Paul Cézanne lived for painting. He saw, thought, felt, and acted exclusively as a painter, but alienated his fellow people and led him to loneliness. In the silence torn by self-doubt, the French artist developed his own revolutionary painting style which triggered a paradigm shift in art history and paved the way for early modernism.
(...) Continue readingPaul Cézanne – Friendship with Zola; dispute with his father
Paul Cézanne was born in the French university city of Aix-en-Provence on 19 January 1839. His father, who through hard work went from a small position as hat merchant to that of wealthy banker, was able to offer him an untroubled childhood and youth with great security. Cézanne and his school friends Emile Zola and Jean-Baptiste Baille formed an inseparable trio: long hunting and fishing trips, reading Homer and Virgil, and above all endless debates about the nature of art filled the everyday life of the three young men. This enjoyable period, which Cézanne remembered fondly, ended with Zola’s departure for Paris in February 1858. In emphatic letters, Zola urged his friends to follow him to Paris in order to finally seal their career as painters. Although Cézanne’s father permitted his son to decorate the salon of the family residence Jas de Boffaan (House of the Wind) with large-format murals, he was critical of his artistic ambitions and wanted him instead to succeed him in his bank. It was only after protracted disputes, that Cézanne received permission to travel.
Setbacks and self-doubt: the meaning of colour
Paul Cézanne did not find the conditions in Paris that he had dreamed of. Studies of the Old Masters in the Louvre, attendance of the Académie Suisse, fruitful interaction with artists such as Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, and reunion with his childhood friend Zola – none of this could gloss over the strangeness and exclusion Cézanne felt, culminating in the rejection of his application to the then seminal École des Beaux-Arts. Plagued by self-doubt, he fled home and made an attempt as bank employee, but the call to art remained overpowering and eventually won the upper hand. The return to Paris brought renewed rejection by the École des Beaux-Arts, but this time the artist was not deterred and continued on his own path independently. The contemporary Parisian art scene was dominated by the fight between the Classicist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, who prioritised line over colour, and the Romanticist Eugène Delacroix, who favoured colour as an expression of artistic inspiration. Paul Cézanne followed and revered Delacroix from whose approach to colour he adopted a great deal.
Camille Pissarro led Paul Cezanne to Impressionism
Paul Cézanne remained a ridiculed outsider. He thus often sought out the peaceful seclusion of his provincial home where he perfected his skills in portrait painting. He also evaded the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war and the threat of conscription by retreating to the fishing village near Marseille. He found a patient model in his mistress, the bookbinder Hortense Fiquet whom he immortalised in over 40 portraits. Even after the birth of his beloved son Paul, Cézanne hid the relationship with Hortense from his father in order to protect his financial support. But his obligation towards wife and child troubled him; he became increasingly lonely and only the call of his fatherly friend Camille Pissarro roused him from his lethargy. The patient and sensitive Pissarro convinced Cézanne to abandon the dark colours that had dominated his work up until then and gently guided him to Impressionist painting. Pissarro was like a father and the good Lord to him, Paul Cézanne said in retrospect about this time.
Obsessed about art; disappointed with life
In the years that followed, Paul Cézanne demonstrated an immense creative urge, leaving little room for anything other than art, and found his first buyer and collector in the doctor Paul-Fernand Gachet. He was never happy with his pictures, obsessively improving, re-painting and doubting. As well as landscapes - which he repeatedly worked as its own subject, in contrast to the spirit of the time - it was above all the longings and fear of being that determined his creativity. His tense relationship with women in particular found subject in his late work; whilst the relationship with Hortense soon collapsed and was only legitimised by marriage for the sake of their son, only his dearly beloved sister Marie was truly close to the artist. The death of his father brought financial respite with the inheritance and artist friends such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir dragged Cézanne out of his self-imposed isolation. As a result, the much-maligned pictures of the idiosyncratic painter gradually found favour with the previously overcritical public. In the autumn of 1906, Cezanne was caught in storm whilst painting en plein air. The stubborn artist continued to paint undeterred for two hours, but on the way home collapsed unconscious.
Paul Cézanne died of a lung infection in Aix-en-Provence on 22 October 1906.
Paul Cezanne - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
