landscape. He was obsessed with his work, which was time-consuming since he painted slowly.
Cézanne had always found it difficult to get along with people, and, deeply upset by the death of his mother in 1897. He exhibited at the widely attended annual Salon des Indépendants in 1899 and at the Universal Exposition held in Paris in 1900, and his works were finally sought after by galleries. The Caillebotte collection opened at the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris with two Cézannes. The National Gallery in Berlin purchased a landscape as early as 1900. Young artists esteemed him; in 1901, the young Symbolist Maurice Denis painted Homage à Cézanne, a picture of artists admiring one of his still lifes.
Cézanne’s last period, the fruit of intense meditation in solitude, reached the heights of lyricism, achieving in its revelation of life in nature what only the greatest artists can attain in their lifetime. “The landscape,” he said, “becomes human, becomes a thinking, living being within me. I become one with my picture.…We merge in an iridescent chaos.” In the apparent immobility of the Provençal countryside, he found geologic forces trapped in the rocks, powerful saps coursing through the trees. With a few light brushstrokes, this sick and misanthropic old man, shut up in his studio, was able to breathe life into the last Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings (1898–1902) and the views of Château-Noir. In the last of the great Bathers paintings (1900–05) he succeeded in integrating monumental nudes with a landscape in his structural vision of reality.
The diabetes from which Cézanne had been suffering for a long time became more serious, and in October 1906 he finally succumbed to a harsh chill caught while working in the fields. He died a few days later and was buried in Aix-en-Provence.
Legacy of Paul Cézanne
Although critical sympathy and public acceptance came to Cézanne only in the last decade of his career, his quest to see through appearances to the logic of underlying formal structure always drew admiration among his colleagues. His hope that his paintings would serve as a form of education for other artists was achieved when a number of important painters purchased his work, including Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Kazimir Malevich, Henri Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp. A 1907 retrospective showing of his works (56 paintings) was held at the Salon d’Automne in Paris and won considerable acclaim. That same year Picasso created his seminal Demoiselles d’Avignon (“Women of Avignon”), clearly inspired by Cézanne’s groundbreaking Bathers of 1900–05. Indeed, Cézanne’s intellectual approach to formal issues—particularly his spatial explorations—laid the foundation for Picasso and other artists’ subsequent explorations with Cubism, while his investigations of colour and brushstroke influenced Matisse and other Fauve artists in the first decade of the century.
Over the years the public has also embraced his work, although, as his first biographer, Julius Meier-Graef, observed in 1904, “Except for Van Gogh, no one in modern art has made stronger demands on aesthetic receptivity than Cézanne.” Cézanne is now recognized as the most significant precursor of 20th-century formal abstraction in painting, as he developed a purely pictorial language that balanced analysis with emotion and structure with lyricism. Picasso offered the most succinct assessment of Cézanne’s role for subsequent generations of artists, declaring that he was “the father of us all.”
Source: Wikipedia