Paul Cézanne

French painter

• Born: January 19, 1839
• Birthplace: Aix-en-Provence, France
• Died: October 22, 1906
• Place of death: Aix-en-Provence, France

One of the leading figures of post-Impressionist painting, Cézanne had an innovative and brilliant style that challenged the conventions of nineteenth century art and had a major influence on twentieth century cubists and abstract artists.

Early Life

Paul Cézanne (say-zahn) was born in the south of France, not far from Marseilles and the Mediterranean. His father’s family came from the Italian Alpine village Cesana (hence the surname) in the seventeenth century and had a history of minor business activities. Louis-Auguste, Paul’s father, started out as a hat maker, at which he was a success, and eventually became a banker in Aix. He lived with Anne-Élisabeth-Honorine Aubert for several years before marrying her in 1844, and Paul was one of their children born before they were married. The family was financially secure, and Paul was educated locally. Interested in art, he took some instruction at the local École des Beaux Arts. One of his closest friends then, and in later life, was Émile Zola, who was to become one of France’s greatest men of letters.

Cézanne’s enthusiasm for art was tolerated by his father, but he was expected to make a career in the law. He was a good student and entered the University of Aix-en-Provence to study law, but after passing his first-year exams, he asked his father if he might join his friend Zola, who had gone to Paris to make his way as a journalist. Cézanne wanted to study at the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His father allowed him to quit school in late 1859, but he kept him in Aix until April, 1861, when he took him to Paris to study as an artist. Cézanne was refused entrance to the school and joined the Académie Suisse, a studio in which young artists banded together to work with live models. He was virtually untrained, and his work showed little promise. Often difficult and inclined to be morose and withdrawn, he was often unhappy with himself and his work. His father supported him, but not generously. In September he gave up, returned to Aix, and joined the family bank.

Life’s Work

Cézanne’s self-portraits reveal a thick-set, hard-mouthed peasant glaring out of the canvas, and if there is one thing that marks him as a man and as an artist it is his weighty, determined stubbornness that the paintings suggest. Once back in Aix, he began to draw again and to take some classes locally. In 1862, his father gave in once again and allowed him to return to Paris, and he began to associate with a group of young artists whose work had been rejected by the conservative power structure of artists, critics, and teachers who controlled the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the annual Salon, an exhibition of supposedly the best art being produced in France. Camille Pissarro became his closest friend, but he also came to know Édouard Manet , Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet, all, in one way or another, out of step with established standards of taste in the art world.

This group of painters would ultimately be called the “Impressionists,” a name that was originally imposed on them with contempt because of their insistence on a new, looser, lighter style of painting in which they attempted to catch the transitory nature of visual experience. There was considerable difference in their individual contributions to the movement, and it can be argued that Manet, whose work was sometimes accepted by the Salon, was on the fringe of the group. The artist most clearly not quite an Impressionist was Cézanne. After attempting to get his work accepted by the Salon and being pointedly rejected, he joined the Impressionists in exhibitions outside official circles, and he continued to exhibit with them for several years; like them, he was to be ridiculed and neglected.

During the late 1860’s, he established a relationship with the model Marie-Hortense Fiquet, who was often a subject of his paintings; they had a child, Paul, in 1872. Like his father, Cézanne did not wed his mistress for several years. He sold practically nothing, was still dependent upon his father, and often disappeared for months at a time. In 1877, he exhibited for the last time with the Impressionists and was so derided for his work that he simply gave up public exhibitions.

Cézanne’s early work was often awkward, his colors muddy, his themes uninviting. Rape, murder, or other emotionally excessive subjects seemed to mirror personal problems with which he was attempting to deal in his art. There is much piling on of paint with the palette knife, and a sense of great power not quite successfully expressed. During the 1870’s, he was closest to being something of an Impressionist. He spent a considerable amount of time with Pissarro, who was something of a teacher-father to him, and began to paint less morbid subjects, his colors becoming brighter, and his draftsmanship more sophisticated. He was still tonally serious, and he never quite gave way to the looser, feathery style of the Impressionists. Where the Impressionists attempted to record the evanescence of experience, its constant change, he chose to seek its basic structures, painting the planes, the conjunctions, the solidity of objects.

By 1880, Cézanne had finally developed a style all his own, entirely different from that of any other painter, incorporating the “open air” freshness of Impressionism to the austere monumentality of painters such as Nicolas Poussin and Gustave Courbet. In a sense, he invented himself.

Cézanne went his own way, almost forgotten, spending most of his time around Aix, painting landscapes, still lifes, and portraits very slowly, painstakingly, in planes of color placed sometimes at seemingly perverse angles, eschewing line for mass, teasing volume, depth, and relationships out of small dabs of color, knowing that colors laid flatly side by side suggest depth or protrusion to the human eye. At close range such work resembles a jigsaw puzzle.

Cézanne seemed to reject the idea that a painting was supposed to be an accurate rendering of reality. His paintings start with reality but ultimately are independent of it: They are aesthetic experiences with their own internal logic. He often subverted the commonly held idea that paintings represent one point of view. He deliberately tipped one end of a table, while the other end was left perfectly flat. He represented his subjects from more than one point of view in ways that are often subtle shifts of perspective. What looks simply like bad draftsmanship was, in fact, deliberate distortion, which creates rhythms, associations, and patterns transcending normal representational painting.

This experimental urge is absorbed in a tender solemnity of tone that suggests that the paintings, however simple in subject, have a haunting metaphysical weight, often reminiscent of the same deep stillness in the work of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. The subject, ultimately, is less important than the experience of its aesthetic presence. Cézanne painted more than sixty studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a rather unimposing mountain that can be seen on the horizon just across the road from his last studio on the Chemin des Lauves on the outskirts of Aix. The paintings are all quite magnificent, all disturbingly alike factually and different aesthetically, often quite clearly presaging the cubist attempt to turn reality into design.

During the late 1890’s, Cézanne began to receive some public recognition, and a group of young artists became aware of the fact not only that he was a formidable painter, but also that he had broken new ground in how one might think about art.

Cézanne worked doggedly, never entirely satisfied, avoided by most because of his notorious irascibility, completely committed to his work. He was beginning to get the attention he had deserved, but seemed not to need it. Watercolors became more important than ever to him, proving his long-held theory that there was no such thing as line and modeling; there were only contrasts. His oils are gloriously rich in his later years, and his work kept exploring the old themes: a few apples, a jug, the old hill, bits and pieces that can still be seen on the tables in the studio as he left it. He suffered from diabetes but continued to work. He caught a cold while painting on October 15, 1906, but he was painting the next morning. However, he died on October 22, exactly one week later.

Significance

It is generally accepted that Paul Cézanne is one of the greatest artists in the history of painting. His own work as a colorist and as an exponent of an entirely original style in both oils and watercolors might be sufficient proof of this judgment, but he was much more than simply a superlative practitioner. For all of his rough provincialism, he was a theorist who not only put his theories into practice but also showed the way for the entirely new art of the twentieth century. It is difficult to think how that art might have gone had Cézanne not provided it with three singularly important clues.

Cézanne’s own work—beginning so unpromisingly, slowly accumulating form and individuality, absorbing the influences of the past and that of his contemporaries, especially the struggling Impressionists, blossoming into one of the most singularly distinctive styles in the history of painting—proved that there was always room for making art new if ambition, will, and talent could hold out against indifference, neglect, and derision.

Cézanne’s decision not to become a follower of Impressionism but to use it to go forward into his own realm of expression allowed him to discover one of the most important secrets behind one of the major movements of twentieth century painting: that just as light is always on the move across the landscape, so is the eye. Therefore, the point of view need not be fixed in a painting but can express that movement in the single canvas. This insight was the key needed to trigger the cubist movement in modern art.

Perhaps even more important, Cézanne proved that art need not necessarily be an accurate representation of what the eye sees. Styles had changed through the centuries, as had theories about how the artist was to represent reality. Cézanne argued for the proposition (and put it into action in his art) that the work of art might start in nature but need not simply reflect it. It could transcend reality; it could be abstract.

Cézanne had said it best: “The eye is not enough, reflection is needed.” Moreover, he had illustrated it best in paintings that at one and the same time could convey the aesthetic illusion of depth and the sense of flat design consistent with the nature of the medium. His one-man show of 1895, organized by his old friend Pissarro, started him on his way to the reputation he deserved. In 1907, a memorial showing of fifty-six paintings was displayed in Paris at the Salon which so long before had turned him away. From that moment onward, he was to be seen as the most influential painter of the century.

Bibliography

Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Nina Maria. Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Examines how Cézanne’s alliance with the region of Provence affected his innovative painting style and critical reputation. Illustrated with 120 color plates and halftones.

Callen, Anthea. Techniques of the Impressionists. London: New Burlington Books, 1987. So much of understanding Cézanne is dependent upon a recognition of the central concern of the artist and his Impressionist friends for technique. This book analyzes individual paintings by artists prior to the Impressionist period and during the period of Impressionist activity. Two Cézanne paintings are carefully discussed.

Cézanne, Paul. Paul Cézanne. Edited by Ellen H. Johnson. Great Artists 18. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1978. Contains a short, informed article by Johnson, which is mindful of the general audience. Large reproductions of several paintings, accompanied by short but sensible notes.

Harris, Nathaniel. The Art of Cézanne. New York: Excalibur Books, 1982. A short, inexpensive, but generously illustrated discussion of the artist’s life and painting.

Lewis, Wyndham. Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1914-1956. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969. Lewis was a great admirer of Cézanne, whom he speaks about with the cogency of a practitioner of the same trade.

Platzman, Steven. Cézanne: The Self-Portraits. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Explores how Cézanne’s many self-portraits reflect his emotions, his artistic development, and his view of himself and others. Includes reproductions of sixty paintings and drawings.

Rewald, John. Paul Cézanne: A Biography. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Based on the correspondence of the painter and his friends, this biography has a homey intimacy and easy charm.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Paul Cézanne: The Watercolours—A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Graphic Society Books, 1984. The watercolors have often been ignored, but they not only are first-class art in their own right but also provide another way of understanding the artist’s obsession with technique and the peculiar way he achieves dimensional effects by juxtaposing slabs of pure color.