Paul Cezanne Biography of Hand Painted Oil Paintings

Paul Cezanne 1839 - 1906

Paul Cézanne was a French painter, often called the father of modern art, who strove to develop an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression, and abstract pictorial order. Among the artists of his time, Cézanne perhaps has had the most profound effect on the art of the 20th century. He was the greatest single influence on both the French artist Henri Matisse, who admired his color, and the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who developed Cézanne's planar compositional structure into the cubist style.

Early Life and Work Cézanne was born in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839, the son of a wealthy banker. In 1862, after a number of bitter family disputes, the aspiring artist was given a small allowance and sent to study art in Paris, where Zola had already gone. From the start he was drawn to the more radical elements of the Parisian art world. He especially admired the romantic painter Eugene Delacroix and, among the younger masters, Gustave Courbet and the notorious édouard Manet, who exhibited realist paintings that were shocking in both style and subject matter to most of their contemporaries.

Influence of the Impressionists Many of Cézanne's early works were painted in dark tones applied with heavy, fluid pigment, suggesting the moody, romantic expressionism of previous generations. Just as Zola pursued his interest in the realist novel, however, Cézanne also gradually developed a commitment to the representation of contemporary life, painting the world he observed without concern for thematic idealization or stylistic affectation. The most significant influence on the work of his early maturity proved to be Camille Pissarro, an older but as yet unrecognized painter who lived with his large family in a rural area outside Paris.

Cézanne himself spoke of "modulating" with color rather than "modeling" with dark and light. By this he meant that he would replace an artificial convention of representation (modeling) with a more expressive system (modulating) that was closer still to nature, or, as the artist himself said, "parallel to nature." For Cézanne, the answer to all the technical problems of impressionism lay in a use of color both more orderly and more expressive than that of his fellow impressionists. Cézanne's goal was, in his own mind, never fully attained. He left most of his works unfinished and destroyed many others.

Significance of Cézanne's Work For many years Cézanne was known only to his old impressionist colleagues and to a few younger radical postimpressionist artists, including the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and the French painter Paul Gauguin. In 1895, however, Ambroise Vollard, an ambitious Paris art dealer, arranged a show of Cézanne's works and over the next few years promoted them successfully. By 1904, Cézanne was featured in a major official exhibition, and by the time of his death (in Aix on October 22, 1906) he had attained the status of a legendary figure. During his last years many younger artists traveled to Aix to observe him at work and to receive any words of wisdom he might offer. Both his style and his theory remained mysterious and cryptic; he seemed to some a naive primitive, while to others he was a sophisticated master of technical procedure. The intensity of his color, coupled with the apparent rigor of his compositional organization, signaled to most that, despite the artist's own frequent despair, he had synthesized the basic expressive and representational elements of painting in a highly original manner.

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Paul Cezanne 1839 - 1906

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