Among the artists of his time, Cézanne perhaps
has had the most profound effect on the art of the 20th century. He was
the greatest single influence on both the French artist Henri Matisse,
who admired his use of color, and the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who
developed Cézanne's planar compositional structure into the cubist
style. During the greater part of his own lifetime, however, Cézanne
was largely ignored, and he worked in isolation. He mistrusted critics,
had few friends, and, until 1895, exhibited only occasionally. He was alienated
even from his family, who found his behavior peculiar and failed to appreciate
his revolutionary art.
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.
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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
(see Impressionism)
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 1872-73, Cézanne shifted from
dark tones to bright hues and began to concentrate on scenes of farmland
and rural villages.
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. 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.
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.
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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 on October 22, 1906) he had attained the status
of a legendary figure. During his last years many younger artists traveled
to Aix 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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