PAUL CÉZANNE

Paul Cézanne was a Post-Impressionist French painter who was born on January the 19th, 1839.His father was the co-founder of a banking firm that prospered throughout the artist's life, affording him financial security that was unavailable to most of his contemporaries and eventually resulting in a large inheritance.When Paul Cézanne was 10, he entered the Saint Joseph School, where he met Émile Zola and Baptistin Baille and the three became very good friends. His father gave him 400000 francs which rid him of all financial worries.In Paris, Cézanne met Camille Pissarro. Cézanne's early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape. Then he started to focus on painting from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style.

Cézanne's work is broadly post-impressionist. His work helped the transition from the 19th century idea of art to the very different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne forms the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that "Cézanne is the father of us all" is significant.Cézanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour and composition. His brushstrokes are clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

The work of Post-Impressionist French painter can be said to have formed the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic inquiry, Cubism. The mastery of design, tone, composition and color that spans his life's work is highly characteristic and now recognizable around the world. Both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were greatly influenced by Cézanne.

Post-impressionism CubismImpressionism Modern art

We can resume Cezzane's art periods in:

Post-impressionism

Paul Cézanne's paintings from his post-impressionism stage are peculiar, bearing little overt resemblance to the artist's mature and more important style. The subject matter is brooding and melancholy and includes fantasies, dreams, religious images and a general preoccupation with the macabre. His technique in these early paintings is similarly romantic, often impassioned.His early work had a sense of energy and revealed a profound depth of feeling.Though Cézanne received encouragement from Pissarro and some of the other Impressionists during the 1860s and enjoyed the occasional critical backing of his friend Zola, his pictures were consistently rejected by the annual Salons and frequently inspired more ridicule than did the early efforts of other experimenters in the same generation.

Impressionism

In 1872, Cézanne moved to Pontoise, France, where he spent two years working very closely with Pissarro. He taught Cézanne new ways to paint with brushstrokes of pure colour. Also during this period, Cézanne became convinced that one must paint directly from nature. One result of this change in artistic philosophy was that romantic and religious subjects began to disappear from Cézanne's canvases. Additionally, the somber, murky range of his palette began to give way to fresher, more vibrant colors. The more personal direction his work began to take was not well-aligned with that of other Impressionists, and his art continued to generate disappointing responses from the public at large. In fact, after the third Impressionist show, Cézanne did not exhibit publicly for nearly 20 years.

Cubism

Cézanne was not primarily interested in creating an illusion of depth in his painting and he abandoned the tradition of perspective drawing. Perspective, which had been used since the Early Renaissance, was a geometric formula that solved the problem of how to draw three-dimensional objects on a two dimensional surface. Cézanne felt that the illusionism of perspective denied the fact that a painting is a flat two-dimensional object. He liked to flatten the space in his paintings to place more emphasis on their surface - to stress the difference between a painting and reality. He saw painting in more abstract terms as the construction and arrangement of colour on a two-dimensional surface. It was this flat abstract approach that appealed to the Cubists and their early paintings, such as Picasso.

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