Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French post-impressionist painter whose work laid the foundation for a new
and different world of art in the 20th century, breaking out of 19th-century artistic endeavors.
Cézanne is considered to have bridged the gap between 19th century Impressionism and early
20th century Cubism. Although his early works were still influenced by Romanticism, he
abandoned the use of perspective and broke the established rules of academic art. Both Matisse,
the founder of Faubism, and Picasso, the founder of Cubism, cited Cézanne's artistic thought and
vision as inspiration. His paintings drew ridicule from contemporary art critics for being
incomprehensible. In the late 1890s, art dealer Vollard popularized Cézanne's work.

Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, the son of banker Louis-Auguste Cézanne
and Anne-Élisabeth-Honarine Aubert. His father's wealth provided the artist with prosperity and
financial security throughout his life that was unavailable to most of his contemporaries. At the
age of ten, Cézanne entered St. Joseph's School. In 1852, Cézanne enrolled at the Bourbon
College, where his classmate was Emile Zola. In 1857, he began attending the Free Municipal
School of Drawing, where his passion for drawing began. His father saw his son as the heir to his
business, and so Cézanne enrolled in the law department of the University of Aix-en-Provence in
1859. Cézanne spent two years in this unpleasant learning environment. In 1859, Cézanne
enrolled in evening college at the Ecole de Design d'Aix-en-Provence. His teacher was the
academic painter Joseph Gibert. In August 1859 he won second prize in the figure studies course
there. Against his father's objections, he moved to Paris in 1861 to further his artistic pursuit.
Zola encouraged Cézanne to make this decision. Cézanne's father eventually accepted his
decision on the condition that Cézanne begin a regular study of drawing. Cézanne later received
an inheritance from his father of 4,000,000 francs, which relieved him of all financial worries as
a budding artist.

Cézanne moved to Paris in April 1861. But the high hopes he set foot in Paris were not fulfilled,
for he applied to the École des Beaux Arts, but was rejected there. He attended the Academie
Suisse for free, where he was able to devote himself to painting. Paul Cézanne is one of the most
influential artists in the history of modern painting. While studying in Paris, Cézanne's early
paintings of romantic and classical themes are dominated by dark colors and an expressive
brushwork inspired by Eugène Delacroix. Dramatic tone contrasts and thick layering of color
often applied with a palette knife. There he befriended Pissarro. Initially, the friendship between
Pissarro and Cézanne had a formative influence on the young artist. In late 1861, disappointed by
Ecole's rejection, Cézanne returned to Aix-en-Provence and joined his father's bank. In the late
autumn of 1862 he again moved to Paris. His father secured his subsistence with a monthly
allowance of 150 francs. Traditional Ecole rejects him again. He therefore continued his studies
at the Academie Suisse.
Contrary to the modern artistic movement in France, Cézanne was under the influence of
Gustave Courbet and Eugène Delacroix, who attempted to portray unadorned reality in art, and
sought to bring art down from its ideal heights to mirror everyday life. The exclusion of works
by Manet, Pissarro, and Monet from the official Salon de Paris in 1863 caused such outrage
among artists that Emperor Napoleon III established the Salon de Refusées. Cézanne's paintings
were first exhibited at the Salon des Refuses in 1863.

In 1872, Cézanne received an invitation from his friend Pissarro to practice art in the village of
Pontoise in the Oise Valley. Pissarro, as a sensitive artist, became a mentor to Cézanne. He
advises him to stay away from dark colors in his color palette and always paint with only the
three primary colors red, yellow, blue. Additionally, he tells Cézanne to refrain from linear
contouring and to create shapes with variations in color tones. Cézanne felt that the Impressionist
technique was bringing him closer to his artistic goals and he focused on this technique. At the
first group exhibition of the Society of Painters and Engravers founded by Monet in 1874, Manet
criticized Cézanne, calling him a mason who paints with a trowel. His works drew severe
criticism from critics. In 1875, Cézanne met the art collector Victor Choquet, who bought three
of his works through Renoir and subsequently became his most devoted collector. Although the
three works Cézanne exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 were canvases,
Cezzane was not entirely in tune with the Impressionist technique of rapidly applying pigment,
he eventually abandoned the dark palette in favor of brighter tones. An advanced style and tonal
scale can be seen in his Bathers series. Bathers' landscape has the brilliance of a plein-air
painting, but the figures, drawn from the artist's imagination. The complex process of drawing
inspiration from these two sources, nature and memory, is seen repeatedly in Cézanne's later
work. In his still lifes from the mid-1870s Cézanne abandoned his tradition of thick color and
began to solve technical problems of form and color by experimenting with finely graded tonal
variations or compositional brushstrokes to create dimension in his subjects. Still Life with
Apples, a mature work from around 1890, demonstrates Cézanne's artistic evolution and mastery
of this style of creating scenes entirely out of color and with distorted perspective space. The
objects in these paintings, such as fruit and tablecloths, are rendered without the use of light or
shadow, but through very fine gradations of color.

From 1882 Cézanne painted a significant number of landscape paintings, in which he

concentrated on the pictorial problems of creating depth in the figure. Here he used an organized
system of layers of color to construct horizontal planes that create dimension and draw the
viewer into the landscape. This technique can be seen in the viaduct paintings of Mont Saint-
Victoire and the Arc River Valley. He painted landscapes with intense volume patterns in highly
geometric rhythms that are most pronounced in houses. These images inspired Cubism by
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

In 1886, Paul Cézanne and Hortense Fickett were married. The purpose of this marriage was to
secure the rights of the artist's son Paul, whom Cézanne loved dearly. In the late 1880s the
Cézanne family settled in Provence. This move gave Cézanne a new independence from the
Paris-centric Impressionists and was reflected in Cézanne's changing artistic practice, and this
period is known as Cézanne's formative period. In 1906, Cézanne was caught in a storm while
working outdoors. After working for two hours he decided to go home; But on the way he lost
consciousness. He developed severe pneumonia due to hypothermia. He died of pneumonia a
few days later, on 22 October 1906, and was buried at Saint-Pierre Cemetery in his hometown of
Aix-en-Provence.

Style

Paul Cézanne used heavy brush strokes in his early years and used thick layers of paint on the
canvas. The texture of the compositions is clear and his palette brush marks are clearly
discernible. Cézanne's early work has been described as 'violent' in nature due to hasty
brushwork. Camille Pissarro primarily worked in Cézanne's studio before befriending him,
painting from his imagination. However, after meeting Cézanne, Pissarro occasionally took his
painting outdoors and began painting from nature. As a result his style and technique became
more structured although his brushstrokes were still thick and heavy. Also, his works are bright
in color.

By the late 1870s Cézanne's compositions had become smoother in texture and he attempted to
create form using his paintbrush. Rather than working from sketches, he was impressed by
Monet's ability to create shapes on canvas and apply color with large, broad strokes. Many of
Cézanne's works remained incomplete due to the difficulty of finishing a piece of artwork. He
took months to complete any work and made his style very challenging. Thus he returned to the
studio and worked there instead. His style and technique continued to change in his later years as
he learned more about his craft. Cézanne was highly analytical of his subjects and perceived
them as different shapes that could be placed together to create an overall form. He created his
works slowly, creating a new outline for each previous image. It took Paul Cézanne months to
complete a portrait or still life using this method. This technique became such a problem that
Cézanne was unable to use real flowers as they would wither before he was able to finish his
paintings. He found working from nature extremely difficult and often returned to a landscape
scene to complete the painting. This was more challenging than Cézanne's complex method of
painting explains why he often painted the same subject over and over again.
Now we will discuss some notable works of Cézanne-

Basket of Apples

During the Neo-Classical period,

still life was considered the least
important subject. Only minor
artists painted what was then
seen as the most purely
decorative and trivial of painting
subjects. If placed roughly in the
hierarchy of subjects from the
most important to the least
important, historical and
religious, portraits, landscapes,
and finally still lifes were
painted. It is true that the still life
was neglectedEi Cézanne was drawn to him. The symbolic form of the still life was so
unconventional that the subject was virtually freed from all conventional ideas. To the artist it
was a subject that offered extraordinary freedom of re-analysis, like a blank slate that allowed
Cézanne to innovate. And Cézanne almost single-handedly revived still life as an important
subject for twentieth-century Picasso, Matisse and others.

The image shows a wine bottle, a basket with an abundance of fruit inside, a plate of stacked
cookies or small rolls, and a tablecloth displayed both folded and hanging down. The image is
nothing remarkable, until one begins to notice the odd flaws in the drawing. For example, look at
the lines at the near and far ends of the table. But that's not all that's wrong, the table seems to tilt
too steeply to the left, putting the fruit at risk of tipping over. The bottle looks terra and the
cookies are really weird.The cookies stacked under the top layer look like they're being viewed
from the side, but the top two cookies are on top and look like we're looking down on them.
Cézanne was striving to rethink the various techniques inherited from the masters of the
Renaissance and Baroque eras. This was due to the growing influence of photography and the
transformation of modern representation. Cézanne saw this mechanical division of vision as
artificial and at odds with the perception of the human eye.

Cézanne pushed this distinction between the camera's gaze and the human perspective. The artist
would place himself at a fixed point in front of the table and render only the collection of
tabletop objects from the original where each line would be straight from the point of view.
Seemingly simple, Cézanne's attempt to represent the true experience of sight had an enormous
impact on 20th-century visual culture. Cézanne realized that unlike the fairly simple and static
view of the Renaissance, people actually see in a way that is complex, we see through both time
and space. Cézanne therefore deconstructed the image. The slight discontinuity we observed in
the cookies stacked on the plate at top right results from the presentation of two slightly different
perspectives.

The Large Bathers is an oil painting by French artist Paul Cézanne, first exhibited in 1906. The
painting is housed in the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, referred to as the Large
Bather as it is the largest of Cezanne's
Bather paintings, the painting is
considered one of the masterpieces of
modern art and is often considered
Cézanne's best work. Cézanne worked on
the painting for seven years and it
remained unfinished at the time of his
death in 1906. It is often cited as an
exemplary example of his art and
philosophy. With each edition of Bathers,
Cézanne moved away from traditional
representations of the painting,
deliberately creating works that would
not be visually appealing to novice viewers. The juxtaposition of the woman's nude form with
the triangular pattern of the tree gave the work an exceptional dimension. This painting is the
final expression of Cézanne's lifelong concern with the limitations of academic art practice. In
classical nudes from the post-Renaissance onwards, artists reduced female beauty to the level of
mere ornamentation, limiting these women to hunchbacked and erotic poses. Artists in this style
of art always depicted these women indoors, and it was as if these women appeared before the
viewer in a very personal moment. We can also observe such tendencies in the art of Degas, a
contemporary of Cézanne. But Cézanne in his Large Bather tried to break out of this tendency
entirely. His nude women do not create sexual excitement in the viewer's mind, rather they look
as if these women are completely free from the limitations of classical nudes. In their sitting,
standing or lying down, we see the body postures used in classical nudes, but despite this they do
not act like heroines that we usually see in nudes, but here it is as if a fragment of their feminine
nature is presented before our eyes. The bathing women were arranged by Cézanne in a triangle,
mocking the glorified triangular pictorial arrangement of old art. Here the triangle is a form of
restriction that in ancient times limited the shape and here also confines these women. The
setting of this painting is strange and beautiful - the landscape is essentially azure, a soft mist
where the sky and water and vegetation merge and with which the masterly painted figures are
subtly clouded. In the distance we see the visualization of an idealized village built layer after
layer of paint. And in the visualization of the sky we can feel the time that is essentially colored
by the last light of twilight.
Large bathers force us to look at classical nudes depicted from the Renaissance period in a new
light. The painting also challenged the superiority of academic depictions of the human body and
inspired future artists such as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or Matisse's Joy of Life

Mont Saint-Victor Cézanne's life has repeatedly inspired wonder. Cézanne painted the mountain
from various points throughout his career and found a new mood or atmosphere each time. The
hill is located very close to Cézanne's hometown, Aix-en-Provence, making it visible in any view
of Aix. Such was Cézanne's love and respect for the mountains that he bought a plot of land
overlooking Mont Saint Victor in 1901 to build a studio. The mountain frequently appears as a
motif in paintings throughout his artistic career. Cézanne's modernist painting technique is
evident in these famous landscape paintings of his beloved Provence. Without abandoning the
optical realism of Impressionism, he tried to bring a certain order and clarity to nature by using
simplified shapes - triangles, flat planes, cylinders, rhomboids and the like. In the landscape of
Mont Saint-Victor, the viewer's eye is directed from the dense farmhouses, across the rectangular
fields, to the conical mountains. In addition to geometric motifs, Cézanne made two special uses
of color—namely, to create atmosphere and to represent the depth of objects. Unlike other
Impressionist painters who generally used bright colors, used no outlines, and applied paint using
thick, small dabs of paintbrushes, Cézanne favored strong blocks of color such as outlines of tree
trunks and fields. He used horizontal lines to create width and vertical lines to create depth. His
deconstruction of nature into basic units and experimentation with form later inspired Cubism.

Mont Saint-Victor with Large Pines is a painting by Cézanne that belongs to a series of three
paintings depicting the same subject. It is currently preserved at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Mont Sainte-Victor with its distinctive rugged landscape dominates the Sahejan scene. In this
painting he uses contrasting colors to convey a
sense of expanse and breadth. Areas of green
and yellow lead the eye to towering Saint-
Victor, painted in cool blues and pinks; Small
touches of red in both the foreground and
background create a sense of visual unity. The
sweeping pine branches in the foreground
follow the shape of the mountain. This was one
of Cézanne's favorite framing devices. The
timeless quality of the scene's setting is
interrupted only by the modern railway viaduct
on the right and the steam of a passing train.
Mont Saint Victor and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley is an oil painting by Cézanne
between 1882-1885. It depicts Mont Saint Victor and the Arc River valley, with Aix-en-
Provence in the background. The painting
also depicts the railway bridge of the Aix-
Marseille line in the Arc River Valley and
the train running over it. It was painted
during the 'mature' period of Cézanne's
work. The silhouetted arc of Mont Saint-
Victor rises above the river valley. To
paint this scene, Cézanne stood on the
hilltop just behind his house, with the
walls of the nearby farmhouse visible
here. In this painting, Cézanne explores
the creation of depth by using layers to
create a set of horizontal planes that draw the eye into focus. Six trees on the left-hand side of the
canvas dominate the foreground of the painting and partially obscure the view of the river valley
below. Small strokes of the artist's brush create a shape of leaves in various shades and greens
that crown the top of tall and bare tree trunks. The roof of a house in the valley below, with a
small chimney at its top, can be seen through a gap in the trees. Green fields are broken up by
bushes and occasional farmhouses are visible. To the right of the painting is the outskirts of the
city where the shapes of the buildings are visible from the blur of the foothills. The arrival of the
railway in Aix-en-Provence, connecting the provincial town with the capital, revolutionized rural
transport and changed the landscape forever. This feat of modern engineering changed the
popular perception of the rural landscape forever and ushered in the dawn of a new era. Here the
viaduct that allows trains to carry passengers across the river valley seems to bridge the gap
between marginal France and modern public life. It is currently preserved in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York. Measuring approximately 25.8 inches × 32.2 inches, this painting
is one of the smallest works in his artistic career. Mont Saint-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc
River Valley were painted towards the end of his career.