Cezanne, Paul

(1839-1906, French)

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Paul Cezanne (January 19, 1839 - October 22, 1906) was a French artist, a Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cezanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso that Cezanne "...is the father of us all..." cannot be easily dismissed.

Cezanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognisable. Using planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature, Cezanne's paintings convey intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

Paul Cezanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, one of the southernmost regions of France. Provence is a varied and complex region geographically, comprised of several limestone plateaux and mountain ranges, to the east of the Rhone valley. The climate is hot and dry in summer and cool in winter. Altitudes range from lower-lying areas to some impressive mountain peaks and these mountainous areas have characteristic pine forests and limestone outcrops. Each of these topographical features would find prominent expression in Cezanne's work. Paul Cezanne developed a lifelong love for the Provencal landscape, which later became his chief subject of study.

From 1859 to 1861 Cezanne studied law in Aix, while also receiving drawing lessons. Going against the objections of his banker father, he committed himself to pursuing his artistic development and left Aix for Paris, with his close friend Emile Zola, in 1861. Eventually, his father reconciled with Cezanne and supported his choice of career. Cezanne later received a large inheritance from his father, on which he could continue living comfortably.

In Paris, Cezanne met the Impressionists, including Camille Pissarro. Initially the friendship formed in the mid 1860s between Pissarro and Cezanne was that of master and mentor, with Pissarro exerting a formative influence on the younger artist. Over the course of the following decade their landscape painting excursions together, in Louveciennes and Pontoise, led to a collaborative working relationship between equals.

Cezanne's early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and comprises many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted. Later in his career, he became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style that was to influence the Impressionists enormously. Nonetheless, in Cezanne's mature work we see the development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting. Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes. His statement "I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums", and his contention that he was recreating Poussin "after nature" underscored his desire to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition.

Cezanne's geometric essentialisation of forms was to influence Pablo Picasso's, Georges Braque's and Juan Gris' Cubism in profound ways. When one compares Cezanne's late oils with Cubist paintings, a link of influence is most evident. The key to this link is the depth and concentration that Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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.

Cezanne's paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon. The Salon rejected Cezanne's submissions every year from 1864 to 1869.

Cezanne exhibited little in his lifetime and worked in increasing artistic isolation, remaining in the south of France, in his beloved Provence, far from Paris. He concentrated on a few subjects and was equally proficient in each genre: still lifes, portraits, landscapes and studies of bathers. For the last, Cezanne was compelled to design from his imagination, due to a lack of available nude models. Like the landscapes, his portraits were drawn from that which was familiar, so that not only his wife and son but local peasants, children and his art dealer served as subjects. His still lifes are at once decorative in design, painted with thick, flat surfaces, yet with a weight reminiscent of Gustave Courbet. The 'props' for his works are still to be found, as he left them, in his studio (atelier), in the suburbs of modern Aix.

Although religious images appeared less frequently in Cezanne's later work, he remained a devout Catholic and said "When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art."

In 1906, Cezanne collapsed while painting outdoors, during a thunderstorm. One week later, on October 22, he died of pneumonia.

Ref: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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