Written by: Alex Broening
Over time, artists’ styles evolve and shift, flowing and changing as the artist changes. Few artists, however, have displayed the sheer volume of different styles embraced and perfected by Paul Cézanne. Born in Aix-en-Provence in Southern France in 1839, Cézanne did not follow a common or easy path to his artistic maturity. The son of a banker, he was encouraged to take up his father’s trade. Cézanne resisted, and in 1859, at the age of 20, attended art classes. An aspiring, but struggling, artist, Cézanne applied twice to the École des Beaux-Arts, but was rejected both times. Instead, he visited Parisian museums and copied works of old masters. Cézanne’s early art was similar in a sense to many of the old masters’ works. His paintings were characterized by high contrast, a thick application of paint with the technique of impasto, and a focus on color – very much the styles favored by the French Academy at the time. However, he failed to get his work accepted at the annual Salon, and his work began to change. In the early 1870s, with his move to southern France, along the Mediterranean, Cézanne began to abandon his dark tone, and started to incorporate brighter, more vibrant colors. In addition, he started painting outside – depicting landscapes and people. This work, while not yet in the Impressionist style, was a step in that direction. In 1873, he returned to Paris, and showed his work alongside that of other rejects of the Salon. However, this avant-garde work was not appreciated by the critics or the public, and so for a decade Cézanne shrunk from public life, and returned to southern France to work on his art. It was in this period, from the second half of the 1870s through the 1880s, that Cézanne produced much of the body of work for which he is known. Cézanne was not content capturing the fleeting moment as many other Impressionists attempted to do. Instead, Cézanne labored through his art to capture something about the subject other than what was evident in reality. Cézanne didn’t care about perspective or naturalism. Instead he focused on the careful construction of objects and their structures, displaying their nature and composition. Cézanne’s goal through his painting was to represent the entirety of a figure or a form – not how they look, but how they exist. He would construct the form methodically, in the way that he thought best represented the object as a whole. Cézanne’s “harmony parallel to nature” was more than aesthetics. When Cézanne painted an apple, or a seascape, or a seated figure, he wanted to express what that subject really was. To do that, he ignored the rules of perspective, and stretched and changed forms to suit his purposes. Cézanne wanted to reveal “something other than reality.” After all, anyone can look at an apple on a table and see that it is an apple. Cézanne wanted to show the viewer what that apple was, and what it really meant. In the last years of his life, Cézanne painted primarily two themes: the Mont Sainte-Victoire near his home, and an increasingly abstracted series called The Bathers, in which he examined the synthesis of the human body and nature. He died in his house in Aix in 1906, after catching pneumonia.
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ContributorsJACQUELINE YU is the co-founder of the MLWGS art history online magazine. She is an incredible artist and devotes much of her time to both participating in, experiencing, and appreciating art. Archives
April 2019
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