Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839 - Aix-en-Provence, October 22, 1906) was a French post-impressionist painter, considered the father of modern painting and whose works laid the foundations for the transition from the nineteenth-century artistic conception to the new and different artistic world of the twentieth century.
However, while he lived, Cézanne was an ignored painter who worked in great isolation. He distrusted critics, had few friends and until 1895 exhibited only occasionally. He was a "painter's painter", ignored by critics and the public, being appreciated only by some impressionists and at the end of his life by the new generation.
Paul Cézanne's Biography
Paris
He enrolled at the Swiss Academy (Académie Suisse), a private academy where he worked with models from life and where there were no exams or lessons, all in preparation for the entrance exam to the École des Beaux-Arts. At the Louvre Museum he discovered the work of Caravaggio and the circle of Velázquez, which profoundly marked his artistic evolution.
When his application to the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) was rejected, he returned to Aix and took a job in his father's bank. However, in 1862 he decided to return to Paris to devote himself definitively to painting, and his father gave him a pension of 125 francs.
He resumed his friendship with Zola and continued his studies at the Swiss Academy, where he met Guillaumin and Camille Pissarro, a painter older than him but little recognized, who lived with his large family in a rural area on the outskirts of Paris. Cézanne was immediately attracted to the more radical elements of the Parisian art world.
He particularly admired the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and among the younger artists Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, who exhibited works of a style and subject matter shocking to their contemporaries. The controversy between the official art and the new painters led to the creation in 1863 of the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected), where works not accepted by the official jury of the Paris Salon were shown.
The official Salon, for its part, rejected all the works he submitted from 1864 to 1869. In 1864 he spent the summer in Aix-en-Provence, the same year in which an exhibition of Delacroix's work was held, allowing Cézanne to get to know his painting in depth. 1869 is the year in which he meets the model Marie-Hortense Fiquet.
In 1870 the Salon rejected his Portrait of Achille Emperaire, considering it unacceptable because it did not respect perspective or anatomical correctness, judging it "on the borderline of the grotesque". When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870, Cézanne and Hortense left Paris for L'Estaque, near Marseille, thus avoiding enlistment.
He was declared a fugitive in January 1871, but the war ended in February and the couple was able to return to Paris in the summer. In January of the following year, 1872, they had their son Paul in Paris. They then moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he lived at Dr. Gachet's house. Cézanne's mother knew of the family events, but not his father, to whom Hortense's existence was not mentioned for fear of incurring his wrath.
In Auvers he deepened his friendship with Pissarro, who lived in Pontoise. Initially, it was the relationship of a master to his pupil, with Pissarro exerting a formative influence on the younger artist. For a long time afterward, Cézanne described himself as Pissarro's pupil, referring to him as "God the Father" and saying "We all came from Pissarro."
Under Pissarro's tutelage, in the short period between 1872 and 1873, Cézanne moved from dark tones to bright colors and began to concentrate on scenes of rural life. Over the next decade, their excursions to paint landscapes together from life in Louveciennes and Pontoise led to a collaborative working relationship between equals.
Leaving Hortense in the Marseilles region, Cézanne moved between Paris and Provence. Thanks to Pissarro, he met "uncle" Tanguy in Paris in 1873. He was a color merchant who accepted paintings as payment for the materials he sold to painters. Although he seemed to have less mastery of technique than the other Impressionists, Cézanne was accepted into the group.
He exhibited at the first Impressionist show held at the photographer Nadar's studio in 1874, A Modern Olympia, Landscape of Auvers-sur-Oise and The House of the Hanged Man were exhibited. These works were mocked, but the third was eventually sold (now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris).
In 1875, he came to the attention of the collector Victor Chocquet, whose commissions gave him some financial relief. He spent the summer of 1876 at L'Estaque, which gave him the opportunity to paint two seascapes. He did not take part in the second Impressionist exhibition, but he did take part in the third (1877) held at Rue Pelletier, with sixteen works, including watercolors, still lifes, landscapes, a painting of bathers and a portrait of the collector Chocquet.
The commercial success of the Impressionists was already limited in itself, and within this group, Cézanne's works had the most unfavorable reception. His paintings provoked hilarity, indignation and sarcasm.
The critic Louis Leroy said of Chocquet's portrait, "This head that looks so peculiar, with the color of an old boot, would impress [a pregnant woman] and provoke yellow fever in the fruit of her womb before its entry into the world." Cézanne did not exhibit with the group again.
Provence
Cézanne spent 1878 in the French Midi with Hortense and her son. In March, his father discovered Hortense's affair and threatened to break with him financially but in September decided to raise his allowance to 400 francs. In 1879-80 he spent part of the winter in Melun, taking the opportunity to paint the snow-covered landscape.
Among the masterpieces of this period is the view of the Maincy Bridge. In August 1880 he went to Zola's house in Médan, on the banks of the Seine, where he met Huysmans and took the opportunity to paint in the open air. His father, due to the life he led, stopped sending him help.
In May 1881 he met Gauguin at Pissarro's house in Pontoise and in October he returned to Aix, where his father Louis-Auguste made him a studio at Jas de Bouffan. It was on the upper floor and was provided with a large window that allowed the northern light to enter but interrupting the line of the eaves, which is still appreciated.
The Cézanne family definitively took up residence in L'Estaque and from then on only rarely left Provence. The move reflects a new independence from the impressionists centered in Paris and the painter's preference for the south, his native land.
In L'Estaque he was visited by Renoir (1882), who was impressed by the beauty of the landscape. That year was the only time he was able to exhibit at the Paris Salon, thanks to the intervention of his friend and artist Antoine Guillemet, Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, father of the artist, reading L'Événement (also known as The Artist's Father), 1866 (National Gallery, Washington).
He received little recognition from the official critics. By then, he stopped working closely with Pissarro. He had met the painter Monticelli in Marseilles in the 1860s and between 1878 and 1884 the two artists often painted landscapes together, once touring the countryside of Aix for a month. In 1883 Manet died, news that affected Cézanne. In December Monet and Renoir joined him at L'Estaque.
The year 1886 was crucial: he married Hortense and, in October, his father died. He left her the estate he had acquired in 1859. Cézanne was forty-seven years old and finally achieved financial independence, thanks to the large inheritance he received, although he continued to maintain his social isolation.
It is the year of his break with Émile Zola, after the latter used him, to a large extent, as a model for the failed and tragic artist Claude Lantier, in The Work. Cézanne felt the novel was unseemly and a betrayal by his childhood friend, so they broke off their friendship and never saw each other again.
By 1888 the family was in the former mansion, Jas de Bouffan, a solid building and grounds with outbuildings. It is now owned by the city, though with less land, and is open to the public on a limited basis. In 1889 he exhibited The House of the Hanged Man at the Universal Exposition. The following year, he exhibited in Brussels with The XX, a group of very active painters.
However, his idyllic period at Jas de Bouffan was only temporary. From 1890 until his death, disturbing events occurred that made him isolate himself even more, devoting himself exclusively to painting. Between 1887 and 1893, he only received visits from a few insiders, such as the art dealers J. Tanguy and Ambroise Vollard.
Problems began with the onset of diabetes in 1890, destabilizing his personality to the point that relations with others were again affected. He traveled to Switzerland, with Hortense and her son, perhaps hoping to restore their relationship. Cézanne, however, returned to live in Provence; Hortense and Paul the younger, to Paris.
Financial needs forced Hortense to return to Provence but in separate dwellings. Cézanne moved in with his mother and sister.
In 1891 he returned to Catholicism, although religious images were rare in his late work. Cézanne maintained that "When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to an object that is God's work, such as a tree or a flower. If it clashes, it is not art".
In 1895 his first solo exhibition, organized by Vollard, was held with 100 canvases. This dealer promoted Cézanne's work with great success during the following years, making his price rise, as can be seen in the prices of the Duret and Tanguy sales (1894) and the Chocquet sale of 1899.
In 1897 his mother died, which allowed him to reconcile with his wife. He sold Jas de Bouffan and rented a place on Rue Boulegon, where he built a studio. He also rented a room at the Château Noir, near Aix, where he prepared a small studio. He spent some time at Le Tholonet, on the slope of the Sainte-Victoire mountain, making it the subject of his painting, as well as the Bibémus quarry.
His paintings became well known and sought after and he gained the respect of a new generation of painters. Despite growing public recognition and financial success, Cézanne preferred to work in artistic isolation, usually painting in Provence. In 1900 three of his canvases were included in the Universal Exhibition and thirteen in an exhibition organized by Paul Cassirer in Berlin, an occasion on which the poet Rainer Maria Rilke saw his work for the first time.
In 1901 he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. That same year, Maurice Denis presents his Homage to Cézanne, a painting in which a group of artists (Redon, Vuillard, Bonnard and Denis) can be seen around a still life painted by Cézanne and which had belonged to Gauguin.
The relationship between Cézanne and his wife remained stormy. He needed a place to be on his own. In 1901 he bought some land along the Chemin des Lauves ("Lauves Road"), an isolated road on the Lauves hill, and had a studio built there (the atelier, now open to the public), where the props of his works can still be seen, just as he left them.
From there you can see the Sainte-Victoire mountain. He painted there until his death. In the meantime, in 1902, he drafted a will excluding his wife from his inheritance and leaving everything to his son. Apparently the relationship was again broken; it is said that she burned his mother's mementos.
In 1903 the recognition of his work culminated, appearing in various exhibitions. Thus, the Salon d'Automne exhibited 33 of his canvases. Cézanne's works were also included in the Viennese Secession and the Berlin Secession.
Émile Bernard, who had already dedicated an article to Cézanne in 1892, worked with him for a whole month in 1904. That same year, the Salon d'Automne devoted an entire room to him, with 30 paintings and two drawings. In 1905 Vollard presented Cézanne's watercolors.
He was already a prestigious painter. Retrospective exhibitions followed one after another. Many young painters traveled to Aix-en-Provence to see him work and ask his advice during the last years of his life. However, both his style and his theories remain mysterious and cryptic; for some he was a naive primitive painter and for others a complicated master of technical procedures.
Death of Cézanne
One day, Cézanne was caught in a storm while working in the fields. Only after working for two hours in the downpour did he decide to return home; but on the way he fainted. He was taken home by a passing motorist. His housekeeper rubbed his arms and legs to restore circulation; as a result, he regained consciousness.
The next day, he intended to continue working, but later fainted; the model called for help; he was put to bed, in Lauves from where he never came out again. He died a few days later, on October 22, 1906, of pneumonia and was buried in the old cemetery in his beloved hometown of Aix-en-Provence.
After his death, his studio in Aix became a monument, Atelier Paul Cézanne, or les Lauves.
Paul Cézanne's Style
Cézanne attempted to achieve an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression and pictorial order. Like Zola with literary realism, Cézanne manifested a progressive interest in the representation of contemporary life, painting the world as it presented itself to his eyes, without concern for thematic idealization or stylistic affectation.
He strove to develop an authentic observation of the visible world through the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered everything he saw into simple forms and planes of color.
His statement, "I want to make Impressionism as solid and enduring as museum art," underscores his desire to unite the observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition. This is also evident in his claim to "revive Poussin from nature" (Vivifier Poussin sur nature).
His brushstrokes are very characteristic and easily recognizable, often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory. These small brushstrokes and planes of color combine to form complex fields, expressing both the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction of the observed nature.
Cézanne strove to understand and reflect the complexity of human visual perception. He wanted to offer an authentic vision of reality, and to this end he observes objects from different points of view, which leads him to represent them from different perspectives simultaneously. Cézanne's mature work shows the development of a solified, almost architectural style of painting.
The intensity of his colors, together with the apparent rigor of the compositional structure, indicate that, despite the artist's own frequent despair, he had synthesized the basic elements of representation and expressiveness of painting in a very personal way.
He was interested in the simplification of forms that occurred naturally to their geometric essence:
Everything in nature is modeled after the sphere, the cone, the cylinder. One must learn to paint on the basis of these simple figures; then one can do whatever one wants. Cézanne, 1904.
For example, a tree trunk can be conceived as a cylinder, a human head as a sphere. Furthermore, the concentrated attention with which he had recorded his observations of nature resulted in a profound exploration of binocular vision, which results from two simultaneous and slightly different visual perceptions, and gives us a perception of depth and a complex knowledge of spatial relationships.
We see two points of view simultaneously; Cézanne employed this aspect of visual perception in his painting to varying degrees. Observation of this fact, along with Cézanne's desire to capture the truth of his own perception, often led him to present the outlines of forms while at the same time attempting to show the distinctly different points of view of both the left and right eye.
Periods
Several periods in Cézanne's life and work have been described.
The dark period, Paris, 1861-1870
This is a period characterized by dark colors and an intense use of black, with thick pigments, very impastoed. His work differs greatly from his earlier watercolors and sketches from the École Spéciale de dessin in Aix-en-Provence in 1859, or from his later works.
The terms antisocial or violent, or also erotic or macabre are often used for these works. His subject matter is the figure in the landscape and comprises many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted. To this period belong:
- The Artist's Father (1866), National Gallery, London.
- Copy by Cézanne in the Louvre Museum of Lunch at Simon's House by Veronese 1860-1870.
- Bread and Eggs (1865), Cincinnati Art Museum.
- Portrait of Uncle Dominique (1866), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
- The Abduction (1867), Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
- Portrait of Achille Emperaire (1867-1868), Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
- The orgy (1867-1872), private collection.
- Black Marble Clock (1869-1870), private collection.
- Pastoral (1870), Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
- The Assassination (ca. 1870), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Impressionist period, Provence and Paris, 1870-1878
When Cézanne moved to L'Estaque in 1870, he changed his subjects to focus mainly on landscape. Settling in 1872, in Auvers (Val-d'Oise), he began his close working relationship with Pissarro, who lived in nearby Pontoise.
Along with Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and a few other painters, Pissarro had developed a style for working outdoors (en plein air) quickly and on a reduced scale, which consisted of using small touches of pure colors, without resorting to preliminary sketches or drawings.
In this way, they intended to capture the fleeting light effects as well as their visual interpretation, also ephemeral, of nature. Under the influence of Pissarro, Cézanne began to abandon the academic norms and the somber, heavily impastoed palette that characterized him.
His canvases became much brighter, with light colors, choosing primary colors and their complements, as well as forcing him to observe reality attentively. His favorite subjects are landscapes. He worked from direct observation and gradually developed an aerial and light painting style.
- The House of the Hanged Man, 1872-73, M. d'Orsay, Paris.
- View of Auvers, ca. 1873, Art Institute of Chicago.
- A Modern Olympia, 1873-74, M. d'Orsay, Paris.
- Bathers, 1874-1875, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
- Madame Cézanne in the Red Armchair, 1877, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
- Still Life of the Tureen, ca. 1877, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
- Still Life of Vase and Fruit, ca. 1877, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Maturity Period, Provence, 1878-1890
When Cézanne took up permanent residence in Provence in the early 1880s, he became independent of the Paris-centered Impressionists and demonstrated his preference for the south, his native country and its landscape. Isolation and concentration, as well as the uniqueness of his quest, could be pointed to as responsible for the incredible evolution his style underwent during the 1880s and 1890s.
Hortense's brother had a house overlooking the Sainte-Victoire mountain in Estaque. A series of paintings of this mountain from 1880-1883 and others of Gardanne from 1885-1888 are sometimes referred to as the "Constructive Period." From 1888 to 1890 he was interested in the human figure, painting a series of pictures with characters from the Commedia dell'arte, moving on, from 1890, to another series on Card Players, possibly inspired by the work on the same subject by Louis Le Nain.
- The Bridge of Maincy (1879-1880), Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
- Three Bathers (1879-1882), Musée du Petit Palais, Paris.
- Rocks at L'Estaque (1882-1885), Museum of Art of São Paulo.
- The Mountain of Sainte Victoire (1885-1887), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
- View of the Village of Gardanne (1886), Barnes Foundation, Lower Merion.
- Shrove Tuesday (1888), Pushkin Museum, Moscow.
- Harlequin (1889-1890), National Gallery of Art (Washington).
Final Period, Provence, 1890-1905
In 1895 he made a germinal visit to the Bibémus quarries and climbed the Sainte-Victoire mountain. The labyrinthine landscape of the quarries must have particularly impressed him, for he rented a cottage there in 1897. It is believed that these forms inspired the cubist style in embryo. Cézanne concentrated on a few genres, in which he was equally adept: still lifes, portraits (and self-portraits), landscapes and studies of bathers (nudes in the landscape).
Regarding the latter, Cézanne was forced to draw from his imagination, due to the lack of available nude models. Like his landscapes, his portraits were painted from what was familiar, so that not only his wife and son, but also local peasants, children, and his dealer, served as models.
Cézanne continued to paint directly from life with brilliant Impressionist-like coloring, but gradually simplified the application of paint to the point where he seemed to be able to express volume with only a few juxtaposed brushstrokes of color. Later experts would come to claim that Cézanne had discovered a way to represent both light and the forms of nature simply through color.
He seemed to reintroduce a formal structure that the Impressionists had abandoned, without sacrificing the sensation and luminous vivacity achieved by them. Cézanne himself spoke of modulating color instead of modeling the chiaroscuro of traditional painting.
By this he meant that he supplanted the artificial conventions of representation (modeling) by a more expressive system (modular) that was even closer to nature or, as the artist himself said, "parallel to nature". For Cézanne, the solution to all the technical problems of Impressionism lay in using color in a more orderly and expressive way than that of his fellow Impressionists.
Cézanne felt that he never fully achieved his goal, so he left most of his works unfinished and destroyed many others.
He lamented his failure to represent the human figure and, indeed, the great works with human figures of his last years reveal curious distortions that seem to be dictated by the rigor of the system of chromatic modulation that he imposed on his own representations. An example of this is the whole series of paintings dedicated to the theme of bathers.
- The Card Players (Les Joueurs de cartes) (five versions between 1890 and 1895), M. d'Orsay, Paris.
- Woman with a Coffee Pot (La Femme à la cafetière) (ca. 1890-1895), M. d'Orsay, Paris.
- Still Life with Apples and Oranges (ca. 1895-1900), M. d'Orsay, Paris.
- Still Life with Onions (ca. 1895-1900), M.º d'Orsay, Paris
- The Mountain of Sainte-Victoire, View from Bibémus (ca. 1898-1900), Baltimore Museum of Art.
- The Great Bathers (1904-1906), National Gallery, London.
- La Montagne Sainte-Victoire et le Château Noir, (1904-1906).
- Portrait of a Peasant (1905-1906), Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.
- The Great Bathers (1906), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
Legacy of Paul Cézanne
It can be said that Cézanne created the bridge between the impressionism of the 19th century and the new style of the beginning of the 20th century, cubism.
For many years Cézanne's work was known only to his former Impressionist colleagues and to a few radical young artists in the post-impressionist line, including Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. This later generation accepted virtually all of Cézanne's oddities.
Cézanne's 1907 retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly impacted the direction of the Parisian avant-garde, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the 19th century and the advent of Cubism.
It was Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena that inspired Picasso, Braque, Gris and others to experiment with multiple, even more complex visions of the same subject, and, in time, to fracture the form.
There is a phrase, attributed to both Matisse and Picasso, that "Cézanne is the father of us all." Matisse admired his use of color and Picasso developed Cézanne's flat compositional structure to create the Cubist style.
One of the paintings in his series, The Card Players, became in 2012 the work of art sold publicly for the most money, when it was purchased by the Qatari royal family for more than $250 million.[citation needed]