Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter who was born on January 19, 1839, in Aix-en-Provence, France. He is considered one of the greatest Post-Impressionist painters and his works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne was born into a well-to-do bourgeois family and received a classical education at the Collège Bourbon in Aix. His father was a successful banker who wanted him to enter the same profession, but Cézanne had creative ambitions and eventually pursued a career in art. He began painting in 1860 in Aix-en-Provence and subsequently studied in Paris. Cézanne’s early pictures of romantic and classical themes are imbued with dark colors and executed with an expressive brushwork in the tradition of Eugène Delacroix. He is credited with paving the way for the emergence of twentieth-century modernism, both visually and conceptually. Cézanne’s unique method of building form with color and his analytical approach to nature influenced the art of Cubists, Fauves, and successive generations of avant-garde artists. Cézanne’s paintings convey his intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze, and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.
Paul Cézanne’s style was different and significant because he developed a unique aesthetic that was distinguishable from his contemporaries. Cézanne attached importance to the genuineness of color and vision and observed unique colors of nature objectively, which made him greatly different from other artists, who observed the colors of nature “rationally or subjectively.” Cézanne’s mature style contains compositions of grand and calm horizontals in which the even up-and-down strokes create a clean prismatic effect and an implacable blue sea spreads wide across the canvases. Like all his mature landscapes, these paintings have the exciting and radically new quality of simultaneously representing deep space and flat design. Cézanne knew well how to portray solidity and depth; his method was that used by the Impressionists to indicate form. Full of the intensity of feeling aroused by his surroundings, Cézanne’s art was also deeply cerebral, a conscious search for intellectual solutions to problems of representation. Cézanne taught the new generation of artists to liberate form from color in their art, thus creating a new and subjective pictorial reality, not bound by the traditional, realistic way of painting.
Cézanne is celebrated as the forefather of Fauvism and a precursor to Cubism. Cézanne’s innovative approach to color theory influenced Fauvism. He used color to create form and structure, rather than relying on traditional techniques such as shading and perspective. This approach to color theory was central to the development of Fauvism. His influence on Fauvism can be seen in the work of artists such as André Derain and Henri Matisse.
Cézanne’s tendency to portray nature using geometric shapes was one of the ways in which he influenced Cubism. He achieved an almost blurred appearance in his paintings by emphasizing the angles of each object individually rather than maintaining a single perspective of the entire scene. This technique resulted in a moderately distorted, abstracted appearance that later became central to Cubism. Gardanne (1885 – 1886), is one of his paintings that distinctively contributed to his influence on Cubism. Through Cezanne, other artists were freed from their constraints and thus Fauvism and Cubism were born.
Some of Cézanne’s famous paintings are as follows:
- Gardanne (1885 – 1886)
- The Card Players (1890 – 1892)
- The Basket of Apples (1893)
- Bathers (1902 – 1904)
- Pierot and Harlequin (1895)
Having influenced other art movements, each one has their own inspirational favorites. These just represent a few.
Paul Cézanne died on October 22, 1906, in Aix-en-Provence, France. He contracted pneumonia while in a severe storm working in one of his studies. He was taken home on a stretcher and died a few days later from the effects of pneumonia. He was 67 years old at the time of his death and since has received legendary status as an artist.