The French painter Paul Cézanne, who exhibited little in his lifetime and pursued his

interests increasingly in artistic isolation, is regarded today as one of the great forerunners
of modern painting, both for the way that he evolved of putting down on canvas exactly
what his eye saw in nature and for the qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through
a unique treatment of space, mass, and color.

Cézanne was a contemporary of the impressionists, but he went beyond their interests in
the individual brushstroke and the fall of light onto objects, to create, in his words,
``something more solid and durable, like the art of the museums.''

Cézanne was born at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France on Jan. 19, 1839. He went
to school in Aix, forming a close friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He also studied
law there from 1859 to 1861, but at the same time he continued attending drawing
classes. Against the implacable resistance of his father, he made up his mind that he
wanted to paint and in 1861 joined Zola in Paris. His father's reluctant consent at that
time brought him financial support and, later, a large inheritance on which he could live
without difficulty. In Paris he met Camille Pissarro and came to know others of the
impressionist group, with whom he would exhibit in 1874 and 1877. Cézanne, however,
remained an outsider to their circle; from 1864 to 1869 he submitted his work to the
official SALON and saw it consistently rejected. His paintings of 1865-70 form what is
usually called his early ``romantic'' period. Extremely personal in character, it deals with
bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in harsh, somber colors and extremely heavy
paintwork.

Thereafter, as Cézanne rejected that kind of approach and worked his way out of the
obsessions underlying it, his art is conveniently divided into three phases. In the early
1870s, through a mutually helpful association with Pissarro, with whom he painted
outside Paris at Auvers, he assimilated the principles of color and lighting of
Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork; yet he retained his own sense of mass and
the interaction of planes, as in House of the Hanged Man (1873; Musee d'Orsay, Paris).

Les joueurs de carte

1890-92 (110 Kb); The Card Players; Oil on canvas, 134 x 181.5 cm (52 3/4 x 71 1/2 in);
The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania

In the late 1870s Cézanne entered the phase known as ``constructive,'' characterized by
the grouping of parallel, hatched brushstrokes in formations that build up a sense of mass
in themselves. He continued in this style until the early 1890s, when, in his series of
paintings titled Card Players (1890-92), the upward curvature of the players' backs
creates a sense of architectural solidity and thrust, and the intervals between figures and
objects have the appearance of live cells of space and atmosphere.

Finally, living as a solitary in Aix rather than alternating between the south and Paris,
Cézanne moved into his late phase. Now he concentrated on a few basic subjects: still
lifes of studio objects built around such recurring elements as apples, statuary, and
tablecloths; studies of bathers, based upon the male model and drawing upon a
combination of memory, earlier studies, and sources in the art of the past; and successive
views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, a nearby landmark, painted from his studio looking
across the intervening valley. The landscapes of the final years, much affected by
Cézanne's contemporaneous practice in watercolor, have a more transparent and
unfinished look, while the last figure paintings are at once more somber and spiritual in
mood. By the time of his death on Oct. 22, 1906, Cézanne's art had begun to be shown
and seen across Europe, and it became a fundamental influence on the Fauves, the
cubists, and virtually all advanced art of the early 20th century.

Cézanne is not an easy man to love, but professors and painters adore him. Art critics
lavish him with superlatives, including "a prophet of the 20th century," "the most
sensitive painter of his time," "the greatest artist of the 19th century," and "the father of
modern art." But he's not quite a household name, and his posters have never been best-
sellers at museum shops around the world. In fact, most non-professionals wouldn't stand
a chance of recognising a Cézanne unless it was clearly labelled. Even then, there's no
guarantee of appeal.

Not that poster sales determine an artist's stature, but they do reveal something about the
accessibility of his work. Cézanne's pictures are restrained, impersonal and remote -- they
don't have the gut-wrenching appeal of van Gogh's portraits, even before he cut off part
of his ear. They can't compete with Monet's lush expanses of waterlilies or Renoir's
sensuous women with their come-hither looks. And let's face it, bowls of fruit and the
hills and trees of Provence, where Cézanne spent most of his life, are a hard sell against
the Tahitian backdrops of Gauguin, with or without the naked women.

Cézanne is an artist's artist. He was obsessed with form rather than content, so subject
matter was always secondary to the act of painting itself. He wanted the methods and
skills of the painter to be more important than the image. That meant the subject of the
painting couldn't be so dynamic as to overshadow the artist's act of creation. The more he
concentrated on this, the less viewer-friendly his works became. But that suited his
personality just fine. His goal was not to have a mass audience or sales appeal, it was to
satisfy himself.

Cézanne was a brooding, complex man, given to rages, grudges and depressions. He had
few friends, and those he had he alienated. Even when success finally caught up with
him, he was dogged by feelings of inadequacy. The most famous of his friends was his
schoolmate and writer Emile Zola, who was everything Cézanne wasn't -- charming,
eloquent, sociable and successful at an early age. Zola was art critic, novelist and
Cézanne's mentor. The artist looked at him for strength but gave nothing in return. Zola
got tired of placating Cézanne's ego, and in later years, when Zola wrote The Masterpiece
of an unfulfilled artist who eventually killed himself, Cézanne was convinced that the
author had him in mind. He was so egocentric and so paranoid, he assumed everyone
would know Zola was writing about him. The reality was that no one knew about him at
all, but the novel still destroyed their friendship.

It's hard to imagine that the man who created such restrained, methodical, time-
consuming works had a violent, volatile temper. Painting was his salvation, a way to
balance the fires within. Rather than let his personality shine in his art -- that scared him
too much -- he suppressed it. A psychoanalyst would have had a field day with Cézanne.
In spite of his bourgeois background, he was a primitive, with rough edges and no table
manners -- although he did improve somewhat after he met Hortense. He worked in
virtual seclusion and seldom ventured out. He was such a recluse that one critic doubted
his existence. When Cézanne finally did attend a show of his paintings, he was amazed
that the gallery had bothered to frame them. Even when he finally enjoyed both success
and sales he remained riddled with self-doubt.

Cézanne was versatile; in his pursuit of perfection and a unique style, he experimented a
lot. Art students often copy paintings -- you still see them in museums with their
sketchbooks -- and Cézanne did just that, but unlike most, he never stopped copying. To
him, it was an important form of discipline and inspiration. He felt he could understand
art better through copying, and whenever he came to an impasse, he went off to the
nearest museum, sketchbook in hand.

His earliest works, from his first days in Paris, are expressionistic, with their impasto
paint surface, broad use of the palette knife, and brooding intensity. He took out his
frustrations on the canvas. In the early 1870s, he experimented with Impressionism. He
tried to combine the principles of light and air-based art with a more structured pictorial
style. After that, he delved into Classicism, with more balanced and formal compositions.
Toward the end of his life, he was at his most daring, reducing architecture and figures to
geometric forms and paving the way for Cubism.

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) is certainly as great an artist as any that ever lived, up there
with Titian, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt. Like Manet and Degas, and also Morisot and
Cassatt, he came from a wealthy family -- his was in Aix-en-Provence, France. His
banker father seems to have been an uncultivated man, of whom his highly nervous and
inhibited son was afraid. Despite parental displeasure, Cézanne persevered with his
passionate desire to become an artist. His early paintings display little of the majesty of
his late work, though today they are rightfully awarded the respect that he certainly never
received for them.

His early years were difficult and his career was, from the beginning, dogged with
repeated failure and rejection. In 1862 he was introduced to the famed circle of artists
who met at the Café Guerbois in Paris, which included Manet, Degas and Pissarro, but
his awkward manners and defensive shyness prevented him from becoming an intimate
of the group. However, Pissarro was to play an important part in Cézanne's later
development.

One of the most important works of his early years is the portrait of his formidable father.
The Artist's Father (1866, 199 x 119 cm (78 x 47 in)) is one of Cézanne's ``palette-knife
pictures'', painted in short sessions between 1865 and 1866. Their realistic content and
solid style reveal Cézanne's admiration for Gustave Courbet. Here we see a craggy,
unyielding man of business, a solid mass of manhood, bodily succint from the top of his
black beret to the tips of his heavy shoes. The uncompromising verticals of the massive
chair are echoed by the door, and the edges of the small still life by Cézanne on the wall
just behind: everything corresponds to the absolute verticals of the edges of the canvas
itself, further accentuating the air of certainty about the portrait. Thick hands hold a
newspaper--though Cézanne has replaced his father's conservative newspaper with the
liberal L'Evénement, which published articles by his childhood friend, Emile Zola. His
father devours the paper, sitting tensely upright in the elongated armchair. Yet it is a
curiously tender portrait too. Cézanne seems to see his father as somehow unfulfilled: for
all his size he does not fully occupy the chair, and neither does he see the still life on the
wall behind him, which we recognize as being one of his son's. We do not see his eyes--
only the ironical mouth and his great frame, partly hidden behind the paper.

Mystery of nature

Cézanne was in his twenties when he painted The Artist's Father. Wonderful though it is,
with its blacks and greys and umbers, it does not fully indicate the profundity of his
developing genius. Yet even in this early work, Cézanne's grasp of form and solid
pictorial structures which came to dominate his mature style are already essential
components. His overriding concern with form and structure set him apart from the
Impressionists from the start, and he was to maintain this solitary position, carving out his
unique pictorial language.

Abduction, rape, and murder: these are themes that tormented Cézanne. Abduction (c.
1867, 90 x 117 cm (35 x 46 in)), an early work full of dark miseries, is impressive largely
for its turgid force, held barely under his control. These figure paintings are the most
difficult to enter into: they are sinister, with passion in turmoil just beneath the surface.

Cézanne's late studies of the human body are most rewarding, his figures often depicted
as bathers merging with the landscape in a sunlit lightness. This became a favorite theme
for Cézanne and he made a whole series of pictures on the subject. This mature work is
dictated by an objectivity that is profoundly moving for all its seeming emotional
detachment.

It was before nature that Cézanne was seized by a sense of the mystery of the world to a
depth never expressed by another artist. He saw that nothing exists in isolation: an
obvious insight, yet one that only he could make us see. Things have color and they have
weight, and the color and mass of each affects the weight of the other. It was to
understand these rules that Cézanne dedicated his life.
Structure and Solidity

From 1872, under Pissarro's influence, Cézanne painted the rich Impressionist effects of
light on different surfaces and even exhibited at the first Impressionist show. But he
maintained his concern for solidity and structure throughout, and abandoned
Impressionism in 1877. In Le Château Noir, Cézanne does not respond to the flickering
light as an Impressionist might; he draws that flicker from deep within the substance of
every structure in the painting. Each form has a true solidity, an absolute of internal
power that is never diminished for the sake of another part of the composition.

It is the tension between actuality and illusion, description and abstraction, reality and
invention, that makes Cézanne's most unassuming subjects so profoundly satisfying and
exciting, and which provided a legacy for a revolution of form that led the way for
modern art.

The special attraction of still life to Cézanne was the ability, to some extent, to control the
structure. He brooded over his apples, jugs, tables, and curtains, arranging them with
infinite variety. Still Life with Apples and Peaches glows with a romantic energy, as
hugely present at Mont Sainte-Victoire. Here too is a mountain, and here too sanctity and
victory: the fruits lie on the table with an active power that is not just seen but
experienced. The jug bulges, not with any contents, but with its own weight of being. The
curtain swags gloriously, while the great waterfall of the napkin absorbs and radiates light
onto the table on which all this life is earthed.

Even Cézanne's pictures of people can be regarded as still lifes, because he demanded
that his models sit absolutely still. Sitting for him was something of a nightmare. Not
only was he foul-tempered, he was an extremely slow painter, probably the reason his
subjects always look tired and sombre. Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who arranged
Cézanne's first one-man show a century ago, posed 115 times for a single painting, sitting
absolutely still "like an apple" and then Cézanne, dissatisfied, abandoned the picture with
only two unpainted spots remaining. He told Vollard that with luck he would find the
correct color and could finish the painting. "The prospect of this made me tremble," noted
Vollard in his biography of the painter. In the artist's eye, there was no difference
between a human sitter and a bowl of fruit, except that the reflection value and the palette
were different. In the end, both his subjects and his fruit wilted.

Bathers were another of Cézanne's themes. Women bathers are usually presented in large
pyramidal groups, overlapping, mostly with their backs to the viewer. His men generally
face forward, almost in a frieze. They are individuals in the same scenery, neither
interacting nor overlapping. There is no eye contact between any of them. Cézanne's only
real passion was his art, but that passion was never revealed on the canvas itself.
Paul Cézanne, one of the creators of modern art, was called the ``solidifier of
Impressionism''. And indeed he does not draw his picture before painting it: instead, he
creates space and depth of perspective by means of planes of color, which are freely
associated and at the same time contrasted and compared. The facets which are thus
produced create not just one but many perspectives, and in this way volume comes once
again to dominate the composition, no longer a product of the line but rather of the color
itself. His still-lifes, in their simplicity and delicate tonal harmony, are a typical work and
thus ideal for an understanding of Cézanne's art.

Most of his pictures are still lifes. These were done in the studio, with simple props; a
cloth, some apples, a vase or bowl and, later in his career, plaster sculptures. Cézanne's
still lifes are both traditional and modern. The fruits and objects are readily identifiable,
but they have no aroma, no sensual or tactile appeal and no other function other than as
passive decorative objects coexisting in the same flat space. They bear no relation to the
colorful vegetables of Provence -- gorgeous red tomatoes, purple aubergines, and bright
green courgettes. In his pursuit of the essence of art, Cézanne had to suppress earthly
delights.

Cézanne immortalized the Provençal countryside with his broad, panoramic views. Often
these are framed in branches, sometimes with architectural elements, but seldom with
human activity. These too are still lifes. Cézanne's landscapes were not painted in the
open air, as were those of the Impressionists, nor were they captured first with a camera.
He composed the pictures the way he wanted them -- arranging the trees and the houses,
probably gleaned from his sketchbooks, on the canvas in the configurations he decided
upon.

Cézanne understood that a painting could not really do its subject justice. He knew that
colors in nature and their combination with natural light could never be truly reproduced.
He saw himself as an interpreter who had to accept the limitations of the medium and
tried to transfer the images onto canvas the best way he could. He attempted to bridge the
natural and artistic worlds. Hence Cézanne's works, in comparison with the paintings of
many other Impressionists, only make sense as a whole, not in snippets, as the brush
strokes and colors are meant to be interdependent on one another. This is especially true
for pictures painted in the latter part of his career, when he used color in short strokes or
in almost mosaic patches, all of equal intensity, throughout an entire painting. In his
striving for perfection, this meant retouching the entire picture to recreate the all-
important harmony. No wonder he scared his sitters.

He sometimes worked on the same picture for years, never satisfied with the results. He
seldom signed his works, because he never considered them finished. Those he did sign
had his mark of approval.

During the last decade of his life, Cézanne's paintings became more simplified, the
objects in his landscapes reduced to components -- cylinders, cones and spheres. He is
often seen as anticipating cubist and abstract art, because he reduced the imperfect forms
of nature to these essential shapes. By the time of his death in 1906, Picasso and Braque
were in the midst of exploring the most radical implications of his style. Maybe the world
has finally caught up with Cézanne. Complexity is more admired now than it was 100
years ago, and since his reputation precedes him, perhaps the exhibition at the Grand
Palais will make his work more accessible to the average museum-goer.

"After fifty years of the most radical change in art from images to free abstraction,
Cézanne's painting, which looks old-fashioned today in its attachment to nature,
maintains itself fresh and stimulating to young painters of our time. He has produced no
school, but he has given an impulse directly or indirectly to almost every new movement
since he died. His power to excite artists of different tendency and temperament is due, I
think, to the fact that he realized with equal fullness so many different sides of his art. It
has often been true of leading modern painters that they developed a single idea with
great force. Some one element or expressive note has been worked out with striking
effect. In Cézanne we are struck rather by the comprehensive character of his art,
although later artists have built on a particular element of his style. Color, drawing,
modelling, structure, touch and expression - if any of these can be isolated from the
others - are carried to a new height in his work. He is arresting through his images - more
rich in suggestive content than has been supposed - and also through his uninterpreted
strokes which make us see that there can be qualities of greatness in little touches of
paint. In his pictures single patches of the brush reveal themselves as an uncanny choice,
deciding the unity of a whole region of forms. Out of these emerges a moving semblance
of a familiar natural world with a deepened harmony that invites meditation. His painting
is a balanced art, not in the sense that it is stabilized or moderate in its effects, but that
opposed qualities are joined in a scrupulously controlled play. He is inventive and perfect
in many different aspects of his art.

"In this striving for fullness, Cézanne is an heir of the Renaissance and Baroque masters.
Like Delacroix, he retains from Rubens and the Italians a concept of the grand - not in
the size of the canvas but in the weight and complexity of variation. His grandeur is
without rhetoric and convention, and inheres in the dramatic power of large contrasts and
in the frankness of his means. His detached contemplation of his subjects arises from a
passionate aspiring nature that seeks to master its own impulses through an objective
attitude to things. The mountain peak is a natural choice for him, as is the abandoned
quarry, the solitary house or tree, and the diversity of humble, impersonal objects on the
table.

"The greatness of Cézanne does not lie only in the perfection of single masterpieces; it is
also in the quality of his whole achievement. An exhibition of works spanning his forty
years as a painter reveals a remarkable inner freedom. The lives of Gauguin and Van
Gogh have blinded the public to what is noble and complete in Cézanne's less
sensational, though anguished, career. Outliving these younger contemporaries, more
fortunate in overcoming impulses and situations dangerous to art, he was able to mature
more fully and to realize many more of his artistic ideas.
"Cézanne's masterliness includes, besides the control of the canvas in its complexity and
novelty, the ordering of his own life as an artist. His art has a unique quality of ripeness
and continuous growth. While concentrating on his own problems - problems he had set
himself and not taken from a school or leader - he was capable of an astonishing variety.
This variety rests on the openness of his sensitive spirit. He admitted to the canvas a great
span of perception and mood, greater than that of his Impressionist friends. This is
evident from the range of themes alone; but it is clear in the painterly qualities as well.
He draws or colors; he composes or follows his immediate sensation of nature; he paints
with a virile brush solidly, or in the most delicate sparse watercolor, and is equally sure in
both. He possessed a firm faith in spontaneous sensibility, in the resources of the sincere
self. He can be passionate and cool, grave and light; he is always honest.

"Cézanne's work not only gives us the joy of beautiful painting; it appeals too as an
example of heroism in art. For he reached perfection, it is well known, in a long and
painful struggle with himself. This struggle can be read in his work in the many signs of
destructiveness and black moods, especially in his early phase; perhaps we may
recognize it too even in the detached aspect of the world that he finally shapes into a
serenely ordered whole. I do not doubt that the personal content of this classic art will in
time become as. evident as the aesthetic result."