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Paul Cezanne

BlogAdmin on 27th May 2022

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) was a French post-impressionist painter. He is said to have laid the foundation for the transition from the 19th-century concept of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. His style of painting served as a bridge between the 19th-century impressionist and 20th century new line of artistic enquiry, mainly Cubism. Cezanne’s exploration of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired many painters of the 20th century. He is the founding father of modern art.

Cezanne Childhood

Paul Cezanne was born into a well-to-do family in Aix-en-Province, France in 1839. His father, a successful banker, was determined to bring up his son to follow either the same profession as he did or become a lawyer. But Cezanne had cultivated creative ambitions early in his youth. Cezanne received his classical education at College Bourbon in Aix. In 1858, he joined the law school of the University of Aix-en-Province as per his father’s direction. As he realised that he had no taste for the study of law after two years of joining the law school, he, with help of support from his mother, persuaded his father to allow him to study painting in Paris. Starting in 1857, Cezanne took painting classes at a drawing school attached to the Musee d’Aix, presently known as Musee Granet. Emile Zola was one of his childhood friends. Cezanne’s two-year stint at law school ended in 1861.

He Met Old Masters in Paris

Cezanne began visiting Zola in Paris and became overawed by the city’s art world. The following year, in 1862, he moved to the French capital to study at the Academie Suisse, where he met famous painter Camille Pissarro. Pissarro had an overwhelming influence on Cezanne’s style of work. He also became heavily impacted by the works of the old masters such as Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet. In the early years of his painting career, he practised figurative works and portraiture with Zola and the members of his family as subjects. During this time, he was rejected from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and his works were not included in the Salon exhibitions. Cezanne’s first stay in art school, Academic Suisse in Paris, a studio where he began his instruction, lasted only five months as he found himself technically not as proficient as some of the other students. Returning to Aix, he started working at his father’s bank. Again, after a year, he went back to Paris with a renewed resolution to stay as long as possible. Thus, he kept alternating between Paris and Aix-en-Provence during this formative period from 1858 to 1872. In 1869, he met Emilie Hortense Fiquet and he married her in 1886.

Conflict of Painting Styles

The early years of the 1860s were witness to the conflict between the realist painters led by Gustave Courbet and the official Academie des Beaux-Arts. The Academie des Beaux-arts rejected all paintings that were not in the academic Neoclassical or Romantic styles, from its annual exhibitions. In 1863, the emperor Napoleon III decreed the opening of a Salon des Refuses to counter the growing agitation over refusal for exhibition by the Salon of the Academie.

Association with the Greats

In the meantime, Cezanne’s tastes had already shifted away from the Academic styles. Soon he became associated with the most advanced members of the group including Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas. They were all in their 20s as was Cezanne and they were, with the exception of Edouard Manet, in the process of making their own styles which came to be called the Impressionist school. Cezanne’s deliberate rudeness born out of extreme shyness in his behaviour became an inhibiting factor in his association with these artists. Nevertheless, he was inspired by their revolutionary spirit and he sought to synthesize the influences of Courbet and the romantic painter Eugene Delacroix.

War and displacement

With the outbreak of the Franco-German War in July 1870, Cezanne left Paris for Provance as he wanted to avoid being drafted for military service. He accompanied with him a young woman called Marie-Hortense Fiquet, who had become his mistress a year before and whom he married in 1886. He settled down in Estaque, a small village, near Marseille on the coast of southern France and began painting landscapes and exploring ways to depict nature faithfully. He began to approach his subjects the same way that his Impressionist friends did. The two landscapes, Snow at Estaque (1870-71) and The Wine Market (1872) were the products of his early and more disciplined style.

Camille Pissarro’s influence

Pissarro had a major impact on Cezanne’s style of art. Pissarro introduced Cezanne to Plein air painting techniques and helped him shift his focus to more vibrantly coloured rural landscape scenes in the early 1870s. Soon afterwards in 1872, Cezanne moved to Pontoise with his wife and his newborn son to live in the valley of Oise River, at the invitation of Camille Pissarro. It was here in Auvers-Sur-Oise where van Gogh lived and worked in the months leading to his death in 1890. Of all his friends, Pissarro was the only one who was patient enough to teach him despite his difficult personality. The two friends painted together intermittently outdoors, a technique that was considered radical. His famous painting ‘The House of the Suicide’ illustrates the effects of the impressionistic style followed by Pissarro on him.

Lacklustre shows in exhibitions

After returning to Paris in 1874, he participated in the first official show of impressionists. Cezanne’s paintings, of all the paintings shown at the third show in 1877, received the most criticism. Without being disheartened by the lacklustre show of his works at the exhibition, Cezanne continued to work diligently and with renewed dedication. He had to endure the failure of his paintings in exhibitions and in finding buyers. He also had to contend with the refusal of his father to help him financially when he needed it the most.

Break Away from Impressionism

Thereafter, the much needed financial succour came to him in the form of connoisseur Victor Choquet, whose painting he painted in 1877. After the second impressionist show, Cezanne decided to break away from Impressionism and concentrate on his own style of painting. However, he continued his relations with ‘the humble and colossal Pissarro, and the greats like Monet and Renoir. In 1882 he went outside of Paris where he painted his most famous sea views in the town of L’Estaque in Marseille. L’Estaque with Red Roofs (1885) showing vivid blue ocean beyond the clusters of sun-dappled buildings in the coastal town is an example. He lost his struggling and largely unsuccessful good friend, Claude Lantier, who shared a number of traits with Cezanne. He was also annoyed at the unflattering representation of himself in Emile Zola’s novel ‘The Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre)’. Thereafter, he severed his ties with the novelist.

Isolation and masterpiece paintings

Cezanne started isolating himself, both in Paris and in Aix as he was dismayed at the public’s reaction to his works. During the period of isolation, from the late 1870s to the early 1890s, he developed his own mature style. The Sea at L’Estaque (1878-1879), The Mills of Gardanne (1885), Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904-1906) were some of the masterpiece landscapes that Cezanne produced during this period. Some of the best-known portraits of Cezanne are Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Armchair (1890-1894), Woman with Coffee-Pot (1890-94), The Card Players (1890-92). The theme portrayed in his painting The Card Players was treated in five different versions.

Peak of Success

Cezanne was a deliberate and meticulous painter who spent upwards of 100 sessions per work on a single piece. Pablo Picasso famously said that he was ‘the father of us all. His artistic career spanned more than forty years, from roughly 1860 to 1906. A prolific artist, he produced more than 900 oil paintings and 400 watercolours, including many incomplete works. One of the most famous paintings of Cezanne is the Pyramid of Skulls. He painted numerous paintings with skulls, mostly human skulls, as subjects from 1867 till his death in 1906 mainly, it is said, because he liked human skulls.

Series of Masterpieces

The state of Qatar bought his famous painting, The Card Players’ for a whopping $250 million. The deal has set the highest ever price paid for a work of art. It upended the modern art market. Cezanne painted ‘Pyramid of Skulls’ in 1901. It depicts 4 human skulls stacked in pyramidal formation. From 1890 to 1905, Cezanne produced masterpieces one after another. Ten variations of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, three versions of Boy in a Red Waist-Coat, The Basket of Apples and Bathers series are some of his masterpieces.

Bouts of depression

During the last decade of his life, Cezanne was feeling isolated. He was giving expression to his feelings of isolation and was alluding to mortality in his letters. It is suspected that the death of his mother in 1897, who had been supportive of him and his father’s refusal to bail him out financially depressed him more than ever before. However, in 1895, one art dealer, Ambroise Vollard set up the first one-man exhibition of Cezanne’s more than 100 canvasses. Although young artists and some art lovers were beginning to appreciate his paintings, the public remained almost unreceptive.

Series on Mont Sainte-Victoire

Cezanne made a series of paintings on Mont Sainte-Victoire after he built a studio in Les Lauves in Aix-en Provence in 1902. This series has come to be considered some of his most famous works. The mountain has been painted from various points of view in different shades of purple, green and blue. He made many such paintings between 1904 and 1906, the year of his death. After his death, Cezanne’s excellence in his artistic career came to the limelight with the successful exhibition of his artworks at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and the Salon d’Automne in Paris. Artworld took notice of one of the greatest painters of the 19th-20th century and became a shining example of art history.

Final Days of the Great Printer

After his mother’s death in 1897, Cezanne gradually withdrew from his wife and the friends of his youth. Though his name and fame were spreading fast and his exhibitions were well attended, Cezanne was rarely seen in the public. The diabetes that he had been suffering from for a long time became serious. Finally, Cezanne succumbed to the harsh chill that he was caught in while working in the fields and died in October 1906. Cezanne’s preoccupation with death was an ongoing theme as could be seen in the form of a number of still life skull paintings produced between 1898 and 1905. The skulls’ volumetric forms could also be the reason for his indulgence in painting skulls other than his contemplation of death. Cezanne is supposed to have exclaimed, “how beautiful a skull is to paint”.

Skull Paintings

The other similarities that these skull paintings share with those of his self portrayals are that the skulls face the viewers straight on in a manner that his self-portraits do. In both these two sets of paintings, ie, the skull paintings and his self-portraits, the lower half is obscured. While the lower jaws are missing in skulls, the lower half of the painter’s face, Cezanne, is obscured by his beard. Further, in both series, the focus was only on the bald pate and eye sockets.

Series of Skull Paintings

Another reason attributed to the painter’s obsession was that he was a devout Catholic and skulls are a prominent feature in homes of Catholics. Also, it is said that the contents of Cezanne’s studio included ‘three skulls and an ivory Christ on an ebony cross near one another in a mantlepiece. His other paintings featuring skulls are ‘Still Life With Skull, Candle and Book’, (1865-1867), ‘Young Man with Skull’, (1896-1898), ‘Still Life With a Skull’, (1895-1900), Still Life, Three Skulls’, (1900), ‘Three Skulls on a Rug’ (1904).