Paul Cezanne

With an insightful text and a carefully chosen selection of his most beautiful and most significant paintings, watercolors, and drawings, this compact volume offers an invaluable overview of Paul Cezanne's career.

One of the original group of French Impressionists, Cezanne (1839-1906) helped transform the history of art in our century. His ground-breaking still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and bathers offered a new way of seeing and recording the world. Whole movements of modern art-most notably, Fauvism and Cubism-are rooted in Cezanne's hard-won innovations, and for Picasso and Matisse his work remained the standard of excellence against which they measured their own achievements.

Other Details: 247 full-color illustrations 288 pages 4 x 4" Published 1996

subject matter is conventional; his innovations can seem inadvertent. Passionate in his desire to be truthful to his "sensations," he was wracked with anxiety about being equal to the task, calling himself "the primitive of the way I discovered." Only at the very end of his life, a month before his death, did he write: "I am continually making observations from nature, and I feel that I am making some slight progress."

Cezanne's biography is uneventful. Born in the provincial town of Aix-en-Provence in 1839, the son of a prosperous (and autocratic) hat manufacturer turned banker, he died there in 1906. As a young man, he studied law for a few years at the University of Aix, without enthusiasm, and wrote poetry—in the Romantic mode—but his passion was for art. Although he displayed no precocious talent, as early as 1857 he began to work at the Free Municipal School for Drawing in Aix, his principal art training until he finally obtained permission from his father, in 1861, to abandon his law studies and go to Paris.

There, enrolled at the Academie Suisse, Cezanne met Camille Pissarro, who was to have an important influence on his work, and later, other "new painters," as the Impressionists were then called. After six months he returned to Aix, in discouragement, to work in his father's bank. Yet he soon left the family enterprise and returned to Paris to devote himself entirely to painting—supported by a modest allowance from his father. He spent most of the next few years in the capital, with brief returns to Aix, absorbing and expanding the ideas current among his adventurous contemporaries.

Cezanne also attempted and failed the entry examinations for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The most radical painter of his generation longed for official recognition, annually submitting work to the Salon and—except for one aberration in 1882—suffering annual rejections. The "new painters," however, welcomed him, and he joined them in 1874 in the celebrated "alternative" show now known as the first Impressionist exhibition. Cezanne continued to exhibit with the "new painters" for several years, even though he never shared their desire to homogenize forms in a sensuous haze of color, a distinction that the Cezanne scholar Lawrence Gowing has termed the difference between painters of effects and a painter of things. Cezanne kept in touch with his colleagues, especially Pissarro, but he became increasingly self-contained. Dividing his time principally between Paris and Aix and its environs, he slowly pursued his highly individual notion of re-creating on canvas his "sensations," as he called his intense awareness of the density and visual weight of the elements of his surroundings.

Cezanne had champions among his fellow artists, notably Pissarro, with whom he worked closely in the early 1870s (to the benefit of both men's work); Edouard Manet, who praised Cezanne's still lifes; and Gustave Caillebotte, an amateur in the truest sense, who befriended the Impressionists, bought their work, painted alongside them, and later left his remarkable collection to the nation. Emile Zola, the acclaimed novelist and journalist who publicly defended the work of the Impressionists, had grown up with Cezanne in Aix and was one of his intimates until 1886, when the painter broke with his boyhood friend, deeply hurt by what he believed was an unflattering portrait of himself as the unstable, obsessed, and failed artist in Zola's novel, L'Oeuvre (Masterpiece). Practical support came from Ambroise Vollard, who opened his legendary Paris gallery in 1894 with art acquired at the auction of the stock of Père Tanguy, a dealer in paints, brushes, canvas, and work by some of the most advanced artists of his day, which he obtained in exchange for supplies. (Tanguy was immortalized in two portraits by Vincent van Gogh, just as Vollard would be by the artists he represented, including Cezanne.)

Despite the evident authority of his work and his subsequent influence, during his lifetime Cezanne remained chiefly an "artist's artist." Not until his last decade did he begin to exhibit with some regularity in group exhibitions in Paris and, occasionally, outside France. (His 1895 solo exhibition at Vollard's new gallery was his first.) He was well represented in the Salons d'Automne, Les Independants, and in a watercolor exhibition at Vollard's gallery, but most influential was the large retrospective organized after his death for the 1907 Salon d'Automne, an exhibition that can be said to have changed the course of modernism. (It also provoked the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's series of extraordinary letters on "the Cezanne inscape.")

The next generation of adventurous artists was fascinated by Cezanne. A twenty-year-old Georges Braque, newly arrived in Paris in 1902, was so struck by Caillebotte's Cezannes, installed at the Musee du Luxembourg after a long wrangle, that he sought out other works at Vollard's. That Cezanne's art offered Braque, Picasso, and Matisse a model of rigorous construction and visual weight that owed nothing to traditional illusionism is plainly visible in their work after 1907. It is plain, too, that for the rest of their lives, Cezanne's art remained the standard of excellence against which they measured their own achievements. Matisse, for example, was still painting homages to Cezanne as a mature artist of nearly fifty, even after having created some of the most extraordinary work in the history of Western art.

Cezanne's art is full of contradictions. It is dispassionate and full of feeling, disciplined and intense, detached and deeply engaged, profoundly inventive and no less profoundly rooted in actual experience. His pictures seem at once inevitable and willful, immutable and about to dissipate into isolated strokes. Cezanne's celebrated method of rendering form with juxtaposed patches of warm and cool color creates a wholly convincing sense of bulk and mass, but at the same time, his deliberate placement of those patches forcibly reminds us of the flatness of the canvas and the artifice of painting itself. His disjunctive touches, his slow accretion of carefully orchestrated tonalities, make us recapitulate his fierce scrutiny of the motif, so that the disembodied act of seeing becomes as physical and tangible as the repetitive pats of pigment. Cezanne's work vibrates with the tension between these contradictory notions, and it is this sense of unrest, of simultaneous instability and solidity that gives his pictures their continuing power to disturb and to exalt. It is part of what makes them modern.