Paul Cezanne
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
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.
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 kindof
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.
Cézanne's first stay in Paris lasted only five months. The
instability of his personality gave way to severe depression almost
immediately when he found that he was not as proficient technically
as some of the students at the Académie Suisse, the studio where he
began his instruction. He stayed as long as he did only because of
the encouragement of the writer Émile Zola, with whom he had formed
a close friendship at the Collège Bourbon. Returning to Aix, Cézanne
made a new attempt to content himself with working at his father's
bank, but after a year he returned to Paris with strengthened
resolution to stay. During his formative period, from about 1858 to
1872, Cézanne alternated between living in Paris and visiting Aix.
The early 1860s was a period of great vitality for Parisian literary
and artistic activity. The conflict had reached its height between
the Realist painters, led by Gustave Courbet,and the official
Académie des Beaux-Arts, which rejected from its annual
exhibition—and thus from public acceptance—all paintings not in the
academic Neoclassical or Romantic styles. In 1863 the emperor
Napoleon III decreedthe opening of a Salon des Refusés to counter
the growing agitation in artistic circles over painters refused by
the Salonof 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. Most
of these artists were only in their 20s (as was Cézanne) and were
just forming their styles; they were to become, with the exception
of Manet, the Impressionist school. Cézanne's friend Zola was
passionately devoted to their cause, but Cézanne's friendship with
the other artists was at first inhibited by his touchiness and
deliberate rudeness, born of extreme shyness and a moodiness that
was offended by their convivial ways. Nevertheless, he was inspired
by their revolutionary spirit as he sought to synthesize the
influences of Courbet, who pioneered the unsentimental treatment of
commonplace subjects, and of the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix,
whose compositions, emphasizing colour instead of line, greatly
impressed Cézanne.
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. He took with
him Marie-Hortense Fiquet, a young woman who had become his mistress
the previous year and whom he married in 1886. 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 approachhis 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 birthto 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 learnthe 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. The two artists painted together intermittently through
1874, taking their canvases all over the countryside and painting
out-of-doors, a technique that was still considered radical. From
this time on,Cézanne was to devote himself almost exclusively to
landscapes, still lifes, and, later, portraits. Pissarro persuaded
Cézanne to lighten his colours and showed him the advantages of
using the broken bits of colour and short brushstrokes that were the
trademark of the Impressionists and that Cézanne came to use
regularly, although with a different effect, in his later work. Even
while under Pissarro's guidance, however, Cézanne painted pictures
clearly indicating that his vision was unique and that his purpose
was quite different from that of the Impressionists. Although he
used the techniques of these young artists, he did not share their
concern with emphasizing the objective vision presented by the light
emanating from an object; rather, his explorations emphasized the
underlying structure of the objects he painted. Already he was
composing with cubic masses and architectonic lines; his strokes,
unlike those of the Impressionists, were not strewn with colour, but
they complemented each other in a chromatic unity. His most famous
painting of this period, The House of the Suicide (1873),
illustrates these forces at work.
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 in1877 were the most
severely criticized of any works exhibited, he continued to work
diligently, periodically goingback 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. The single exception to this lack of patronage
was the connoisseur Victor Chocquet, whose portrait he painted in
1877. After the second Impressionist show Cézanne broke
professionally with Impressionism, although he continued to maintain
friendly relations with “the humble and colossal Pissarro,” with
Monet, “the mightiest of us all,” and with Renoir, whom he also
admired. Dismayed by the public's reaction to his works, however, he
isolated himself more and more in both Paris and Aix, and he
effectively ended his long friendship with Zola, as much because of
neurotic distrust and jealousy as from disappointment at Zola's
“popular” writing, which his antisocial and single-minded
disposition found incomprehensible.
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. These landscapes contain
compositions of grand and calm horizontals in which the even
up-and-down strokes create a clean prismatic effect and an
implacable blue sea spreads wide across the canvases. Like all his
mature landscapes, these paintings have the exciting and radically
new quality of simultaneously representing deep space and flat
design. Cézanne knew well how to portray solidity and depth; his
method was that used by the Impressionists to indicate form. In his
own words, “I seek to render perspectiveonly through colour.” The
painter's intelligence and eye wereable to strip away that which was
diffuse and superimposed in the view of a given mass, in order to
analyze its constituent elements. In works such as these, he chose
to rediscover a more substantial reality of simple forms behind the
glimmering veil of appearances: “Everything in Nature ismodeled
after the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. One must learn to
paint from these simple figures.” At the same time, such pictures
present shimmering harmonies of colour that can be seen as totally
flat designs, without depth. Other striking landscapes from this
period are the prismatic landscapes of Gardanne (The Mills of
Gardanne, c. 1885) and the series of monumental compositions in
which Mont Sainte-Victoire near Aix becomes a mythical presence.
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 paintingportrays 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.
Full of the intensity of feeling aroused by his surroundings,
Cézanne's art was also deeply cerebral, a conscious search for
intellectual solutions to problems of representation. Although he
had great admiration for many other painters, he disagreed with the
objectives of all but himself; painters who narrated events, as did
the Romantics and the Old Masters, and painters who only represented
nature—as did the Impressionists—seemed to him to lack a standard of
purpose that only his own art possessed. At the same time, he was
not a truly abstract painter, for the ideas of structure that he
wished to express were about reality, not design. In this, he was
the major source of inspiration for the Cubist painters.
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 withdrew
gradually from his wife and from the friends of his youth. By the
turn of the century his fame had begun to spread, and, since he was
rarely seen by anyone, he became something of a legendary figure. 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, thissick 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.
Assessment
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.”
René Huyghe
