Cézanne, Paul

Cézanne, Paul (1839-1906), French painter. He was one of the most important European painters of the late 19th century and, through the influence of his late works that verge almost on abstraction, his work is often viewed as a precursor of modern art, especially Cubism.

Cézanne was born on January 19, 1839, in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, the son of a wealthy banker. From c. 1849 to 1852 he studied at the École Saint-Joseph and from 1852 to 1858 he attended the College Bourbon, also in Aix, where he met the writer Émile Zola, with whom he formed a close friendship that lasted until the 1880s. Following his father’s plans for his career, he went at the age of 20 to study law at the Université d’Aix, but abandoned these studies in 1861 to take up painting full-time. He moved to Paris in early 1861, where he worked at the Académie Suisse, but was not happy there and moved back to Aix. He returned to Paris in 1862 and this time took a successful course at the Académie Suisse. During this period he submitted work for the Salon, but only in 1882 was one of his works, a portrait, accepted. From 1862 Cézanne moved continually between Aix and Paris until 1870, when he settled in L’Estaque, a village on the coast near Marseille.

Although the chronology of Cézanne’s early work is sometimes difficult to establish, as many pieces were destroyed by the artist, his style can be clearly divided into several phases. His works from 1862 to 1870 are expressively painted, predominantly in dark colours such as greys, blacks, and earth tones; the paint is heavily applied in thick, lively strokes in which the use of the palette knife is clearly visible. These works show in particular the influence of such artists as Delacroix, Courbet, and Zurbarán, whom Cézanne had studied in Paris. Many have violent themes, such as The Abduction (1867, King’s College, Cambridge) and The Murder (c. 1870, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). The turbulent style of these works contrasts with more sober portraits of the same period, such as of his father reading a newspaper and of his uncle Dominique.

From c. 1870 Cézanne worked mainly at L’Estaque and from 1872 at Pontoise, with Camille Pissarro, whom he had met in Paris. During this period Cézanne began to study nature directly under the influence of his contact with the Impressionists. He also exhibited at the first and third Impressionist exhibitions in 1874 and 1877 respectively. His style also changed from strong, sinuous, expressionistic brushstrokes to small, minute brushstrokes that carefully built up forms. This is most evident in his landscape of the House of the Hanged Man (1873, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and portrait of the collector Victor Chocquet (1876-1877, private collection). From the late 1870s and 1880s Cézanne began to move away from the Impressionist style to a greater emphasis of form and solidity, which he believed the Impressionists neglected. In contrast to the Impressionists’ subjective vision of the world, he considered that the aim of the artist was objectively to represent the underlying forms of nature. His more architectonic style is evident in his landscapes, such as Rocks at L’Estaque (1883-1885, Museu de Arte de São Paulo), in which the composition is built up from vertical and horizontal planes; portraits, such as that of his wife Mme Cézanne in a Yellow Chair (1890, Art Institute of Chicago) and Boy with a Red Vest (c. 1895, Stiftung Sammlung E. G. Bührle); and his numerous still lifes, for example Still Life with Basket of Apples (1890-1894, Art Institute of Chicago) and Still Life with Plaster Cupid (c. 1895, Courtauld Galleries, London). In many of the still lifes as well as in his famous series of Card Players (from 1890, Courtauld Galleries, London), Cézanne altered conventional perspective expressed in terms of successive planes of depth by emphasizing the foreground—a revolutionary development later taken up by the Cubists.

In the 1890s Cézanne’s fame as a painter grew and in November 1895 he had his first one-man show in Paris. Although in the late 1870s and 1880s he had withdrawn from exhibiting, his work was widely shown in the years around 1900, for example at the Salon des Indépendants in 1899, 1901, and 1902 and at the Secession in Vienna in 1903. His very last works of these years are typified by the use of stronger colours and more pronounced faceted, sometimes almost abstract forms created by the methodical application of brushstrokes of pure colour. His most famous works of this period are the paintings and watercolours of Mont Sainte-Victoire, produced from 1900, and the series the Large Bathers (1895-1906, National Gallery; Barnes Foundation, Merion Station, Philadelphia; and Philadelphia Museum of Art), in which the groups of extenuated, almost abstract, geometric figures are paralleled by a triangular vault of overhanging trees. In many works of this period, especially the views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne deliberately left parts of the canvas bare: he was perhaps the first to break totally with the established convention of finished paintings, a tendency that characterizes much later 20th-century art.

Among the artists of his time, Cézanne had perhaps the most profound effect on the art of the 20th century. He was a major influence on several of the most illustrious modern painters, including Henri Matisse, who admired his use of colour, and Pablo Picasso, who developed Cézanne’s flat compositional structure into full-blown Cubism. He died in Aix on October 22, 1906.