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    Cézanne
    Cézanne
    Cézanne
    Ebook96 pages33 minutes

    Cézanne

    By Nathalia Brodskaya

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Since his death 100 years ago, Cézanne has become the most famous painter of the nineteenth century. He was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839 and the happiest period of his life was his early youth in Provence, in company with Emile Zolá, another Italian. Following Zolá’s example, Cézanne went to Paris in his twenty-first year.
    During the Franco-Prussian war he deserted the military, dividing his time between open-air painting and the studio. He said to Vollard, an art dealer, “I’m only a painter. Parisian wit gives me a pain. Painting nudes on the banks of the Arc [a river near Aix] is all I could ask for.” Encouraged by Renoir, one of the first to appreciate him, he exhibited with the impressionists in 1874 and in 1877. He was received with derision, which deeply hurt him.
    Cézanne’s ambition, in his own words, was “to make out of Impressionism something as solid and durable as the paintings of the museums.” His aim was to achieve the monumental in a modern language of glowing, vibrating tones. Cézanne wanted to retain the natural colour of an object and to harmonise it with the various influences of light and shade trying to destroy it; to work out a scale of tones expressing the mass and character of the form.
    Cézanne loved to paint fruit because it afforded him obedient models and he was a slow worker. He did not intend to simply copy an apple. He kept the dominant colour and the character of the fruit, but heightened the emotional appeal of the form by a scheme of rich and concordant tones. In his paintings of still-life he is a master. His fruit and vegetable compositions are truly dramatic; they have the weight, the nobility, the style of immortal forms. No other painter ever brought to a red apple a conviction so heated, sympathy so genuinely spiritual, or an observation so protracted. No other painter of equal ability ever reserved for still-life his strongest impulses. Cézanne restored to painting the pre-eminence of knowledge, the most essential quality to all creative effort.
    The death of his father in 1886 made him a rich man, but he made no change in his abstemious mode of living. Soon afterwards, Cézanne retired permanently to his estate in Provence. He was probably the loneliest of painters of his day. At times a curious melancholy attacked him, a black hopelessness. He grew more savage and exacting, destroying canvases, throwing them out of his studio into the trees, abandoning them in the fields, and giving them to his son to cut into puzzles, or to the people of Aix.
    At the beginning of the century, when Vollard arrived in Provence with intentions of buying on speculation all the Cézannes he could get hold of, the peasantry, hearing that a fool from Paris was actually handing out money for old linen, produced from barns a considerable number of still-lifes and landscapes. The old master of Aix was overcome with joy, but recognition came too late. In 1906 he died from a fever contracted while painting in a downpour of rain.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParkstone International
    Release dateDec 22, 2011
    ISBN9781781605868
    Cézanne

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      Book preview

      Cézanne - Nathalia Brodskaya

      Author: Nathalia Brodskaya

      © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

      © Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

      ISBN 978-1-78160-586-8

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

      Nathalia Brodskaya

      Paul

      Cézanne

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      1. Portrait of the Artist, ca. 1873-1876.

      2. Portrait of Ivan Morozov.

      3. The Four Seasons, 1859-1860.

      List of Illustrations

      Notes

      1. Portrait of the Artist, ca. 1873-1876.

      Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

      2. Portrait of Ivan Morozov.

      At the turn of the century, Cézanne began to be taken more and more seriously by the avant-garde: Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Vlaminck, Derain, and others, among them young Russian painters whose new art owed much to the master from Provence. However, many of Cézanne’s contemporaries did not realize his true greatness. When Paul Cézanne died in October 1906 in Aix-en-Provence, the Paris newspapers reacted by publishing a handful of rather equivocal obituaries. Imperfect talent, crude painting, an artist that never was, incapable of anything but sketches, owing to a congenital sight defect — such were the epithets showered on the great artist during his lifetime and repeated at his graveside.

      This was not merely due to a lack of understanding on the part of individual artists and critics, but above all to an objective factor — the complexity of his art, his specific artistic system which he developed throughout his career and did not embody in toto in any single one of his works. Cézanne was perhaps the most complex artist of the nineteenth century.

      3. The Four Seasons, 1859-1860.

      Musée du Petit Palais, Paris.

      One cannot help feeling something akin to awe in the face of Cézanne’s greatness, wrote Lionello Venturi. You seem to be entering an unfamiliar world — rich and austere with peaks so high that they seem inaccessible.[1] It is not in fact an

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