Cézanne, Paul
(b. Jan.19, 1839, Aix-en-Provence, Fr.--d. Oct. 22, 1906, Aix-en-Provence)
Frenchpainter, one of the greatest of the Postimpressionists, whose works and ideaswere influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists andart movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne's art, misunderstood anddiscredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionismand eventually challenged all the conventional values of painting in the 19thcentury through its insistence on personal expression and on the integrity ofthe painting itself. He has been called the father of modern painting.
EncyclopaediaBritannica, 1994
Biography
The Frenchpainter Paul Cézanne, who exhibited little in hislifetime and pursued his interests increasingly in artistic isolation, isregarded today as one of the great forerunners of modern painting, both for theway that he evolved of putting down on canvas exactly what his eye saw innature and for the qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through aunique treatment of space, mass, and color.
Cézannewas a contemporary of the impressionists, but he went beyond their interests inthe individual brushstroke and the fall of light onto objects, to create, inhis words, ``something more solid and durable, like the art of the museums.''
Cézannewas born at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France on Jan. 19, 1839. He went toschool in Aix, forming a close friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He alsostudied law there from 1859 to 1861, but at the same time he continuedattending drawing classes. Against the implacable resistance of his father, hemade up his mind that he wanted to paint and in 1861 joined Zola in Paris. Hisfather's reluctant consent at that time brought him financial support and,later, a large inheritance on which he could live without difficulty. In Parishe met Camille Pissarro and came to know others of the impressionist group,with whom he would exhibit in 1874 and 1877. Cézanne, however, remainedan outsider to their circle; from 1864 to 1869 he submitted his work to theofficial SALON and saw it consistently rejected. His paintings of 1865-70 formwhat is usually called his early ``romantic'' period. Extremely personal incharacter, 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 theobsessions underlying it, his art is conveniently divided into three phases. Inthe early 1870s, through a mutually helpful association with Pissarro, withwhom he painted outside Paris at Auvers, he assimilated the principles of colorand lighting of Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork; yet he retainedhis own sense of mass and the interaction of planes, as in House of theHanged Man (1873; Musee d'Orsay, Paris).
In thelate 1870s Cézanne entered the phase known as ``constructive,''characterized by the grouping of parallel, hatched brushstrokes in formationsthat build up a sense of mass in themselves. He continued in this style untilthe early 1890s, when, in his series of paintings titled Card Players(1890-92), the upward curvature of the players' backs creates a sense ofarchitectural solidity and thrust, and the intervals between figures andobjects have the appearance of live cells of space and atmosphere.
Finally,living as a solitary in Aix rather than alternating between the south andParis, Cézanne moved into his late phase. Now he concentrated on a fewbasic subjects: still lifes of studio objects built around such recurringelements as apples, statuary, and tablecloths; studies of bathers, based uponthe male model and drawing upon a combination of memory, earlier studies, andsources in the art of the past; and successive views of the MontSainte-Victoire, a nearby landmark, painted from his studio looking across theintervening valley. The landscapes of the final years, much affected byCézanne's contemporaneous practice in watercolor, have a moretransparent and unfinished look, while the last figure paintings are at oncemore 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 itbecame a fundamental influence on the Fauves, the cubists, and virtually alladvanced art of the early 20th century.
Список литературы
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