© Copyright 2005 Paul van Rensburg.
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Paul Cézanne 1839-1906
Paul Cézanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from 19th century art to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. He can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's Cubism. Both Matisse and Picasso regarded Cézanne as "the father of us all", a notion which cannot be easily dismissed. Although he has produced no school, he has given an impulse directly or indirectly to almost every new movement since he died.
Paul Cézanne was born into a family of Italian origin in Cesana Forinese. His father had established a felt hat business in Aix-en-Provence and later became a banker. In 1859 he bought a country house on the outskirts of Aix, the Jas de Bouffan, which was to be frequently represented in Cézanne’s paintings.
Between 1852 and 1859 Paul Cézanne studied at the Collčge Bourbon where he formed a friendship with Emile Zola, with whom he shared an interest in literature. In 1856 Cézanne began to attend the evening drawing courses of Joseph-Marc Gibert at the Aix Museum.
From 1859 to 1861 he studied law at Aix and entered his father’s bank. By April 1861 his father had finally yielded to Cézanne’s desire to make a career in art and allowed him to go to Paris to study at the Académie Suisse. In Paris, Cézanne frequented the Louvre, met Pissarro and Guillaumin and, later on, Monet, Sisley, Bazille and Renoir.
In September of the same year he was refused admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and went back to Aix, to the great relief of his father, who offered him a position in his bank. But in November 1862, however, Paul Cézanne went back to Paris and took up painting again.
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During his so called “dark” or “romantic” period (1862-70) Paul Cézanne often visited Paris where he met with Edouard Manet and the future Impressionists. Cézanne, however, remained an outsider to their circle. From 1864 to 1869 he submitted his work to the official Salon and saw it consistently rejected. His paintings during this time were extremely personal in character and dealt with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in harsh, somber colors and extremely heavy paintwork. Abduction, rape, and murder are themes that tormented Cézanne.
In 1867, he produced "Abduction", a work full of dark miseries and with passion in turmoil just beneath the surface.
In 1886 after his father’s death, Cézanne married Hortense Fiquet, with whom he had had a secret liaison since 1870. She is said to have looked after the finished canvasses, which Cézanne never took care to keep and abandoned as soon as he completed the painting. In that year, when Paul was 47, he inherited the estate his father had purchased in 1859. By 1888 the family was in the former manor, Jas de Bouffan, a substantial house and grounds with outbuildings, which afforded them a new-found comfort.
Cézanne's idyllic period at Jas de Bouffan was temporary. From 1890 until his death he was beset by troubling events and he withdrew further into his painting, spending long periods as a virtual recluse. His paintings became well-known and sought after and he was the object of respect from a new generation of painters. The problems began with diabetes in 1890, destabilizing his personality to the point where relationships with others were again strained. He travelled in Switzerland, with Hortense and his son Paul, perhaps hoping to restore their relationship. Cézanne, however, returned to Provence to live, while Hortense and Paul junior, moved to Paris. Financial need prompted Hortense's return to Provence but in separate living quarters. Cézanne moved in with his mother and sister.
In 1891 he turned to Catholicism. Cézanne alternated between painting at Jas de Bouffan and in the Paris region, as before. In 1895 he made a germinal visit to Bibémus Quarries and climbed Mt. Ste. Victoire. The labyrinthine landscape of the quarries must have struck a note, as he rented a cabin there in 1897 and painted extensively from it. The shapes are believed to have inspired the embryonic 'Cubist' style. Also in that year, his mother died, an upsetting event but one which made reconciliation with his wife possible. He sold the empty nest at Jas de Bouffan and rented a place on Rue Boulegon, where he built a studio. There is some evidence that his wife joined him there.
The relationship, however, continued to be stormy. He needed a place to be by himself. In 1901 he bought some land along the Chemin des Lauves ("Lauves Road"), an isolated road on some high ground at Aix, and commissioned a studio to be built there (the 'atelier', now open to the public). He moved there in 1903. Meanwhile, in 1902, he had drafted a will excluding his wife from his estate and leaving everything to his son Paul; the relationship was apparently off again. She is said to have burned the mementos of Paul's mother.
From 1903 to the end of his life, he painted in his studio, working for a month in 1904 with Émile Bernard, who stayed as a house guest. After his death it became a monument, Atelier Paul Cézanne, or les Lauves.
During this troubled period from 1890 onward, Cézanne moved into his late phase. Now he concentrated on a few basic subjects: still lifes of studio objects built around such recurring elements as apples, statuary, and tablecloths; studies of bathers, based upon the male model and drawing upon a combination of memory, earlier studies, and sources in the art of the past; and successive views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, a nearby landmark, painted from his studio looking across the intervening valley. The landscapes of the final years, much affected by Cézanne's contemporaneous practice in watercolor, have a more transparent and unfinished look, while the last figure paintings are at once more somber and spiritual in mood.
One of the most important works of his early years is the portrait of his formidable father. "The Artist's Father", 1866, is one of Cézanne's "palette-knife pictures'', painted in short sessions between 1865 and 1866, the realistic content and solid style revealing Cézanne's admiration for Gustave Courbet. It depicts a craggy, unyielding man of business, a solid mass of manhood, bodily succint from the top of his black beret to the tips of his heavy shoes. The uncompromising verticals of the massive chair are echoed by the door, and the edges of the small still life by Cézanne on the wall just behind: everything corresponds to the absolute verticals of the edges of the canvas itself, further accentuating the air of certainty about the portrait.
With thick hands holding and devouring a newspaper, he sits tensely upright in the elongated armchair. Yet it is a curiously tender portrait too. Cézanne seems to see his father as somehow unfulfilled, because for all his size, he does not fully occupy the chair, and neither does he see the still life on the wall behind him, which is recognizable as being one of his son's. One does not see his eyes, only the ironical mouth and his great frame, partly hidden behind the paper.
In the early 1870s, through a mutually helpful association with Pissarro, with whom he painted outside Paris at Auvers, Cézanne worked his way out of the obsessions underlying his romantic period and assimilated the principles of color and lighting of Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork, yet retaining his own sense of mass and the interaction of planes, as in "House of the Hanged Man", produced in 1873.
Paul Cézanne’s “Impressionist” period (1873-79) is connected with his staying at Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise in 1872, 1873, 1874, 1877 and 1881 where he worked with Pissarro and exhibited with the Impressionists in 1874 and in 1877.
In the late 1870s Cézanne entered the phase known as his "constructive" period, characterized by the grouping of parallel, hatched brushstrokes in formations that build up a sense of mass in themselves. He continued in this style until the early 1890s, when, in his series of paintings titled Card Players (1890-92), the upward curvature of the players' backs creates a sense of architectural solidity and thrust, and the intervals between figures and objects have the appearance of live cells of space and atmosphere.
By the time of his death on October 22, 1906, Cézanne's art had begun to be shown and seen across Europe, and it became a fundamental influence on the Fauves, the cubists, and virtually all advanced art of the early 20th century.
Cézanne's geometric essentialisation of forms was to influence Pablo Picasso's, Georges Braque's and Juan Gris' Cubism in profound ways. When one compares Cézanne's late oils with Cubist paintings, a link of influence is most evident. The key to this link is the depth and concentration that Cézanne applied to recording his observations of nature, a focus later intellectually synthesized in Cubism. We have two eyes and therefore possess binocular vision. This gives rise to two slightly separate visual perceptions, which are simultaneously processed in the visual cortex of the brain and provide us with depth perception and a complex knowledge of the space which we inhabit. The essential aspect of binocular vision that Cézanne employed and which became influential on Cubism, was that we often "see" two views of an object at the same time. This led him to paint with a varying outline that at once shows the left-eye and right-eye view, thus ignoring tradional linear perspective. Cubism took this a step further and Picasso, Braque and Gris experimented with not simply two simultaneous views but with multiple views of the same subject.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.abcgallery.com/C/cezanne/cezannebio.html
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cezanne.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/style.html
