Paul Cezanne

“May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth… lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.”

Paul Cézanne to Emile Bernard, 15 april 1904

Paul Cézanne was an extraordinary painter.  He brought a new way of looking at ordinary objects into the art world – which sadly, most people didn’t understand – and so many didn’t like his work.  Of course, it could also be that they didn’t like the man himself – he was not known for having a sunny, pleasant disposition. (He once chased his housekeeper out his studio because she had had the nerve to start cleaning the ankle deep mess of pappers, rotting food, dishes, paint brushes and old cloths dipped in terpentine…the poor woman refused to ever set foot in the studio again, although he continued to pay her until his death five years later.)

But to other artists, he was a mentor, a teacher…the father of a movement.  Pablo Picasso, who it is said developed cubism at the feet of Cézanne, once said this about the artist: ““My one and only master…Cézanne was like the father of us all.”

And so it’s ironic that Cézanne was the ultimate outsider – a man ridiculed and misunderstood, an artist whose work was laughed at and dismissed as crazy.

When I visited Cézanne’s workshop in Aix-en-Provence not too long ago, I was struck, as always by the artist’s eye.

Binocular Vision – A Completely New Perspective

In his studio, you can still see the old 15 foot wooden ladder that he used to climb up – and paint on – as he looked down on the still life below him.  And after painting a still life on the ladder for a while, he’d take the canvas and lay it on the floor – and then he’d continue painting while laying on the floor – looking up at the still life.  It was this that gave his work such depth, and such a different perspective from so many other artists of his time.

He looked at whatever he was painting, and broke it down to it’s most basic form – the cone, the cylinder and the sphere, and he used color to add depth and shadow and life to his work.

Biography: The Early Years

Paul Cézanne was born on January 19, 1839, the only son of a wealthy banker in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. On 22 February, Paul was baptized in the parish church, with his grandmother and uncle Louis as godparents. His father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne (28 July 1798 – 23 October 1886) was a wealthy and well-respected man, who was the co-owner of a banking firm.  His mother, Anne-Elisabeth Honorine Aubert (24 September 1814 – 25 October 1897), was vivacious and romantic, but quick to take offense – whether the offenses were real or imagined.  Once she felt slighted, she never forgave the “guilty party.”  Cézanne also had two younger sisters, Marie and Rose.

Early Education

Cézanne became interested in art at an early age, and was encouraged by his mother – and his sisters, but his father never approved of his son’s wish to become an artist. At the age of ten, Paul entered the Saint Joseph boarding-school, where he studied drawing under Joseph Gibert, a Spanish monk, in Aix.

In 1852 Cézanne became a student at the Collège Bourbon (now Collège Mignet), where he met and became friends with Émile Zola, who was in a lower grade.  He stayed there for six years, though in the last two years he was a day scholar only.  From 1859 to 1861, complying with his father’s wishes, Cézanne attended the law school of the University of Aix, but he continued with his drawing lessons.

Paris, Friends and Failure

After many heated arguments with his father over his desire to become a painter, Cézanne left home at the age of 22, and went to Paris, where he joined his childhood friend and author Emile Zola who was already living there. He was introduced to the famed circle of artists who met at regularly at the Café Guerbois in Paris, (artists such as Manet, Degas and Pissarro), but Cézanne’s awkward manners and defensive shyness prevented him from becoming an intimate of the group.

Cezanne’s stay in Paris lasted only six months. Although he was attracted and fascinated by the innovative and cutting edge works by the artists he hung out with at the cafe -  Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, he was never satisfied by his own work – and sadly he destroyed most of his own canvases of his early work.

He returned home depressed, and full of self-doubt about his ability to put on canvas the things he could see with his eyes.

But after only a year of working with his father, and trying to live up to his father’s ideals, he was drawn back to art and decided to try a painter’s life one more time – deeply disappointing his father, who threatened to cut him off without a penny. (He did not, because of the pleadings of his wife and daughters on Cézanne’s behalf.)

Cézanne returned to Paris, only to suffer a new defeat, when he failed the entrance exam for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. However, this time while in Paris, Cézanne met the Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro.

Worse, his paintings were rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon.

His Early Work

One of the most important works of his early years is the portrait of his very formidable father. The Artist’s Father (1866, 199 x 119 cm (78 x 47 in)) is one of Cézanne’s “palette-knife pictures” which was painted in short sessions between 1865 and 1866.

This painting, which was finally accepted by the Salon in 1882 – thanks to the intervention of his friend and fellow artist Antoine Guillement – was Cézanne’s first and last successful submission.

This painting has always fascinated me on several levels. First, of course, you have the realistic content and solid style, which show’s Cézanne’s admiration for the painter Gustave Courbet.

If you look closely at it, you see a somewhat grumpy, unyielding man of business.  You get the feeling that this man will never back down, never compromise – you can see it from his posture, his hands…he radiates sternness from the top of his black beret all the way down to the tips of his heavy brown shoes.

The stiff verticals of the big chair are echoed in those of the door, and even in the edges of the small still life (which also happens to be by Cézanne) on the wall just behind the chair: every vertical line matches the absolute verticals of the edges of the canvas itself, – which deepens the feeling of stiffness and certainty of the portrait.  His father’s thick hands firmly hold his newspaper- (although it’s interesting to know that Cézanne replaced his father’s habitual, conservative newspaper with the liberal L’Evénement, which regularly published articles by his friend, Emile Zola.) His father seems completely absorbed by what he’s reading in the paper, and he’s sitting stiffly in the somewhat elongegated armchair.  Yet for all its sternness, for all the uncompromizing and somewhat austereness of the man, I always have the feeling that Cézanne was trying to get the attention the man in the painting too.  Notice how his father doesn’t completely fit the chair – he’s not sitting all the way back in it – we can’t see his eyes, only his grim mouth and thick frame – and I’ve always wondered what his reaction would have been to a sudden disturance – if Cézanne had shouted or thrown something – would the man have gotten up from his chair, and paid attention to his son?

A Change of Style

Initially the friendship formed in the mid-1860s between Pissarro and Cézanne was that of master and mentoree.  Pissarro had a lasting and formative influence on the younger aftist.  Over the next ten years they often traveled together, where they painted many different landscapes in Louveciennes and Pontoise, and this led to a collaborative working relationship between equals.  When he was 30, Cezanne not only changed his painting style, but his habits and lifestyle as well.  He met Hortense Fiquet who, in the beginning, became his mistress for many years.

The black and somewhat morbid atmosphere of his painting gradually changed when, with Pisarrio, he concentrated on landscapes.  After the birth of his son, Cezanne even moved his family to Pontoise, where Pissarro lived. Cézanne’s mother knew about Hortense, but they didn’t tell his father, for fear that he would finally cut Cézanne off without a cent.

Cézanne’s early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and he created many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted.

Cézanne’s paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon. The Salon rejected Cézanne’s submissions every year from 1864 to 1869.

Before 1895 Cézanne exhibited twice with the Impressionists – at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, although he maintained his concern for solidity and structure throughout. Hortense and the children stayed in Marseilles at that time. After the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, Cézanne abandoned Impressionism for good.

In March 1878, Cézanne’s father found out about Hortense and threatened to cut Cézanne off financially but, in September, he decided to give him 400 francs for his family.

Cézanne continued to migrate between the Paris region and Provence until Louis-Auguste had a studio built for him at his home, Jas de Bouffan, in the early 1880s. The studio was on the top floor and a huge picture window was added, allowing in the northern light but interrupting the line of the eaves. This feature remains today. Cézanne stabilized his residence in L’Estaque. He painted with Renoir there in 1882 and visited Renoir and Monet in 1883.

In 1886 (which was a turning point for the family). The year 1886 was a turning point for the family. Cézanne married Hortense. In that year also, Cézanne’s father died, leaving him the estate purchased in 1859; he was 47.

In later years, a few individual paintings were shown at various venues, until 1895, when a well-known Parisian art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, gave the artist his first solo exhibition. Vollard bought every painting in the Cézanne’s workshop in Aix.

1888 the family was in the former manor, Jas de Bouffan, a substantial house and grounds with outbuildings, which afforded a new-found comfort. (This house, in Aix, although it has much less acerage than during Cézanne’s life, is now owned by the city and is open to the public on a restricted basis.)

However, it didn’t last – in 1899, after his mother’s death, Cézanne had to sell the house in Jas de Bouffan, and Hortense and Cezanne’s son began spending less and less time with him. (He had developed diabetes – and the more physical problems he had, the more difficult he became, and the more depressed.) He rented a flat on the Rue de Boulegon, and bought a piece of land that at that time was north of Aix – and that’swhere he had his final studio built. (More about that in just a minute.)

The Later Years

During this later part of his career, Cezanne became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style that influenced the Impressionists enormously.

Throughout his life he struggled constanty to develop what he called an “authentic observation of the seen world”.  He wanted to recreate what he saw in the most accurate method possible.  And that’s how he came to create a kind of structured order to his work by breaking what he saw down into their most basic and simplest of forms and color planes.

He once said, “I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums.”

Despite the increasing public recognition and financial success, Cézanne chose to work in increasing artistic isolation, usually painting in the south of France, in his beloved Provence, far from Paris.

By now, he and Hortense seldom lived together – he left them in Marseilles while he went to Paris, and they lived in Paris while he was in Provence.

The Atelier (Workshop in Aix-en-Provence

While the studio was being built, Cézanne drove the architect crazy with his very exacting ideas about how things should be done – in fact, the architect had started putting in southern exposure windows and Cezanne almost had a fit – he wanted a huge window built on the north side – to simulate the same kind of light which is found outside (although it’s not very practical just from the aspect of needing to heat it in the winter – but he got his way).  However, the architect insisted on adding 4 small windows on the south side – which Cezanne apparently grumbled about but allowed.

He told the architect that he didn’t want windows on the south side at all, because as the sun moved across the sky, it caused the light and shadows to change – creating havoc with his painting.  (However, we know that he did, in fact, use the southern windows – in some of his most famous still-lifes.)

One of the many things I found interesting about Cézanne’s studio is a large but very narrow window that’s also built on the north side of the studio.  It turns out that he had it built so he could paint from the upper garden – when he wanted to work on “The Bathers” – (started in 1894), apparently he’d just push the painting out through that opening and could then paint in his garden.

The other thing that really struck me about the workshop are all of Cézanne’s things – items he used in his everyday life, and as models in his painting – they are still there – for example, in the workshop you can see the “green jug” the “rum bottle” and the “olive bowl” as well as the ceramic “cherub” in the studio – and then see them in his paintings.

The Death of Cézanne

In October 1906, Cézanne was outside painting his beloved Saint Victoire mountains and was caught in a rainstorm – but he continued to paint.  On the way home, he collapsed and a neighbor found him and took him home.  He recovered, thanks to the ministrations of his housekeeper, and on October 16, still sick ad feverish, he went out into the garden to work on one of his famous portraits of M. Villiers – his gardener.  Cézanne was dying when he went back to the house.

From 1906 to 1921, Cézanne’s studio was closed.  In 1921, a scholar, Marcel Provence, bought it from Cézanne’s son, and he kept everything in it the way that it was – in memory of Cézanne.

Then in 1954, it was saved from being demolished when two American students, James Lord and John Rewald bought it, created a committee and offered it to the University.  In 1964, the university sold it to the city of Aix.  And it was classified as a historical monument in 1974.  Today it is managed by the tourist office of the city of Aix.

Why Cézanne’s Workshop is a “Must See” When You Visit Aix

You must see the workshop because it’s not like any other “museum” – it’s not filled with Cézanne’s artwork – although you’ll see a couple of salvaged pieces of one of the many canvases that the artist destroyed because he wasn’t happy with it, but it is filled with the things that were loved and used by the man and the artist.

It’s touching to see his “best” coat – somewhat frayed and worn at the cuffs, hung on a hook next to his stained off-white canvas coat that he wore when painting outside, or his cane, leaning haphazardly against the wall, as if waiting for Cézanne to pick it up again.  In a bureau in front of the large north windows, you’ll find his ties, and a pipe, and a pair of cufflinks.  And in another drawer are photos of the artist and his friends.

And you can still see the same table, chair and white porcelain pieces that are featured in so many of his still lifes.  It is these things, more than anything else, that takes Cézanne the painter, and turns him into Cézanne the man – and helps to keep him and his work alive. To see more, check out my post on the day that we visited Cezanne’s workshop.