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Paul Cézanne (19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne "is the father of us all" cannot be easily dismissed. Cézanne's
work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and
draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory
brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He
used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form
complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of
the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature. The
paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects, a
searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of
human visual perception. The
Cézannes came from the small town of Cesana now in West
Piedmont, and it has been assumed that their name came from Italian
origin. Paul Cézanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, in Provence in the south of France. On 22 February, Paul was baptized in the parish church, with his grandmother and uncle Louis as godparents. His father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne (28 July 1798 – 23 October 1886), was
the cofounder of a banking firm that prospered throughout the artist's
life, affording him financial security that was unavailable to most of
his contemporaries and eventually resulting in a large inheritance. On the other hand, his mother, Anne-Elisabeth Honorine Aubert (24 September 1814 – 25 October 1897), was vivacious and romantic, but quick to take offense. It was from her that Paul got his conception and vision of life. He also had two younger sisters, Marie and Rose, with whom he went to a primary school every day. At the age of ten, Paul entered the Saint Joseph school, where he studied drawing under Joseph Gibert, a Spanish monk, in Aix. In 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon (now Collège Mignet), where he met and became friends with Émile Zola, who was in a less advanced class, as well as Baptistin Baille — three friends who would come to be known as "les trois inséparables" (the three inseparables). He stayed there for six years, though in the last two years he was a day scholar. From
1859 to 1861, complying with his father's wishes, Cézanne
attended the law school of the University of Aix, while also receiving
drawing lessons. Going
against the objections of his banker father, he committed himself to
pursuing his artistic development and left Aix for Paris in 1861. He
was strongly encouraged to make this decision by Zola, who was already
living in the capital at the time. Eventually, his father reconciled
with Cézanne and supported his choice of career. Cézanne
later received an inheritance of 400,000 francs (£218,363.62) from his father, which rid him of all financial worries. In Paris, Cézanne met the Impressionist Camille Pissarro.
Initially the friendship formed in the mid 1860s between Pissarro and
Cézanne was that of master and disciple, with Pissarro exerting
a formative influence on the younger artist. Over the course of the
following decade their landscape painting excursions together, in Louveciennes and Pontoise, led to a collaborative working relationship between equals. His
early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and
comprises many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the
landscape, imaginatively painted. Later in his career, he became more
interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a
light, airy painting style that was to influence the Impressionists
enormously. Nevertheless, in Cézanne's mature work we see the
development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting.
Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of
the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint
that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered whatever he
perceived into simple forms and colour planes. His statement "I want to
make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the
museums", and his contention that he was recreating Poussin "after nature" underscored his desire to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition.
Cézanne
was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to
their geometric essentials; he wanted to "treat nature by the cylinder,
the sphere, the cone" (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder,
an apple or orange a sphere, for example). Additionally, the
concentrated attention with which he recorded his observations of
nature resulted in a profound exploration of binocular vision, which results in two slightly different simultaneous visual perceptions, and provides us with depth perception and
a complex knowledge of spatial relationships. We see two different
views simultaneously; Cézanne employed this aspect of visual
perception in his painting to varying degrees. The observation of this
fact, coupled with Cézanne's desire to capture the truth of his
own perception, often compelled him to render the outlines of forms so
as to at once attempt to display the distinctly different views of both
the left and right eyes. Thus Cézanne's work augments and
transforms earlier ideals of perspective, in particular single-point perspective.
Cézanne's paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon.
The Salon rejected Cézanne's submissions every year from 1864 to
1869. Cézanne continued to submit works to the Salon until 1882.
In that year, through the intervention of fellow artist Antoine
Guillemet, Cézanne exhibited Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, Father of the Artist, reading 'l'Evénement', 1866 (National Gallery, Washington), his first and last successful submission to the Salon. Before
1895 Cézanne exhibited twice with the Impressionists (at the
first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and the third Impressionist
exhibition in 1877). In later years a few individual paintings were
shown at various venues, until 1895, when the Parisian dealer, Ambroise Vollard, gave the artist his first solo exhibition. Despite the increasing
public recognition and financial success, Cézanne chose to work
in increasing artistic isolation, usually painting in the south of
France, in his beloved Provence, far from Paris. He concentrated on a
few subjects and was highly unusual for 19th-century painters in that
he was equally proficient in each of these genres: still lifes,
portraits, landscapes and studies of bathers. For the last,
Cézanne was compelled to design from his imagination, due to a
lack of available nude models. Like the landscapes, his portraits were
drawn from that which was familiar, so that not only his wife and son
but local peasants, children and his art dealer served as subjects. His
still lifes are at once decorative in design, painted with thick, flat
surfaces, yet with a weight reminiscent of Gustave Courbet. The 'props' for his works are still to be found, as he left them, in his studio (atelier), in the suburbs of modern Aix. Although religious images appeared less frequently in Cézanne's later work, he remained a devout Roman Catholic and
said, "When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a
God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art."
One day, Cézanne was caught in a storm while working in the field. Only
after working for two hours under a downpour did he decide to go home;
but on the way he collapsed. He was taken home by a passing driver. His old housekeeper rubbed his arms and legs to restore the circulation; as a result, he regained consciousness. On
the following day, he intended to continue working, but later on he
fainted; the model with whom he was working called for help; he was put
to bed, and he never left it again. He died a few days later, on 22 October 1906. He died of pneumonia and was buried at the old cemetery in his beloved hometown of Aix-en-Provence. |