NAVIGATIONALL ARTISTS
Paul
Cezanne (January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906)
Though Cezanne’s artistic career spanned the time of the Impressionists, a group into which he would never fit, he helped to lay the building blocks for the Post-Impressionists. Both Picasso and Matisse referred to Cezanne as “the father of us all”. Picasso more notably stating “all modern painting was under the hat Cezanne wore in the open air, whose brim served to measure distance.” His work emphasizes the Impressionists’ role of color taking it a step further using the Impressionist fragmented brushstroke to create shape, form and depth. This unique mastery of composition and his need to paint his perception of his subject rather than simply reproducing it lays the foundation for Cubism and the abstract artistry of the 20th century.
From “Masterpieces of Western Art” – an amazing source of information:
”Cezanne is frequently referred to as the father of modern art. From the very beginning of his artistic career, he sought to achieve more than his contemporaries, the realists and the Impressionists. Though he strictly rejected Neoclassicism, he saw himself as a classical artist; he sought to express a universal and timeless truth, based on his exploration of the fundamental principles of painting. He regarded narrative, idealist and symbolist factors as detrimental. He invariably worked from nature, seeking to capture the essence without creating a mere reproduction of what he saw. In his analysis of the relationship between colour, form, light, and space, he gradually achieved a unity of drawing, colour, and forms of presentation that paved the way for Cubism and abstraction. He modeled and modulated with colours and colour values. Gradually, the classical perspective disappeared from his compositions and he constructed objects, volumes, and space on the basis of painterly interpretations of basic geometric patterns and forms”
To
Learn More about Cezanne and other artists Purchase Masterpieces of Western
Art
Cezanne was born in Southern France to successful banker Louis-Auguste
Cezanne and Anne-Elizabeth Honorine Aubert. He had two sisters, Marie
and Rose. He studied art early in life from a Spanish monk. He attended
the College Bourbon for six years where he met and befriended Emile Zola,
a French novelist. His father objected to his artistic pursuits and though
Cezanne would attend Law School, it would not last. Paul left the school
after two years to move to Paris and immerse himself in his dreams of
becoming an artist.
In Paris, Cezanne met the Impressionists but except for Pissaro, whom
he befriended, he would only rarely be in contact with them and he only
exhibited with them on two occasions. He came from a rich family but didn’t
dress or act the part. His Impressionist counterparts found him rough
around the edges and distrustful and only in the last ten years of his
life would his contemporaries finally come to appreciate his work. It
is this being amidst the Impressionists and yet far from them that makes
Cezanne’s work so crucial to the development of the art and artists
that would follow him.
Much like Impressionists who would prefer to paint the outdoors while
outside, Cezanne’s favorite theme was outdoor landscape. While the
Impressionists used short brushstrokes to capture the fleeting moment,
Cezanne took this one step further and used this brushstroke to define
depth and form. Always adhering to the “cube, cone, and sphere”
simplistic breaking down of form, he was able to capture depth in a sense
that hadn’t previously been seen. It is almost as if the viewer
were seeing two different views of the subject at the same time. Cezanne
was meticulous with his brushstrokes, sometimes leaving paintings unfinished
when encountering a problem he could not render. It is these brushstrokes,
creating form while capturing depth and transforming space, that links
Cezanne with creation of cubism and the abstract.
Cezanne would spend most of his life living between Paris and his family’s
home in Aix. He married Hortense Fiquet in 1886. Though never gaining
the approval of his most ardent critics, Cezanne would, in the last years
of his life, win the respect of most of his Impressionist contemporaries
and inspire a new generation of artists. He would die doing what he loved
most: painting outside, in the open air. He was caught in a downpour and
collapsed on his way home. He died of pneumonia a few days later at the
age of 67.
