Paul Cezanne Biography
Paul Cezanne (1839
- 1906). The French painter Paul Cézanne, who exhibited little
in his lifetime and pursued his interests increasingly in artistic
isolation, is regarded today as one of the great forerunners of modern
painting, both for the way that he evolved of putting down on canvas
exactly what his eye saw in nature and for the qualities of pictorial
form that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass, and
color. Cézanne was a contemporary of the impressionists, but he went
beyond their interests in the individual brushstroke and the fall
of light onto objects, to create, in his words, ``something more solid
and durable, like the art of the museums.'' Cézanne was born at Aix-en-Provence
in the south of France on Jan. 19, 1839. He went to school in Aix,
forming a close friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He also studied
law there from 1859 to 1861, but at the same time he continued attending
drawing classes. Against the implacable resistance of his father,
he made up his mind that he wanted to paint and in 1861 joined Zola
in Paris. His father's reluctant consent at that time brought him
financial support and, later, a large inheritance on which he could
live without difficulty. In Paris he met Camille Pissarro and came
to know others of the impressionist group, with whom he would exhibit
in 1874 and 1877. 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 of 1865-70 form what
is usually called his early ``romantic'' period. Extremely personal
in character, it deals with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy
in harsh, somber colors and extremely heavy paintwork. House of the
Hanged Man Thereafter, as Cézanne rejected that kind of approach and
worked his way out of the obsessions underlying it, his art is conveniently
divided into three phases. In the early 1870s, through a mutually
helpful association with Pissarro, with whom he painted outside Paris
at Auvers, he assimilated the principles of color and lighting of
Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork; yet he retained his own
sense of mass and the interaction of planes, as in House of the Hanged
Man (1873; Musee d'Orsay, Paris). The Card Players In the late 1870s
Cézanne entered the phase known as ``constructive,'' 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. Finally, living as a solitary in Aix rather than alternating
between the south and Paris, 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. By the time of his death on Oct. 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.
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