Paul Cézanne who was often called the
father of modern art, strove to develop an ideal synthesis of
naturalistic representation, personal expression, and abstract
pictorial order. Among the artists of his time Cézanne
perhaps had the most profound effect on art 20th century. He was
greatest single influence both French artist Henri Matissewho
admired use color and Spanish Pablo Picasso developeds planar
compositional structure into cubist style. During greater part
own lifetimehowever largely ignored worked in isolation. mistrusted
critics few friendsuntil 1895exhibited only occasionally. alienated
even from family found behavior peculiar failed to appreciate
revolutionary art.
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.
Influence of the Impressionists
 |
Girl at the Piano, 1868-69
(Ouverture to Tannhäuser)
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg |
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. 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 1880s 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
Cézanne's Use of Color
 |
Still Life with Drapery, 1899
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg |
This isolation and Cézanne's concentration and
singleness of purpose may account for the remarkable development
he sustained during the 1880s and 1890s. 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 replaced 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.
|
|
Large bathers, 1906
Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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.
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.
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