Modern Age
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)
French Post-Impressionism painter.
Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a prosperous banker whose wealth freed him from the market's demands. A boyhood friend of the novelist Émile Zola, he moved between Paris and Provence, exhibited with the Impressionists in the 1870s under the guidance of Camille Pissarro, then withdrew increasingly to the south to pursue a solitary, obsessive project of his own.
Where the Impressionists chased the fleeting sensation, Cézanne wanted to rebuild it into something structural and permanent — 'solid and durable, like the art of the museums'. He constructed his canvases from patch-like 'constructive' brushstrokes in which colour, tone, and form are decided in a single touch, tilting planes and multiplying viewpoints so that a tabletop, an apple, or Mont Sainte-Victoire is realized as built architecture rather than a snapshot. He painted the same motifs — the mountain, bathers, apples, the card players — over and over in a slow struggle he called 'realization'.
Almost unknown to the public until the dealer Ambroise Vollard gave him a solo show in 1895, Cézanne became, in his last decade, the acknowledged father of modern painting. Picasso and Braque built Cubism on his tilted planes, and Kandinsky and Matisse drew on him too. He died in Aix in 1906, still working before his mountain.
The words the record keeps using: structural, patient, solid, meditative, searching, austere, monumental.
At a glance
- Lived 1839–1906
- Origin French
- Worked in Aix-en-Provence
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Post-Impressionism
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Watercolor
- Techniques Broken color, Constructive brushstroke
Works in the archive
- The Card Players, 1890 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Two Provençal peasants sit face to face at a table, absorbed in a game of cards. Part of a series Cézanne devoted to the subject, it monumentalizes ordinary men into a still, weighty, almost architectural composition. - Still Life with Apples, 1893 (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
Apples, a pitcher, and a dish arranged on a rumpled cloth over a table — the deceptively simple subject through which Cézanne waged his campaign to rebuild painting. 'With an apple I will astonish Paris,' he is reputed… - The Large Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), 1900 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Cézanne's largest and most ambitious canvas, left unfinished at his death: a group of monumental female bathers set in a landscape and framed by arching trees. His lifelong effort to fuse the nude figure with nature… - Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904 (One of the late Mont Sainte-Victoire series (1904))
One of the many late views of the limestone mountain that dominated the landscape around Aix, painted from the plain with the valley of ochre houses and green trees below. Cézanne returned to this motif dozens of times,…
What was said
In a letter to Émile Bernard, Cézanne advised treating nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, everything put into proper perspective.
Cézanne wrote of his slow, exhausting effort to reach the 'realization' of his sensations before the motif, which drove him to paint the same subjects again and again.
Cézanne said he wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums.
Lineage
Learned from Eugène Delacroix
Passed on to Wassily Kandinsky
What would Paul make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Paul Cézanne", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Paul · Keep a life moment the way Paul would · Pictures made after Paul