Paul Cezanne
I. Early Life and Work
Cézanne
was born in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839, the son of a
wealthy banker. His boyhood companion was Émile Zola, who later gained fame as a novelist
and man of letters. As did Zola, Cézanne developed artistic interests at an early age,
much to the dismay of his father. In 1862, after a number of bitter family disputes, the
aspiring artist was given a small allowance and sent to study art in Paris, where Zola had
already gone. From the start he was drawn to the more radical elements of the Parisian art
world. He especially admired the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and, among the younger
masters, Gustave Courbet and the notorious Édouard Manet, who exhibited realist paintings
that were shocking in both style and subject matter to most of their contemporaries.
II. Influence of the Impressionists
Many of Cézanne's early works were painted in
dark tones applied with heavy, fluid pigment, suggesting the moody, romantic expressionism
of previous generations. Just as Zola pursued his interest in the realist novel, however,
Cézanne also gradually developed a commitment to the representation of contemporary life,
painting the world he observed without concern for thematic idealization or stylistic
affectation. The most significant influence on the work of his early maturity proved to be
Camille Pissarro, an older but as yet unrecognized painter who lived with his large family
in a rural area outside Paris. Pissarro not only provided the moral encouragement that the
insecure Cézanne required, but he also introduced him to the new impressionist technique
for rendering outdoor light. Along with the painters Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir,
and a few others, Pissarro had developed a painting style that involved working outdoors (en
plein air) rapidly and on a reduced scale, employing small touches of pure color,
generally without the use of preparatory sketches or linear outlines. In such a manner
Pissarro and the others hoped to capture the most transient natural effects as well as
their own passing emotional states as the artists stood before nature. Under Pissarro's
tutelage, and within a very short time during 1872-1873, Cézanne shifted from dark tones
to bright hues and began to concentrate on scenes of farmland and rural villages.
III. Return to
Aix-en-Provence
Although he seemed less
technically accomplished than the other impressionists, Cézanne was accepted by the group
and exhibited with them in 1874 and 1877. In general the impressionists did not have much
commercial success, and Cézanne's works received the harshest critical commentary. He
drifted away from many of his Parisian contacts during the late 1870s and '80s and spent
much of his time in his native Aix-en-Provence. After 1882, he did not work closely again
with Pissarro. In 1886, Cézanne became embittered over what he took to be thinly
disguised references to his own failures in one of Zola's novels. As a result he broke off
relations with his oldest supporter. In the same year, he inherited his father's wealth
and finally, at the age of 47, became financially independent, but socially he remained
quite isolated.
IV. Cézanne's Use of Color
This isolation and
Cézanne's concentration and singleness of purpose may account for the remarkable
development he sustained during the 1880s and '90s. In this period he continued to paint
studies from nature in brilliant impressionist colors, but he gradually simplified his
application of the paint to the point where he seemed able to define volumetric forms with
juxtaposed strokes of pure color. Critics eventually argued that Cézanne had discovered a
means of rendering both nature's light and nature's form with a single application of
color. He seemed to be reintroducing a formal structure that the impressionists had
abandoned, without sacrificing the sense of brilliant illumination they had achieved.
Cézanne himself spoke of "modulating" with color rather than
"modeling" with dark and light. By this he meant that he would replace an
artificial convention of representation (modeling) with a more expressive system
(modulating) that was closer still to nature, or, as the artist himself said,
"parallel to nature." For Cézanne, the answer to all the technical problems of
impressionism lay in a use of color both more orderly and more expressive than that of his
fellow impressionists.
Cézanne's goal was, in
his own mind, never fully attained. He left most of his works unfinished and destroyed
many others. He complained of his failure at rendering the human figure, and indeed the
great figural works of his last years—such as the Large Bathers(circa
1899-1906, Museum of Art, Philadelphia)—reveal curious distortions that seem to have
been dictated by the rigor of the system of color modulation he imposed on his own
representations. The succeeding generation of painters, however, eventually came to be
receptive to nearly all of Cézanne's idiosyncrasies. Cézanne's heirs felt that the
naturalistic painting of impressionism had become formularized, and a new and original
style, however difficult it might be, was needed to return a sense of sincerity and
commitment to modern art.
V. Significance of Cézanne's Work
For many years Cézanne
was known only to his old impressionist colleagues and to a few younger radical
postimpressionist artists, including the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and the French
painter Paul Gauguin. In 1895, however, Ambroise Vollard, an ambitious Paris art dealer,
arranged a show of Cézanne's works and over the next few years promoted them
successfully. By 1904, Cézanne was featured in a major official exhibition, and by the
time of his death (in Aix-en-Provence on October 22, 1906) he had attained the status of a
legendary figure. During his last years many younger artists traveled to Aix-en-Provence
to observe him at work and to receive any words of wisdom he might offer. Both his style
and his theory remained mysterious and cryptic; he seemed to some a naive primitive, while
to others he was a sophisticated master of technical procedure. The intensity of his
color, coupled with the apparent rigor of his compositional organization, signaled to most
that, despite the artist's own frequent despair, he had synthesized the basic expressive
and representational elements of painting in a highly original manner.