Paul Cézanne

French painter, one of the greatest of the Postimpressionists, 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 through its insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself. He has been called the father of modern painting.

Cézanne's subjects are principally landscape and still life, with a few portraits; his colours are strong yet sober. He emphasized the underlying structure of his subjects rather than the objective vision offered by the light they reflected. His works include "Card Players" (1890-92) and numerous studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence (e.g., "Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine Trees," 1885-87, and "Mont Sainte-Victoire, seen from the Bibemus Quarry," 1897

Cézanne was the son of a well-to-do bourgeois family. He received an excellent classical education at the Collège Bourbon in Aix. In 1858, under the direction of his father--a successful banker determined that his son should 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 on some kind of artistic career, and, after two years of vacillation, he persuaded his father, with the support of his mother's entreaties, to allow him to study painting in Paris.
 

Early work in Paris

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 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 the 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 of this group, including Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, 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 these young men 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 supported by their revolutionary inspiration as he sought to synthesize the influences of Courbet, who pioneered in the unsentimental treatment of commonplace subjects, and the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, whose compositions, depending on colour instead of line, greatly impressed Cézanne.

During this period Cézanne began to develop a style that was almost opposite to that of his mature works. It 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 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 January 1872 a son, Paul, was born to Cézanne and Marie-Hortense. 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 with his difficult personality to teach him. 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 brush strokes 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 Impressionist techniques, he emphasized the underlying structure of the objects he painted rather than the objective vision presented by the light that emanated from them, which was the main concern of the Impressionists. 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 Suicide's House" (1872-73), illustrates these forces at work.

In 1874, with the first official show of the Impressionists, Cézanne returned to Paris. Although the paintings that Cézanne exhibited at the first Impressionist show and at their third show in 1877 were the most severely criticized of any works there, he continued to work diligently, periodically going back to soak up the light of Provence. He made sojourns at Estaque in 1876, and in 1878 at 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 at both Paris and Aix, and he effectively ended his long friendship with Émile Zola, as much because of neurotic distrust and jealousy as from disappointment at Zola's "popular" writing, which his antisocial and single-minded genius found incomprehensible.

Development of his mature style (1878-90).

Cézanne was to use essentially the same approach in his portraits. Some of the best known are a portrait of his son in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1885), "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 in his extraordinary still lifes, of which he painted more than 200. He organizes 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 intellectual, a conscious search for solutions to problems of representation. Although he had great admiration for many other painters, he disagreed with the objectives of all but himself; painters that narrated events, as did the Romantics and the old masters, and painters that only represented nature--however perfectly, as did the Impressionists--seemed to him to lack a purity 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. He was, however, the major source of inspiration for the Cubists Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Juan Gris.

After his father's death in 1886, Cézanne was able to be independent financially. He had married Marie-Hortense six months earlier and, after a year in Paris in 1888, he installed her and their son there permanently. Cézanne himself then settled in Aix except for a few visits to the capital, to Fontainebleau, to Giverny, to Jura in Switzerland, and to the home of Claude Monet, 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 the young artists and some art lovers were beginning to show enthusiasm for his painting, the public remained unreceptive.

Final years.

Cézanne had always had extreme difficulty in getting 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 Exposition Universelle 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 admired 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, which only the greatest artists can attain in their lifetime, in its revelation of life in nature. "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. The last of the great "Bathers" paintings (1900-05), in which he succeeds in integrating monumental nudes with a landscape in his structural vision of reality, was a profound inspiration to the major painters of the 20th century--particularly Picasso, who modeled his "Demoiselles d'Avignon" after it.

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. The following year, a retrospective showing of his works (56 paintings) was held at the Salon d'Automne in Paris and won considerable acclaim.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica Online