French painter.
Attracted by impressionism before dissociating itself some, Cézanne invented a style which opened the way with the art of the XX E century: its landscapes - in particular its famous sights of the Holy-Victoire mountain - owe their in-depth construction with the only treatment of the color; its dead natures and its portraits play on a geometrization of the forms heralding the cubism.
Carrying out a solitary existence far away from the capital, Cézanne knows the celebrity only in 1904, at the time of the retrospective which the Living room of autumn devotes to him.
At the same time, its influence on the young artists becomes very important, at the moment when its life and its work are completed, which, still registered in the representational art of the XIX E century, already the abstraction announces.
A difficult career Paul Cézanne is born in Aix-en-Provence on on January 19th, 1839, in an easy medium; his/her father, trader hatter, will become banker in 1847: Cézanne will never know material concern. It starts by making traditional studies, during which it binds with its Émile Zola school-fellow, then is registered with the Faculty of Law, while following courses of drawing. In 1861, against the will of his father, it goes up to Paris to devote itself entirely to painting, but does not succeed in entering to the School of the fine arts.
Disappointed by the capital, within which it will have during all its existence of the evil to be integrated, Cézanne divides until 1870 its time between Aix and Paris, where it attends some future impressionists, inter alia Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley and Monet. Not succeeding in exposing its first creations to the Living room, it presents a work to famous Salon of refused, in 1863. Cézanne continues in this time several different directions. Sometimes he studies the large Masters of the Louvre, of which he is an assiduous visitor, and imitates the style of Delacroix or Corot (the black Clock); sometimes he works on portraits, for which he uses a thick matter spread out with the knife, or on works reflecting its obsessions (the Orgy, the Temptation of Antoine saint).
In 1871, with his/her son Paul and his partner, Hortense Fiquet - which becomes his wife in 1886 -, Cézanne settles in Pontoise, then in Auvers-sur-Oise, where it meets Doctor Gachet, who becomes one of the large collectors of his works. Accompanied by Camille Pissarro, it starts to work in the open air. He plays of a cleared up pallet which one notices in particular in the House of hung, shown with the first exposure of the Impressionists, in the Nadar photographer, in 1874. Work was the object of critical sharp, because of its apparently slackened composition and of the thick matter employed. To the following exposure of the group, in 1877, Cézanne sends a work of a different nature: the Bathers reveal a concern of the subject and size which distinguishes it from the impressionists, of which he dissociates himself consequently clearly; choosing an original course, it decides “to make impressionism an art of museum”, i.e. to reconcile the pictorial research most recent with the lessons of the Masters of the past.
Seeking its inspiration in various landscapes, of Estaque, near to Marseilles, to Melun or the Rock-Guyon, Cézanne manages to be made admit with the Living room of 1882, but it made there scandal. In Work, novel published in 1886, his/her Zola childhood friend will put in scene Claude Lantier, painter revolutionary but impotent, who, failing in his desire of artistic creation, comes to the suicide. Seeing in this work an allusion to its own destiny, Cézanne will be scrambled definitively with the writer. The same year, his/her father dies, leaving him an important heritage: the painter will be until the end of his days safe from need. He can consequently work as a recluse (the Card players, the Young man with the red waistcoat, blue Vase); he more and more often remains in Aix-en-Provence, and works indefatigably “on the reason”, in the countryside surrounding the Holy-Victoire mountain.
Even if two personal exposures are devoted to him to the Vollard gallery, in 1895 and 1898, even if it takes part in the World Fairs of 1889 and 1900 in Paris, Cézanne leads a cloistered life to Aix-en-Provence, where many admirors come to visit him. On October 15th, 1906, in from Aix countryside, it is surprised by a storm; he dies one week later.
The revolution cézannienne After a beginning marked by forms baroques, as in modern Olympia (1873) - as made fun as work of Manet as it parodies -, and following the failure of the exposure of the Impressionists of 1877, Cézanne invents a personal manner gradually to paint. It passes by one constructive period (1877-1886), before coming to an art of synthesis (1886-1906).
Its first concern is to react against the slackened character of impressionist creations and to structure its tables firmly: working on familiar landscapes, Cézanne tries to emphasize the forms which constitute them by underlining the principal lines and the points of force (the Bridge of Maincy, 1879). In House and firm of Jas de Bouffan (1887), the painter privileges the geometrical edges and lines, and thus creates an extremely rigid structured composition.
Its famous dead natures reveal the same concern for logical organization of the essential forms. The literary absence of subject makes it possible pictorial research to arise with an all the more large intensity. Using some simple elements posed on a table - a cup, glass, fruits, a knife -, Cézanne invents a true dramaturgy.
It is starting from 1888 qu ' it gives its full measurement, sticking to series of a repetitive nature. Its many sights of from Aix countryside, in particular of the Holy-Victoire mountain, which it paints until its death, reveal a new design of painting. Eager to be faithful to nature, to safeguard what it names its “small feeling”, Cézanne invents an in-depth construction thanks to the juxtaposition of cold and hot colors, the first tending to be inserted around the distance and the seconds, on the contrary, to approach the spectator.
In the series of the Bathers and Baigneuses, which starts in 1875 and culminates with the Large Bathers, of 1898-1905, Cézanne, by integrating human figures into the landscape, carries out a traditional company, that it carries out with modern means. It is innovative by renovating the traditions, with the ambition to transform work “into a real Chick, of outdoor, color and light”.
Cézanne and the art of the XXe century
Since its death, Cézanne was seen surrounded of the greatest consideration, because of the echo which its inventions in the art of our century received.
The deer, savage defenders of the pure color, and especially the Cubists seem to have continued in the way that it had traced. Thus, the Cubists, in particular Directs and Picasso, defended a geometrization of the forms which seems the practical application of the watchword that Cézanne launched in 1904: it wished, in a letter with his friend the painter “synthetist” Émile Bernard, “to treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone”, and, in its works, had used this principle. The houses or the landscapes are often transformed into cubes or volumes (the red Rock, 1900); until in his portraits, like the Woman with the coffee machine (1892), the painter exploits geometrical volumes whose fitment constitutes the human body.
But the heritage of Cézanne is also to seek in abstract painting. Admittedly, its works remained figurative; one knows the importance which the artist under investigation attached of the nature, which appears particularly in time that it passed to work in the open air. However, one can credit Cézanne, than very, to have more clarified other the crisis of the subject. Generally scorning the literary topics, it almost carried out all its works on the same subjects, of the portraits, the landscapes and dead natures.
What is these famous apples which it was so often rained to represent, if not of the pretexts to paint volumes, colors and matters? No one better than did not show him how much essence, in painting, is due to the questions of form, color and composition, the subject not being nothing more than the occasion to create a work. Picasso, evoking the influence of Cézanne as from 1906, underlines it: “I understood that painting had an intrinsic value, independently of the representation of the objects.”
In this priority granted to painting itself compared to what it appears, Cézanne is shown still modern by giving importance to the material dimension of artistic creation. The poet Joachim Gasquet, who lengthily attended it, stresses that “to be a good workman, to fill his trade well for him the base of all was”. In fact, Cézanne grants to the color, as a vibration and a matter posed by the brush, a new place. The freedom of its key attests it. In his Self-portrait of 1880, one even sees that the fabric, with its rough grain, plays in work a key role.
Cézanne thus precedes the currents of the art of the XX E century, which were based on a value without precedent granted to material and the play of the forms. It is especially one of the first to have regarded painting as an art having its own language, and carrier, in its matter even, of the spiritual adventures noblest.