ARTISTS
Prehistoric
Painting
Ancient
Painting
Medieval
Painting
Renaissance
17th
& 18th Century
Romanticism
& Classicism
Realism
Impressionism
Post-Impressionism
Expressionism
& Cubism
Surrealism
Chinese
Painting
Japanese
Painting
Indian
Painting
Persian
Painting
African
Art
| CEZANNE, Paul |
| Right
now a moment is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do
that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that
moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate. give the image
of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen
before our time. - Paul Cezanne |
 |
 |
 |
CEZANNE, Paul, French painter born Aix-en-Provence, France, January 19, 1839 and died there on October 22, 1906. The son of a rich banker, he began to receive an annual allowance of 3,600 francs from his father in 1863, when he declared painting to be his profession. This decision owed much to the kindly machinations of Emile Zola, the inseparable friend of his youth, who had persuaded him to visit Paris in 1861 and now introduced him to Edouard Manet and the young painters and intellectuals around him. Basically a solitary man, Cezanne did not respond to the vibrancy of Parisian cafe discussions, and, except for Camille Pissarro, he did not care much for his new associates. For 10 years, with Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet as his avowed models, he produced a long series of works, both tortured and romantic, ranging from intense portraits to groups of various sorts, chiefly arresting for their violent eroticism. Easily recognizable by the rude strokes of the palette knife, these works were called lurid by Cezanne himself. This period concluded with landscapes painted at L'Estaque, near Marseille, during the Franco Prussian War, when he was literally in hiding.
Until he began to work alongside Pissarro in 1872, Cezanne had asserted himself exclusively as an unusually violent naturalist. A not-quite overnight change brought him into the impressionist camp. He lightened his palette and by subtle tonal gradations defined the structure of objects. While Claude Monet was dissolving structures in an atmospheric bath, Cezanne used light as a cohesive element, helping to define structure.
Taking impressionism as his point of departure, Cezanne effected a revolution that made him the precursor of almost all the important movements in 20th century painting. He provided, for instance, the technical and theoretical data of cubism, so that the innovators of 1907 had only to study his later canvases before creating the first overtly cubist paintings.
Cezanne suffered bitterly from lack of recognition. He exhibited with the impressionists in 1874 and 1877: in the latter year critical reaction to his 17 pictures was militantly hostile. For some years he sent pictures to the official Salon, but only one (the identity of which is not known) was accepted, in 1882. His father's death in 1886 made him well to do; his mother's in 1897, wealthy. In 1886 he broke with Zola who in L'oeuvre had obviously based the chief character, a half-mad impressionist painter who commits suicide, on Cezanne. In 1891 he had his first attack of diabetes, which would eventually kill him. Four years later, Ambroise Vollard, the dealer, gave him a one-man show, derided by the public but praised by many painters and connoisseurs. Cezanne began to be collected, Aix became a place of pilgrimage for younger artists, and in 1904 he triumphed - an entire room at the Salon d'Automne was set aside for his paintings. His fame grew so rapidly that in 1920 the influential critic Clive Bell wrote: "If the greatest name in European painting is not Cezanne, it is Giotto."
Cezanne is most amply represented in the Louvre in Paris and in the Barnes
Foundation, Merion, Pa., but many galleries, notably the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York and the National Gallery in Washington, contain representative
canvases.