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Paul Cézanne, (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. See also the Britannica Classic by Roger Fry: Cézanne.

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 kind of 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 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 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 approach his 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 birth to 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 learn the 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 in 1877 were the most severely criticized of any works exhibited, he continued to work diligently, periodically going back 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

Mont Sainte-Victoire, oil painting by Paul Cézanne, 1904–06.

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 perspective only through colour.” The painter’s intelligence and eye were able 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 is modeled 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.

Louis Guillaume, oil on canvas by Paul Cézanne, c. 1882; in the Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 55.9 × 46.7 cm.

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 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 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.

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, 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. 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.

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.”

Courtesy - René Huyghe

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Paul Cezanne

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