Cézanne, Paul

Cézanne, Paul (1839–1906). French painter, with Gauguin and van Gogh the greatest of the Post-Impressionists and a figure of central importance in the development of 20th-century art. He was born in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a hat dealer who became a prosperous banker, and his financial security enabled him to survive the indifference to his work that lasted until the final decade of his life. Much of his early career was spent in Paris in the circle of the Impressionists (he participated in the first and third of their eight group exhibitions), but after the death of his father in 1886 and his inheritance of the family estate (the Jas de Bouffan, which figures in many of his paintings), Cézanne lived mainly in Aix. His goal was to create an art combining the best of the French classical tradition of formal structure with the best in contemporary naturalism, and he summed up this objective in two much-quoted remarks: that it was his ambition ‘to do Poussin again after nature’ and that he wanted to make of Impressionism ‘something solid and enduring like the art of the museums'. He devoted himself mainly to certain favourite themes—portraits of his wife Hortense, still-lifes, and above all the landscape of Provence, particularly the Mont Sainte-Victoire (in 1896 he remarked ‘When one was born down there … nothing else seems to mean anything'). His painstaking analysis of nature differed fundamentally from Monet's exercises in painting repeated views of objects such as Haystacks or Poplars. Cézanne was interested in underlying structure, and his paintings rarely give any obvious indication of the time of day or even the season represented. The third dimension is created less through perspective or foreshortening than by delicate variations of tonality, and he distorted natural appearances—subtly tilting and stretching forms—to achieve the pictorial balance that was his central concern. In his final decade his work included three large pictures of Bathers (female nudes in a landscape setting) that are among his greatest and most radical achievements. The first two (Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania, and NG, London) were probably begun in about 1895 and 1900 respectively and worked on intermittently up to his death; the third (Philadelphia Museum of Art) was perhaps entirely painted in 1906. In these majestic works he sacrificed anatomical accuracy for pictorial structure, the simplified forms of the figures echoing the broad sweeps of the tree trunks. Henry Moore first saw the Philadelphia picture in 1922 (when it was in a private collection) and later recalled, ‘If you asked me to name the ten most intense moments of visual emotion in my life, that would be one of them.’

Cézanne worked in comparative obscurity until he was given a one-man show in Paris by Ambroise Vollard in 1895. It made little impact on the public but excited many younger artists, and because Cézanne was rarely seen he began to acquire a legendary reputation. By the end of the century he was revered as the ‘Sage’ by many of the avant-garde and in 1904 the Salon d'Automne gave him a special exhibition. A memorial exhibition of his work at the same venue in 1907, the year after his death, was a major factor in the genesis of Cubism, and his subsequent influence has been profound, varied, and enduring. Richard Verdi (Cézanne, 1992) sums up his impact on his immediate followers: ‘so protean were the implications of Cézanne's art that few of the most advanced painters of the next generation could afford to ignore it. His “pupils” thus became virtually everyone of consequence connected with the birth of early modern art. For Picasso he was “like our father … who protected us”; for Matisse, “a god of painting”. Klee regarded him as “the teacher par excellence”; and even Kandinsky—who derived little stylistic influence from Cézanne's art—acclaimed him as an artist who had laid the foundations of abstract art by relegating the objects he painted to the status of pictorial things. “A whole generation of otherwise dissimilar artists have drawn inspiration from his work”, claimed the English critic Clive Bell in 1914. “That is why it implies no disparagement of any living artist when I say that the prime characteristic of the new movement is its derivation from Cézanne.”’ Forty years after Bell's remarks, Lawrence Gowing summed up the awesome status Cézanne continued to enjoy among artists and critics: ‘He is like a patron saint. Whoever does not feel the force of his art and the heroic virtue of his example … is not on the threshold of valuing what it is that is precious to this century’ (introduction to the catalogue of the Arts Council Cézanne exhibition, Tate Gallery, London, 1954). Cézanne is now also immensely popular with the public: the official attendance figure for his exhibition at the Tate in 1996 was 408,688—a record for any show at the gallery.

Cézanne was a laboriously slow painter—he is said to have had over a hundred sittings for a portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Petit Palais, Paris, 1899) before abandoning it with the comment that he was not displeased with the shirt front—but he left a substantial body of work (drawings and watercolours as well as oils). There are examples in many major collections, with particularly fine representations in, for example, the Courtauld Gallery, London, the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania, the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and the Hermitage, St Petersburg. His studio in Aix is now a Cézanne museum, reconstructed as it was at the time of his death and displaying personal mementoes such as his hat and clay pipe.