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In 1883, the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans replied to Pissarro in a letter to Pissarro's accusation that Cézanne was only briefly mentioned in Huysman's book L'Art Moderne by suggesting that Cézanne's view of the motifs was distorted by astigmatism : "[...] but it There is certainly an eye defect involved, which I am assured he is also aware of.” Five years later, in La Cravache magazine, his judgment became more positive when he described Cézanne's works as “strange yet real” and as “revelations”. designated. |
The art dealer Ambroise Vollard first came into contact with Cézanne's works in 1892 through the paint dealer Tanguy, who had exhibited them in his shop in the Rue Clauzel in Montmartre in return for the delivery of painting utensils . Vollard recalled the lack of response: the shop was rarely visited, "since it was not yet fashionable at the time to buy 'atrocious works' expensively, not even cheaply." Tanguy even took interested parties to the painter's studio, to which he had a key where small pictures and 100 francs large pictures could be bought at a fixed price of 40 francs. The Journal des Artistes echoed the general tone of the time, anxious to ask whether its sensitive readers would not be sickened at the sight of "these oppressive abominations, which exceed the measure of evil permitted by law." |
The art critic Gustave Geffroy was one of the few critics who judged Cézanne's work fairly and unreservedly during his lifetime. As early as 25 March 1894, he wrote in the Journal about the then current relationship between Cézanne's painting and the efforts of younger artists, that Cézanne had become a kind of forerunner to which the Symbolists referred, and that there was a direct connection between Cézanne's painting and of the Gauguins, Bernards and even Vincent van Goghs. A year later, after the successful exhibition at the Vollard Gallery in 1895, Geffroy again led the Journal: "He is a great truth fanatic, fiery and naive, harsh and nuanced. He will go to the Louvre.” Between these two chronicles, Cézanne painted the portrait of Geffroy, which Cézanne left unfinished because he was dissatisfied with it. |
Posthumous exhibitions |
Two retrospectives posthumously paid tribute to the artist in 1907. From 17 to 29 June, the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris showed 79 watercolours by Cézanne. The 5th Salon d'Automne then paid homage to him from 5 October to 15 November, exhibiting 49 paintings and seven watercolours in two rooms in the Grand Palais. Visitors included the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe, who would write the first Cézanne biography in 1910, Harry Graf Kessler and Rainer Maria Rilke. The two exhibitions motivated many artists, such as Georges Braque, André Derain, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, on their crucial insights for 20th century art. |
In 1910, some of Cézanne's paintings were shown in the Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition in London (another one followed in 1912). The exhibition had been initiated by the painter and art critic Roger Fry in the Grafton Galleries, which wanted to introduce English art lovers to the work of Édouard Manet, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Cézanne. Fry used the name to describe the Post-Impressionist style . Although the exhibition was judged negatively by critics and the public, it was to be significant in the history of modern art. Fry recognized the extraordinary value of the path that artists such as van Gogh and Cézanne had taken in expressing their personal feelings and worldview through their paintings, even if visitors at the time could not yet understand this. Cézanne's first exhibition in the United States took place in 1910/11 at Gallery 291 in New York. In 1913 his works were exhibited at the Armory Show in New York; it was a groundbreaking exhibition of modern art and sculpture, although here too the exhibits were met with criticism and ridicule. Today, these artists, who were criticized and ridiculed even by their own art academies during their lifetime, are regarded as the fathers of modern art. |
Influence on modernity and misinterpretations |
Cézanne! Cézanne was the father of all of us. |
A kind of dear god of painting. |
Many "productive" misunderstandings lie hidden in the reception of the works and the supposed intentions of Cézanne, which had a considerable influence on the further course and development of modern art. The list of those artists who more or less justifiably referred to him and who coined individual elements from the wealth of his creative approaches for their own pictorial inventions shows an almost complete art history of the 20th century. As early as 1910, Guillaume Apollinaire stated that "most of the new painters claim to be successors of this serious painter who was only interested in art". |
Immediately after Cézanne's death in 1906, stimulated by a comprehensive exhibition of his watercolours in the spring of 1907 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and a retrospective in October 1907 at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, a lively examination of his work began. Among young French artists, Henri Matisse and André Derain were the first to become passionate about Cézanne, followed by Picasso, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. This enthusiasm was lasting, as the eighty-year-old Matisse said in 1949 that he owed the most to the art of Cézanne. Braque also described the influence of Cézanne on his art as an "initiation" and said in 1961: "Cézanne was the first to turn away from the learned mechanized perspective." Picasso admitted that "he was the only master for me ..., he was a father figure to us: it was he who offered us protection." |
Cézanne expert Götz Adriani notes, however, that the Cézanne's reception by Cubists – particularly by the Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, who placed Cézanne at the beginning of their way of painting in their 1912 treatise Du "Cubisme" – was arbitrary because they largely ignored the motivation gained from observing nature. In this context, he points to the formalistic misinterpretations that refer to Émile Bernard's published paper from 1907, which refers to a 1904 letter Cézanne wrote advising him to "treat nature according to cylinder, sphere and cone" Further misinterpretations of this kind can be found in Kazimir Malevich's 1919 text On the New Systems in Art. In his quote, Cézanne did not intend to reinterpret the experience of nature in the sense of orienting himself towards cubic form elements; he was more concerned with corresponding to the object forms and their colouring under the various aspects in the picture. |
One of the many examples of Cézanne's influence on modernism is the 1888 painting Mardi Gras in the Pushkin Museum, which shows his son Paul with his friend Louis Guillaume and in costumes from the Commedia dell'arte. Picasso took inspiration from it for the harlequin theme in his pink period. Matisse, in turn, took up the theme of the most classic painting in the Bathers series, The Great Bathers from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in his 1909 painting The Bathers. |
Numerous artists were inspired by Cézanne's work. The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker saw Cézanne's paintings in Paris in 1900, which deeply impressed her. Shortly before her death, she wrote to Clara Westhoff in a letter on 21 October 1907 : "I am thinking and thinking a lot these days about Cézanne and how he is one of the three or four painters who struck me like a thunderstorm or a major event.” Paul Klee noted in his diary in 1909: “Cézanne is a teacher par excellence for me” after seeing more than a dozen paintings by Cézanne in the Munich Secession. The artist group Der Blaue Reiter referred to him in their 1912 almanac when Franz Marc reported on the kinship between El Greco and Cézanne, whose works he understood as the gateways to a new era of painting. Again, Kandinsky, who had seen Cézanne's painting at the 1907 retrospective at the Salon d'Automne, refers to Cézanne in his 1912 treatise On the Spiritual in Art, in whose work he found a "strong resonance of the abstract." recognized and found the spiritual part of his beliefs predetermined in him. El Lissitzky emphasized his importance for the Russian avant-garde around 1923, and Lenin suggested erecting monuments to the heroes of the world revolution in 1918; on the roll of honor were Courbet and Cézanne. Next to Matisse, Alberto Giacometti dealt most extensively with Cézanne's style of representation. Aristide Maillol worked on a Cézanne monument in 1909, but failed due to rejection by the city of Aix-en-Provence. Cézanne was also an important authority for artists of the newer generation. Jasper Johns described him as the most important role model alongside Duchamp and Leonardo da Vinci. |
Inspired by Cézanne, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote: |
Cézanne is one of the greatest of those who changed the course of art history ... From him we have learned that to alter the colouring of an object is to alter its structure. His work proves without doubt that painting is not—or not any longer—the art of imitating an object by lines and colours, but of giving plastic [solid, but alterable] form to our nature. (Du "Cubisme", 1912) |
Along with the work of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, the work of Cézanne, with its sense of immediacy and incompletion, critically influenced Matisse and others prior to Fauvism and Expressionism. Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris and others to experiment with ever more complex views of the same subject and eventually to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art. Picasso referred to Cézanne as "the father of us all" and claimed him as "my one and only master!" Other painters such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Kasimir Malevich, Georges Rouault, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse acknowledged Cézanne's genius. |
Ernest Hemingway compared his writing to Cézanne's landscapes. As he describes in A Moveable Feast, I was "learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them." |
Cézanne's painting The Boy in the Red Vest was stolen from a Swiss museum in 2008. It was recovered in a Serbian police raid in 2012. |
Films about Cézanne |
Une visite au Louvre, 2004. Filmed and directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet about Cézanne, based on the posthumously published conversations with the painter, handed down by his admirer Joachim Gasquet. The film describes a walk by Cézanne in the Louvre past the paintings of his fellow artists. |
On the 100th anniversary of Cézanne's death in 2006, two documentaries from 1995 and 2000 about Paul Cézanne and his motif La Montagne Sainte-Victoire were re-released. Cézanne's triumph was re-shot for the 2006 anniversary year. |
The Violence of the Motive, 1995. A film directed by Alain Jaubert. A mountain near his hometown of Aix-en-Provence becomes Cézanne's main motif. He shows La Montagne Sainte-Victoire from different perspectives and at different times of the year more than 80 times. The motif becomes an obsession that Jaubert gets to the bottom of in his film. |
Cézanne – the Painter, 2000. A film by Elisabeth Kapnist. The story of a passion and a lifelong artistic search: the painter Cézanne, his childhood, his friendship with Zola and his encounter with Impressionism are portrayed. |
The Triumph of Cézanne, 2006. A film by Jacques Deschamps. Deschamps takes the 100th anniversary of Cézanne's death in October 2006 as an opportunity to trace the genesis of a legend. Cézanne encountered rejection and incomprehension before he was allowed to rise to the Olympus of art history and the international art market. |
The 2016 film Cézanne and I explores the friendship between the artist and Émile Zola. |
In fiction |
Paul Cézanne figures prominently in the award winning Historical Fiction Novel, The Dream Collector, Book 1: "Sabrine & Sigmund Freud" (2023) by R.w. Meek (Historium Press) in which Cézanne's relationship with Émile Zola is explored, as well as Cézanne's phobia of touch and his painting method of 'modulation'. |
Cézanne and philosophy |
The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard argues in his work Misère de la philosophie, that Cézanne has, so to speak, the sixth sense: he senses the reality in the making before it is completed in normal perception. So the painter touches on the sublime when he sees the overwhelming quality of the mountainous landscape, which can neither be represented with normal language nor with the usual painting technique. Lyotard sums it up: "One can also say that the uncanniness of the oil paintings and watercolours dedicated to mountains and fruits derives both from a deep sense of the disappearance of appearances and from the demise of the visible world." |
Cézanne's stylistic approaches and beliefs regarding how to paint were analyzed and written about by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty who is primarily known for his association with phenomenology and existentialism. In his 1945 essay entitled "Cézanne's Doubt", Merleau-Ponty discusses how Cézanne gave up classic artistic elements such as pictorial arrangements, single view perspectives, and outlines that enclosed colour in an attempt to get a "lived perspective" by capturing all the complexities that an eye observes. He wanted to see and sense the objects he was painting, rather than think about them. Ultimately, he wanted to get to the point where "sight" was also "touch". He would take hours sometimes to put down a single stroke because each stroke needed to contain "the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style". A still life might have taken Cézanne one hundred working sessions while a portrait took him around one hundred and fifty sessions. Cézanne believed that while he was painting, he was capturing a moment in time, that once passed, could not come back. The atmosphere surrounding what he was painting was a part of the sensational reality he was painting. Cézanne claimed: "Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting." |
Art market |
The increase in value of Cézanne's work can be seen from the auction of his painting Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier on 10 May 1999, which sold for $60.5 million at Sotheby's in New York, the fourth-highest price paid for a painting up to that time, and the most expensive still life painting at the time. |
Cézanne's watercolour Still Life with Green Melon set the record for a work on paper at an auction, when it sold for $25.5 million in 8 May 2007, far above its estimate of $18 million. A preparatory watercolour for The Card Players series previously thought lost for sixty years sold for $19.1 million on 1 May 2012 to an anonymous bidder. |
One of the five versions of Cézanne's The Card Players was sold in 2011 to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price variously estimated at between $250 million ($338.6 million today) and possibly as high as $300 million ($406.3 million today), either price signifying a new mark for highest price for a painting up to that date. The record price was surpassed in November 2017 by Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. The Card Players is now the third most expensive painting of all time after the sale of Interchange by Willem de Kooning. |
On 8 November 2022, $138 million US was paid for the painting La Montagne Sainte-Victoire as part of the Paul Allen collection sale at Christie's in New York City to setting a new mark for a price paid for his work at auction. |
Nazi-looted art |
In 2000 French courts ordered the seizure of Cézanne's "The sea at l'Estaque" which was part of the "From Fra Angelico to Bonnard: masterpieces from the Rau Collection" exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg because of a claim that it had been looted by Nazis from the gallery owner Josse Bernheim-Jeune. |
In 2020 the provenance of a Cézanne from the Buehrle collection came under scrutiny. The painting, Paysage, had already been flagged as potentially problematic in the 2015 Schwarzbuch Bührle: Raubkunst für das Kunsthaus Zürich?. In Die Wochenzeitung, Keller said the provenance of Paysage had been "whitewashed". "Among Keller's objections to the provenance description on the foundation's website is the failure to note that the pre-war owners, Berthold and Martha Nothmann, were forced to flee Germany as Jews in 1939." |
In 2023, a last minute settlement was reached between the heirs of Jacob Goldschmidt and the Museum Langmatt, a foundation founded by Dr. Sidney Brown, concerning Cézanne's Fruits et pot de gingembre. The deal was brokered by Christie's after it was discovered that Goldschmidt, a Jewish art dealer, had sold the artwork due to Nazi persecution. |
Cézanne's Provence |
Visitors to Aix-en-Provence can discover Cézanne's landscape motifs along five marked trails from the city center. They lead to Le Tholonet, the Jas de Bouffan, the Bibémus quarry, the banks of the River Arc and the Les Lauves workshop. |
The Atelier Les Lauves has been open to the public since 1954. An American foundation initiated by James Lord and John Rewald made this possible with funds provided by 114 donors. They bought it from the previous owner Marcel Provence and transferred it to the University of Aix. In 1969 the studio was transferred to the city of Aix. The visitor will find Cézanne's furniture, easel and palette, the objects that appear in his still lifes, and some original drawings and watercolours. |
During their lifetime, most of the residents of Aix mocked their fellow citizen Cézanne. More recently, they even named a university after their world-famous artist: in 1973 it was founded in Aix-en-Provence, the Paul Cézanne University with the departments of law and political science, business administration as well as natural sciences and technology. In 2011 it was dissolved and combined with the other two universities in Aix and Marseille to form the University of Aix-Marseille. |
As a result of their rejection of his works in the past, the Musée Granet in Aix had to make do with a loan of paintings from the Louvre in order to be able to present visitors with Cézanne, the son of their city. In 1984, the museum received eight paintings and some watercolours, including a motif from the Bathers series and a portrait of Mme Cézanne. Thanks to another donation in 2000, nine paintings by Cézanne are now on display there. |
Gallery |
Landscapes |
Still life paintings |
Portraits and self-portraits |
Bathers |
Watercolours |
See also |
List of paintings by Paul Cézanne |
Cézanne (typeface) |
Post-Impressionism |
Marie-Hortense Fiquet |
List of artwork associated with Agnes E. Meyer |
Croix de Provence on the Montagne Sainte-Victoire |
Notes |
References |
Further reading |
Andersen, Wayne (2003) The Youth of Cézanne and Zola: notoriety at its source: art and literature in Paris, Geneva and Boston: Editions Fabiart ISBN 0972557350 |
Andersen, Wayne (2004) Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ISBN 052183726X |
Armstrong, Carol (2018) Cézanne's Gravity, New Haven and London: Yale University Press ISBN 9780300266832 |
Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Nina M. (2003) Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press ISBN 0226423085 |
Bernard, Émile (1925) (1925) Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne: une conversation avec Cézanne: la méthode de Cézanne, Paris: R.G. Michel OCLC 423843520 |
D'Souza, Aruna (2008) Cézanne's Bathers, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press ISBN 9780271032146 |
Dambrowski, André (2013) Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life, Berkeley, University of California Press ISBN 0520273397 |
Danchev, Alex (2013) The Letters of Paul Cézanne, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, ISBN 978-1-60606-160-2 |
Gasquet, Joachim (1991) Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, Translated by C. Pemberton. London and New York: Thames & Hudson OCLC 802912360 |
Kendall, Richard, ed. (1988) Cézanne: By Himself, London: Macdonald ISBN 0760755582 |
Kendall, Richard (1989) The History and Techniques of the Great Master Cézanne, London: Tiger Books International ISBN 1855010089 |
Lewis, Mary Tompkins (1989) Cézanne's Early Imagery, Berkeley: University of California Press ISBN 9780520322134 |
Machotka, Pavel (2008) Cézanne: The Eye and the Mind, 2 vols. Marseille: Editions Crès ISBN 2753700478 |
Pissarro, Joachim (2006) Cézanne/Pissarro, Johns/Rauschenberg: Comparative Studies on Intersubjectivity in Modern Art, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press ISBN 0521836409 |
Rilke, Rainer Maria (1944) Lettres sur Cézanne, Paris: Editions Correa ISBN 2020260492 |
Sidlauskas, Susan (2009) Cézanne's Other: The Portraits of Hortense, Berkeley: University of California Press ISBN 9780520257450 |
Simms, Matthew (2008) Cézanne's watercolours: between drawing and painting, New Haven and London: Yale University Press ISBN 9780300140668 |
Smith, Paul (1996) Interpreting Cézanne, London: Tate Publishing ISBN 1854371711 |
Zola, Émile (1928) Correspondance (1858–1871), 2 vols. Oeuvres Complètes. Paris: François Bernouard ISBN 9780274259649 |
External links |
Online Exhibition of Paul Cezanne |
National Gallery of Art, Cézanne in Provence |
Paul Cézanne at the Museum of Modern Art |
Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California |
Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – Exhibition catalog: Cézanne (pp. 49–63) |
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