Paul Cézanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a wealthy banker. His father's money gave him the freedom to fail repeatedly and keep painting; it also loaded him with anxiety. He entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix at thirteen, where he formed a close friendship with a boy named Émile Zola, the future novelist, with whom he shared a consuming passion for literature and art. In 1861 his father relented and sent him to Paris, where he first encountered the work of Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet. The official Salon rejected his submissions every year from 1864 to 1869. He participated in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 and the third in 1877, but he hated both the style — which he considered too sketchy, insufficiently architectural — and the gossip of Parisian art life. After 1879 he stopped exhibiting with the Impressionists and retreated increasingly to Provence. He lived for extended periods in L'Estaque, on the Mediterranean coast west of Marseille, and from 1882 onward at the Jas de Bouffan, his family's property outside Aix. His working method was glacially patient: a single canvas could take hundreds of sessions; still-life arrangements of apples and oranges rotted before he finished them. He worked primarily in three overlapping domains — still lifes, the Mont Sainte-Victoire series, and the large bather compositions — and in each of them he pursued the same problem: how to render three-dimensional solidity on a flat surface without the illusion of linear perspective, replacing depth cues with modulated patches of color organized by their geometric logic rather than by their appearance. His Card Players series (1890–95), which exists in five versions, strips the subject to its structural essentials with an authority reminiscent of Chardin or Le Nain. His approximately sixty views of Mont Sainte-Victoire reduce the mountain to flat planes of ochre and blue-green that tilt toward the picture surface rather than receding from it — the decisive step toward a painting in which the flatness of the canvas is acknowledged rather than disguised. When Cézanne died of pneumonia in Aix on 22 October 1906 — having collapsed in a field while working outdoors — he had shown publicly only three times in his life: the 1874 and 1877 Impressionist shows, and a one-man gallery exhibition in 1895 arranged by Ambroise Vollard. It was this 1895 show that converted the next generation. Pissarro called it revelatory; Monet acquired three Cézannes; the young Matisse bought his Three Bathers. By 1907, Picasso and Braque were taking apart his late work — the tilting planes, the passage between tones — and reassembling it as Cubism. His remark to Émile Bernard, recorded in 1904, that everything in nature can be reduced to the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone, became the founding manifesto of twentieth-century abstraction.
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Post-Impressionist painter · Father of Modern Art · Mont Sainte-Victoire
Paul Cézanne
1,839 CE – 1,906 CE
The reclusive Provençal painter who dismantled Renaissance perspective and handed Cubism, Expressionism, and abstract art its founding grammar.
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