We Visit the Paul Cézanne Workshop in Aix-en-Provence

Friday we went to the Paul Cézanne workshop in Aix en Provence, and I was blown away by it! Aix-en-Provence is one of my favorite cities to visit and explore.  It’s also one of the places with wonderful English bookstores, fun sidewalk cafes and interesting little shops.

So when Alain suggested we spend a lazy afternoon wandering around Aix, I couldn’t get ready fast enough!

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter, who had a difficult life. The only son, he had two sisters, Rose and Mary. He was closer to Mary than to Rose throughout his life, and was a continual disappointment to his banker father, who wanted his son to have an “acceptable” profession. (However, at his father’s death, he was able to sell the family home – because according to French law, the inheritance is shared equally between family members) and that left him with quite a sizeable fortune for those days.

Cézanne was a man with a hot temper who was known for being rude and difficult – and he was disliked and often shunned by the residents of Aix, who considered him to be almost a vagrant, a crazy man, whose paintings they didn’t like and didn’t understand.
They didn’t like his temper, or the way he dressed, or what they considered his eccentricities. Because of that, he sometimes had a hard time getting food or supplies, because the townspeople didn’t want to sell to him.

In fact, the first time his housekeeper went to the Aix workshop and began cleaning, he became enraged – because she was cleaning up the over-ripe and rotting pieces of fruit that he was painting in his still-life! He screamed and yelled and chased her out of the house! She was so upset that she refused to ever go back to clean again – although he continued to pay her for the rest of his life.

His gardener had a similarly easy job, because Cézanne refused to let him cut any of the trees, bushes or plants – he wanted it to grow the way he remembered it (because he’d spent many happy summers during his childhood playing in that wild area – which is why he bought it and had his house built on it.) However, the gardener appears in several of Cézanne’s paintings – usually sitting with one leg crossed over the other, sitting at the foot of a tree in the garden!

What you need to know about visiting the Paul Cézanne Workshop: the workshop is a little hard to find – because it’s not in the center of town and the road leading you to it is not well-signed. (Also, there is no parking available.)

The Cézanne workshop is now surrounded by houses and commercial buildings, but when it was built, it was all alone in the countryside, about halfway up a steep hill. Because it’s not located in the best area, your smartest move is to park in one of the paid underground parking lots at the bottom of the street – and then walk (or take the bus) up the hill to the workshop. Also, if you’ve got the time – and don’t mind a bit more of a climb, a fifteen minute walk further up the hill will take you to one of Cézanne’s favorite places to see – and paint – the Saint Victoire mountains. Oh – one little interesting note: if you see one of Cézanne’s paintings of the Saint Victoire mountains – and the mountain is in the center of the painting – you’ll know that it’s one of the last of the series – the ones he did at the workshop in Aix.

Surrounded by a large stone and wood fence, entry is through a double-wide wooden gate, painted the same color as the shutters. It’s a rather nondescript 2 story stone and plaster house, with large rough wooden shutters that have been painted sunset orange. One of the first things that hits you – in fact, it’s almost a slap to your senses – is the most incredible terraced garden that surrounds the house – although well-tended, it seems almost wild with – trees, bushes, plants and flowers growing together in a lush mix of colors, textures and scents.

The house is now owned by the city of Aix, and visits are run by Aix tourist department. (By the way, if you go for a visit, try to get Roberta Clarico as your guide – not only does she speak English really well, but she’s a wonderful guide – she made the exhibit come to life for everyone in our group!)

He had the house built to his (very) exacting specifications – and halfway into the construction, Cézanne changed the architect’s original plans – to his great dismay, when Cézanne discovered that the architect had begun to build windows into the south side of the house. (The problem with light from the south is that it’s always changing – as the sun moves across the sky, you get shadows and the light changes the perspective of your subject.)

So instead, Cézanne had a wall of windows built into the north side of his studio. (Although we know he played with light and shadow from those windows on the south side as well!) The room is large, with rough wooden floorboards and the ceiling must be 20 feet high – and the north side windows run the length and width of the room.

Inside the house – upstairs – in the room Cézanne used as his studio – you can still see his things – the

shabby, off-white canvas coat that he worse when he painted (it still has daubs of paint stains here and there), a heavy overcoat – shabby and worn around the collar and sleeves, as well as some of the white pottery, fruit bowls and bottles that he painted during the last five years of his life.

Leaning against the wall – as if he’d just left it there moments ago, is his cane. And next to it, on little crooked metal legs (that fold up to when it’s carried), is a dirty canvas painter’s kit on foldable metal legs – it’s the one Cézanne took with him when he went to paint the Saint Victoire mountain scenes that he loved so well. There are also sketches, photographs, a selection of Cézanne’s ties and other personal effects.

Here’s what the Wikipedia has to say about Cézanne: “…whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century’s new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne “is the father of us all” cannot be easily dismissed.

Cézanne’s work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognisable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature.

The paintings convey Cézanne’s intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception…”

To me, his work is dramatic and a mystery. It draws you in – almost against your will, causing you to look at the most ordinary objects with a new eye and from a new perspective. When he was painting a still-life in his studio, he wanted you to not only “see” it, but to feel like the items in the painting were jumping out at you. So to get the effect he wanted, he would climb up a ten-foot ladder and paint from above. Then he would lay his painting on the floor, and lie down to continue painting it from below. He was also the first of the impressionists to break objects down to their lowest common denominator – an apple wasn’t just an apple, it was also a sphere. A bottle was a tube. A mountain was a cone. If you haven’t looked at a Cézanne lately, it’s worth the time to take a second look!

The workshop is worth taking the time to visit – and if you’re planning a trip in 2009, you’ll definitely want to visit when they exhibit the work of Cézanne and Picasso.

Tags:Aix-en-Provence,French Riviera Cities,Paul Cezanne Workshop

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