PAUL CÉZANNE, FRENCH POST-IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Paul Cézanne, the French Post-Impressionist painter, who was born on a day like today in 1839.

Paul Cézanne (19 January 1839-22 October 1906) was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation and influenced avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century. 

Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and early 20th century Cubism.

While his early works are still influenced by Romanticism -such as the murals in the Jas de Bouffan country house- and Realism, Cézanne arrived at a new pictorial language through intensive examination of Impressionist forms of expression. He altered conventional approaches to perspective and broke established rules of academic art by emphasizing the underlying structure of objects in a composition and the formal qualities of art.

Cézanne strived for a renewal of traditional design methods on the basis of the impressionistic colour space and colour modulation principles.

Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects. Both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne is the father of us all.

His painting provoked incomprehension and ridicule in contemporary art criticism. Until the late 1890s it was mainly fellow artists such as Camille Pissarro and the art dealer and gallery owner Ambroise Vollard who discovered Cézanne's work and were among the first to buy his paintings.

In 1895, Vollard opened the first solo exhibition in his Paris gallery, which led to a broader examination of the artist's work.

More information: Paul Cezánne

Paul Cézanne was born the son of the milliner and later banker Louis-Auguste Cézanne and Anne-Elisabeth-Honorine Aubert at 28 rue de l'Opera in Aix-en-Provence.

Cézanne moved to Paris in April 1861. The high hopes he had set in Paris were not fulfilled, as he had applied to the École des Beaux-Arts and was turned down. He attended the free Académie Suisse, where he was able to devote himself to life drawing.

On 31 May 1870, Cézanne was best man at Zola's wedding in Paris. During the Franco-Prussian War, Cézanne and Hortense Fiquet lived in the fishing village of L'Estaque near Marseille, which Cézanne would later visit and paint frequently, as the place's Mediterranean atmosphere fascinated him. He avoided conscription for military service. Although Cézanne had been denounced as a deserter in January 1871, he managed to hide. No further details are known as documents from this period are missing.

In 1901, Cézanne acquired a piece of land north of the city of Aix-en-Provence along the Chemin des Lauves, an isolated road on some high ground, where he had his studio built on the Chemin des Lauves in 1902 according to his needs (Atelier de Cézanne, now open to the public). He moved there in 1903.

For large-format paintings such as The Bathers, which he created in the Les Lauves studio, he had a long, narrow gap in the wall built through which natural light could flow. That year Zola died, leaving Cézanne in mourning despite the estrangement. His health deteriorated with age; In addition to his diabetes, he suffered from depression in old age, which manifested itself in growing distrust of his fellow human beings to the point of delusions of persecution.

Cézanne's early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and includes many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted. Later in his career, he became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style.

Nevertheless, in Cézanne's mature work there is the development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting. Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes. His statement I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums, and his contention that he was recreating Poussin after nature underscored his desire to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition.

More information: The Art Story

 It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand
in front of a blank canvas.

Paul Cezanne