Paul Cezanne

Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839 - Aix-en-Provence, October 22, 1906) was a French Post-Impressionist painter, considered the father of modern painting. and whose works laid the foundations for the transition from nineteenth-century artistic conception to the artistic world of the XX century, new and different. Yet while he lived, Cézanne was an ignored painter who worked in great isolation. He mistrusted critics, he had few friends, and until 1895 he exhibited only occasionally. He was a "painter's painter", ignored by critics and the public, being appreciated only by some impressionists and at the end of his life by the new generation.

Biography

Paris

He enrolled in the Swiss Academy (Académie Suisse), a private academy where he worked with life models and where there were no exams or lessons, all to prepare for the entrance exam at the École des Beaux-Arts. In the Louvre Museum he discovered the work of Caravaggio and the circle of Velázquez, which profoundly marked his artistic evolution. When his candidacy for the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) was rejected, he returned to Aix and took a job at his father's bank. However, in 1862 he decided to return to Paris to devote himself permanently to painting, his father giving him a pension of 125 francs. He resumed his friendship with Zola and continued his studies at the Swiss Academy, where he met Guillaumin and Camille Pissarro, an older but little-known painter who lived with his large family in a rural area outside Paris. Cézanne was immediately drawn to the more radical elements of the Parisian art world. He especially admired the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and among the younger artists Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, who exhibited works of style and themes that were shocking to his contemporaries. The controversy between official art and the new painters led to the creation in 1863 of the Salon des Refusés (Hall of the Rejected), where works not accepted by the official jury of the Paris Salon were shown. The official Salon, for its part, rejected all the works he presented from 1864 to 1869. In 1864 he spent the summer in Aix-en-Provence, the same year that an exhibition of Delacroix's work is held, which allows Cézanne knows his painting in depth. 1869 is the year in which he meets the model Marie-Hortense Fiquet. In 1870 the Salon rejected his Portrait of Achille Emperaire, considering that it was unacceptable as it did not respect perspective or anatomical correctness, judging it "at the limit of the grotesque". When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870, Cézanne and Hortense left Paris for L'Estaque, near Marseilles, thus avoiding conscription. He was declared a fugitive in January 1871, but the war ended in February and the couple were able to return to Paris in the summer. In January of the following year, 1872, they had their son Paul in Paris. They then moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he lived with Dr. Gachet. Cézanne's mother knew of the family events, but not her father, to whom Hortense's existence was not mentioned for fear of incurring her wrath. In Auvers he deepens his friendship with Pissarro, who lived in Pontoise. Initially, it was a teacher's relationship with his student, with Pissarro exerting a formative influence on the younger artist. For a long time afterwards, Cézanne described himself as Pissarro's student, referring to him as "God the Father" and saying "We all come from Pissarro". Under Pissarro's tutelage, in In the short period between 1872 and 1873, Cézanne turned from dark to bright colors and began to concentrate on scenes of rural life. Over the next decade, his excursions to paint landscapes together from life in Louveciennes and Pontoise led to a collaborative working relationship of equals.

A modern Olympia, h. 1873-74, work of Cézanne presented in the first impressionist exhibition.

Leaving Hortense in the Marseille region, Cézanne moved between Paris and Provence. Thanks to Pissarro he met the & # 34; uncle & # 34; Tanguy in Paris in 1873. He was a color merchant who accepted paintings as payment for the materials he sold to painters. Although he seemed to have less command of the technique than the other Impressionists, Cézanne was accepted into the group. He exhibited at the first impressionist show held in the studio of the photographer Nadar in 1874, exhibiting A Modern Olympia , Landscape of Auvers-sur-Oise and The House of the hanged man . These works were ridiculed, but the third was eventually sold (now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris).

The Hanging House, Auvers-sur-Oise (1874).

In 1875, he came to the attention of the collector Victor Chocquet, whose commissions provided him with some financial relief. He spent the summer of 1876 at L'Estaque, which gave him the opportunity to paint two seascapes. He did not take part in the second impressionist exhibition, but he did take part in the third (1877) held on Rue Pelletier, with sixteen works, including watercolors, still lifes, landscapes, a painting of bathers and a portrait of the collector Chocquet. The commercial success of the Impressionists was already limited by itself and within this group, Cézanne's works had the most unfavorable reception. His paintings provoked hilarity, outrage and sarcasm. Critic Louis Leroy said of Chocquet's portrait: "This head that looks so peculiar, with the color of an old boot, would shock [a pregnant woman] and cause yellow fever in the fruit of her womb before its delivery." entry into the world". Cézanne did not exhibit with the group again.

Provence

Cézanne spent the year 1878 in the French South with Hortense and their son. In March, his father found out about Hortense's affair and threatened to break up with him financially, but in September she decided to raise his allowance to 400 francs. In 1879-80 he spent part of the winter in Melun, taking the opportunity to paint the snow-covered landscape. Among the masterpieces of this period is the view of the Maincy Bridge. In August 1880 he went to Zola's house in Médan, on the banks of the Seine, where he met Huysmans and took the opportunity to paint outdoors. His father, due to the life he led, stopped sending him help. In May 1881 he met Gauguin at Pissarro's house in Pontoise and in October he returned to Aix, where his father Louis-Auguste gave him a studio at Jas de Bouffan. He was on the top floor and was provided with a large window that allowed in northern light but interrupted the line of the eaves, which is still visible. The Cézanne family settled permanently in L'Estaque and from then on he only rarely left Provence. The move reflects a newfound independence from the Paris-centered Impressionists and the painter's preference for the south, his homeland.

In L'Estaque it was visited by Renoir (1882), who was impressed with the beauty of the landscape. That year was the only time he was able to exhibit at the Paris Salon, thanks to the intervention of his friend and artist Antoine Guillemet, Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, father of the artist, reading L'Événement (also known as The Artist's Father), 1866 (National Gallery, Washington). It received little recognition from official critics. By then, he stopped working closely with Pissarro. He had met the painter Monticelli in Marseilles in the 1860s and between 1878 and 1884 the two artists often painted landscapes together, once touring the Aix countryside for a month. In 1883 Manet died, news that affected Cézanne. In December Monet and Renoir met him at L'Estaque.

The year 1886 was crucial: he married Hortense and, in October, his father died. He inherited the estate he had acquired in 1859. Cézanne was forty-seven years old and finally achieved financial independence, thanks to the large inheritance he received, although he continued to maintain social isolation. It is the year of his break with Émile Zola, after the latter used him, to a great extent, as a model for the failed and tragic artist Claude Lantier, in The Work. Cézanne felt that the novel was improper and a betrayal by his childhood friend, so they broke off their friendship and never saw each other again.

Dead nature with apples (1890).

By 1888 the family was in the previous mansion, Jas de Bouffan, a solid building and grounds with outbuildings. It is currently owned by the city, albeit with less land, and is open to the public on a limited basis. In 1889 he shows The House of the Hanged Man at the Universal Exhibition. The following year, he exhibited in Brussels with Los XX, a group of very active painters. However, his idyllic period at Jas de Bouffan was only temporary. From 1890 until his death, disturbing events occurred that made him isolate himself further, devoting himself exclusively to painting. Between 1887 and 1893, he was only visited by a few insiders, such as the art dealers J. Tanguy and Ambroise Vollard.

The problems began with the onset of diabetes in the 1890s, destabilizing his personality to the point that relationships with others were again affected. He traveled to Switzerland, with Hortense and her son, perhaps hoping to restore their relationship. Cézanne, however, returned to live in Provence; Hortense and Paul the Younger, to Paris. Financial needs forced Hortense to return to Provence but in separate living quarters. Cézanne moved with his mother and his sister.

Bodegon with curtain (1895) illustrates the growing trend of Cézanne towards the terse compression of dynamic forms and tension between geometric figures.

Bottle, garrafa, jar and lemons (1902-1906) Paul Cézanne. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

In 1891 he returned to Catholicism, although religious imagery was sparse in his late work. Cézanne maintained that «When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to an object made by God like a tree or a flower. If it's out of tune, it's not art."

In 1895 his first individual exhibition was held, organized by Vollard, with 100 canvases. This dealer promoted Cézanne's work with great success during the following years, managing to raise its price, as can be seen when looking at the prices of the Duret and Tanguy sales (1894) and the Chocquet sale of 1899.

In 1897 his mother died, which allowed him to reconcile with his wife. He sold Jas de Bouffan and rented a place on Rue Boulegon, where he built a studio. He also rented a room at Château Noir, near Aix, where he sets up a small studio. He spent a season at Le Tholonet, on the slopes of Mont Sainte-Victoire, making it the object of his painting, as well as the Bibémus quarry.

His paintings became well known and sought after and earned the respect of a new generation of painters. Despite growing public recognition and financial success, Cézanne preferred to work in artistic isolation, usually painting in Provence. In 1900, three of his canvases were included in the Universal Exhibition and thirteen in an exhibition organized by Paul Cassirer in Berlin, the occasion on which the poet Rainer Maria Rilke saw his work for the first time. In 1901 he exhibited at the Salon des Independants. That same year, Maurice Denis presents his Homage to Cézanne, a painting in which a group of artists (Redon, Vuillard, Bonnard and Denis) can be seen around a still life painted by Cézanne and which had been owned by Gauguin.

The relationship between Cézanne and his wife 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 the Lauves hill, and had a survey made there (the atelier, currently open to the public), where the props of his works can still be seen, just as he left them. From there you can see the Sainte-Victoire mountain. There he painted until his death. Meanwhile, in 1902, he drafted a will excluding his wife from his estate and leaving it all to his son. Apparently the relationship was broken again; it is said that she burned the memories of her mother.

In 1903 the recognition of his work culminated, appearing in various exhibitions. Thus, the Autumn Salon exhibits 33 of his canvases. Works by Cézanne in the Viennese Secession and in the Berlin Secession are also included.

Émile Bernard, who had already dedicated an article to Cézanne in 1892, worked with him for a whole month in 1904. That same year, the Autumn Salon dedicated an entire room to him, with 30 paintings and two drawings. In 1905 Vollard presented Cézanne's watercolors. He was already a prestigious painter. Retrospective exhibitions followed one another. Many young painters traveled to Aix-en-Provence to see him at work and ask his advice during the last years of his life. However, both his style and his theories remain mysterious and cryptic; to some he was a naive primitive painter and to others a complicated master of technical procedures.

Death of Cézanne

House where Paul Cézanne on Rue Bougelon, Aix-en-Provence, France died.

One day, Cézanne was caught in a storm while working in the fields. Only after working for two hours in the downpour did he decide to return home; but on the way he fainted. A passing driver took him home, and his housekeeper rubbed his arms and legs to restore circulation; as a result, he regained consciousness.The next day, he intended to continue working, but later passed out; the model asked for help; they put him to bed, in Lauves from where he did not come out again. He died a few days later, on October 22, 1906, of pneumonia and was buried in the old cemetery in his beloved hometown of Aix- en-provence.

After his death, his studio in Aix became a monument, Atelier Paul Cézanne, or les Lauves.

Style

Cézanne attempted to achieve an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression, and pictorial order. Like Zola with literary realism, Cézanne manifested a progressive interest in the representation of contemporary life, painting the world as it appeared to him, without concern for thematic idealizations or affectation in style. He strove to develop an authentic observation of the visible world through the most accurate method of depicting it in paint that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered everything he saw into simple shapes and planes of color. His statement "I want to make impressionism something solid and enduring like museum art", underlines his desire to unite the observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition. This is also evident with his claim to «revive Poussin from nature» (Vivifier Poussin sur nature).

The Sainte-Victoire Mountain1905.

His brushstrokes are very characteristic and easily recognizable, often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory. These small brushstrokes and planes of color were combined to form complex fields, expressing at the same time the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction of observed nature.

Cézanne strove to understand and reflect the complexity of human visual perception. He wanted to offer an authentic vision of reality, and for this he observes objects from different points of view, which leads him to represent them from different perspectives simultaneously. Cézanne's mature work shows the development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting. The intensity of his colors, together with the apparent rigor of the compositional structure, indicate that, despite the artist's own frequent despair, he had synthesized the basic elements of representation and expressiveness of painting in a very personal way.

He was interested in simplifying the shapes that occurred naturally to their geometric essence:

Everything in nature is modeled according to the sphere, the cone, the cylinder. You have to learn to paint on the basis of these simple figures; then you can do everything you want.. Cézanne, 1904.

For example, a tree trunk can be thought of as a cylinder, a human head as a sphere. In addition, the focused attention with which he had recorded his observations of nature resulted in a deep exploration of binocular vision, which results from two simultaneous and slightly different visual perceptions, and provides us with depth perception and complex knowledge of spatial relationships. We see two points of view simultaneously; Cézanne employed this aspect of visual perception in his painting to different degrees. Observing this fact, coupled with Cézanne's desire to capture the truth of his own perception, often led him to present the outlines of forms while at the same time attempting to show the distinctively different viewpoints of both the left eye and the left eye. like the right.

Periods

Several periods in the life and work of Cézanne have been described.

The Dark Period, Paris, 1861-1870

This is a period characterized by dark colors and an intense use of black, with thick pigments, very impasto. His work differs greatly from his earlier watercolors and sketches at the École Spéciale de dessin at Aix-en-Provence in 1859, or from his later works. The terms antisocial or violent, or also erotic or macabre, are often used for these works.His subject matter is figure in landscape and comprises many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in landscape, imaginatively painted. To this period belong:

Murder, h. 1870.

• The father of the artist (1866), National Gallery of London.
• Copy by Cézanne at the Louvre Museum Food at Simon's house of Veronés 1860-1870
• Breads and eggs (1865), Cincinnati Art Museum.
• Portrait of Uncle Dominique (1866), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
• The rapture (1867), Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
• Portrait of Achille Emperaire (1867-1868), Orsay Museum, Paris.
• The orgy (1867-1872), particular collection.
• Black marble watch (1869-1870), particular collection.
• Pastoral (1870), M.o de Orsay, Paris.
• Murder (h. 1870), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Impressionist Period, Provence and Paris, 1870-1878

When Cézanne left for L'Estaque in 1870, he changed his subjects to focus primarily on landscape. Settling in 1872, in Auvers (Val-d'Oise), he began his close working relationship with Pissarro, who lived in nearby Pontoise. Along with Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and a few other painters, Pissarro had developed a style of working outdoors (en plein air) quickly and on a small scale, using small touches of pure colors, without resorting to preliminary sketches or drawings. In this way, they intended to capture fleeting light effects as well as their visual interpretation, also ephemeral, of nature. Under the influence of Pissarro, Cézanne began to abandon academic norms and the sombre, heavily impastoed palette that characterized him. His canvases became much brighter, with light colors, choosing primary colors and their complementary colors, as well as forcing him to carefully observe reality. His favorite subject is landscapes. He worked from direct observation and gradually developed a light and airy painting style.

Auvers View (h. 1873).

• The house of the hangman1872-73, M.o de Orsay, Paris.
• Auvers View, h. 1873, Art Institute of Chicago.
• A modern Olympia1873-74, M.o de Orsay, Paris.
• Bañistas1874-1875, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
• Mrs. Cézanne in the red armchair1877, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
• Dead nature of the sopera h. 1877, M.o de Orsay, Paris.
• Dead nature of the vase and fruits, h. 1877, M.o Metropolitano de Arte, New York.

Maturity Period, Provence, 1878-1890

The Maincy Bridge1879-1880.

When Cézanne settled permanently in Provence in the early 1880s, he broke away from the Paris-focused Impressionists and demonstrated his preference for the south, his native country and its landscape. Isolation and concentration, as well as the singularity of her search, could be credited with the incredible evolution that her style underwent during the 1880s and 1890s. Hortense's brother had a house from which you could see the Sainte Mountain -Victoire in Estaque. A series of paintings of this mountain from 1880-1883 and others by Gardanne from 1885-1888 are sometimes known as the "Construction Period". From 1888 to 1890 he was interested in the human figure, painting a series of pictures with characters from the Commedia dell'arte, moving on, from 1890, to another series on Card Players, possibly inspired by the work on the same subject by Louis Le Nain.

• The Maincy Bridge (1879-1880), M.o de Orsay, Paris.
• Three bathers (1879-1882), Petit Palais Museum, Paris.
• Rocks in L'Estaque (1882-1885), São Paulo Art Museum.
• The Sainte Victoire Mountain (1885-1887), M.o Metropolitano de Arte, New York.
• View of the village of Gardanne (1886), Barnes Foundation, Lower Merion.
• Tuesday of Carnival (1888), Pushkin Museum, Moscow.
• Arlequin (1889-1890), National Art Gallery (Washington).

Final Period, Provence, 1890-1905

Players of cards Courtauld Institute of Art, London. 4th version of the same topic.

Bodegon with apples and oranges1895-1900.

The big bathers1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art: the triumph of geometric equilibrium and stability as Poussin.

In 1895 he made a seminal visit to the Bibémus quarries and ascended the Sainte-Victoire mountain. The labyrinthine landscape of the quarries must have particularly impressed him, as he rented a cabin there in 1897. These shapes are believed to have inspired the embryonic Cubist style. Cézanne concentrated on a few genres, in which he was equally adept: still lifes, portraits (and self-portraits), landscapes, and studies of bathers (nudes in landscape). Regarding the latter, Cézanne was forced to draw from his imagination, due to the lack of available nude models. Like his landscapes, his portraits were painted from what was familiar, so that not only his wife and son, but also local peasants, children, and his dealer, served as models.

Cézanne continued to paint directly from life in brilliant Impressionist-like colouring, but gradually simplified the application of paint to the point where he seemed to be able to express volume with just a few juxtaposed brushstrokes of colour. Experts would later claim that Cézanne had discovered a way to represent both light and the forms of nature simply through color. He seemed to reintroduce a formal structure that the Impressionists had abandoned, without sacrificing the sensation and liveliness of light achieved by them. Cézanne himself spoke of modulating color instead of modeling the chiaroscuro of traditional painting. By this he meant that he supplanted the artificial conventions of representation (modeling) with a more expressive system (modular) that was even closer to nature or, as the artist himself said, "parallel to nature". For Cézanne, the solution to all the technical problems of impressionism lay in using color in a more orderly and expressive way than that of his fellow impressionists.

Cézanne considered that he never fully achieved his goal, so he left most of his works unfinished and destroyed many others. He lamented his failure to represent the human figure and, indeed, the great works with human figures of his last years reveal some curious distortions that seem dictated by the rigor of the chromatic modulation system that he himself imposed on his works. own representations. An example of this are the entire series of paintings dedicated to the subject of bathers.

• Players of cards (Les Joueurs de cartes) (five versions between 1890 and 1895), M.o de Orsay, Paris.
• Women with coffee maker (La Femme à la cafetière) (h. 1890-1895), M.o de Orsay, Paris.
• Dead nature with apples and oranges (h. 1895-1900), M.o de Orsay, Paris.
• Bodegon with onions (h. 1895-1900), M.o de Orsay, Paris
• The mountain of Sainte-Victoire, view from Bibémus (h. 1898-1900), Baltimore Art Museum.
• The big bathers (1904-1906), National Gallery, London.
• La Montagne Sainte-Victoire et le Château Noir(1904-1906).
• Portrait of a peasant (1905-1906), Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.
• The big bathers (1906), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

Legacy

Bank ticket (front), 100 FF, with the portrait of Paul Cézanne, and the painting The sea in the Estaque.

Bank bill (front), 100 FF, with two paintings by Paul Cézanne: Apples and Cookiesand Card players.

Cézanne can be said to create the bridge between the impressionism of the 19th century and the new style of the beginning of the XX, cubism.

For many years Cézanne's work was known only to his former Impressionist colleagues and a few radical young artists in the line of Post-Impressionism, including Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. This later generation accepted virtually all of Cézanne's oddities.

The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly impacted the direction the Parisian avant-garde took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the century XIX and the advent of cubism. It was Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena that inspired Picasso, Braque, Gris, and others to experiment with multiple yet more complex visions of the same subject, and, over time, to fracture the form. There is a phrase, attributed to both Matisse and Picasso, according to which "Cézanne is the father of us all." Matisse admired his use of color and Picasso developed Cézanne's flat composition structure to create the Cubist style.

One of the paintings in his series, The Card Players, became the publicly sold work of art for the most money in 2012, when it was bought by the Qatari royal family for more than 250 million dollars.^{[citation required]}