Paul Cézanne
The father of modernism.
Cézanne wanted to make Impressionism into “something solid and durable” and built up his motifs from geometric forms. Picasso called him “the father of us all”.
Paul Cézanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. His father was a hatter who later became a banker and a wealthy man. At school Paul became a close friend of Émile Zola, who later became a famous writer. His father wanted his son to become a lawyer, and Paul began studying law. In 1861 he was finally allowed to go to Paris to paint. There he studied at the independent Académie Suisse and met Camille Pissarro.
The early years were hard. The Salon rejected him year after year. His early paintings are dark, thick and violent, with subjects such as murders and orgies. In the early 1870s he worked with Pissarro in Pontoise and Auvers and began painting outdoors with lighter colours. The House of the Hanged Man (1873) in the Musée d'Orsay was shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. The critics were harsh, and Cézanne withdrew more and more to Provence.
Cézanne wanted to make Impressionism into something solid and durable. He built up his motifs with small, parallel brushstrokes that form blocks of colour. He often showed objects from several viewpoints at once, and tabletops and jugs may tilt in ways that are not “correct”. In a letter he wrote that nature should be treated through the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire some sixty times, apples in still lifes and five versions of The Card Players. His large paintings of bathers are held in, among other places, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London.
His private life was complicated. He lived with Hortense Fiquet and had a son, Paul, in 1872, but hid the relationship from his father for many years. They married in 1886, the same year his father died and Cézanne received a large inheritance. His friendship with Zola ended around the same time. Only in 1895 did he have a solo exhibition, at the dealer Ambroise Vollard’s, and young artists began to discover him. He died in 1906 after being caught in a storm while painting outdoors.
The year after his death a large memorial exhibition was held in Paris. It made a deep impression on Picasso and Braque and became an important starting point for Cubism. Cézanne is often called the father of modern art, because he showed that a painting can be an independent construction of colour and form.