Paul Cézanne: The Father of Modern Art

Paul Cézanne was born on January 19, 1839, in Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France, into a family of comfortable means. His father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne, was a successful banker who had risen from humble origins, and he intended his son to follow the same path. The young Cézanne studied law at the University of Aix, but his true vocation was already asserting itself. He drew constantly, filled notebooks with sketches, and formed a friendship with Émile Zola, the future novelist, who encouraged his artistic ambitions. In 1861, against his father’s wishes, Cézanne left for Paris.

The Paris years were difficult. Cézanne’s early work was dark, violent, and unpolished—paintings of murder and rape, of savage figures in raw landscapes. He was rejected by the Salon repeatedly, and his thick, tortured application of paint earned him the contempt of critics. But he found allies among the young painters who would become the Impressionists. He met Camille Pissarro, who became his mentor and friend, and through Pissarro he met Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and the others. He exhibited with the Impressionists in 1874 and 1877, but his work was never fully at home in the movement. He was searching for something else: a way to reconcile the spontaneity of Impressionism with the structure and solidity he admired in the Old Masters.

The Artist

Cézanne’s mature work emerged in the 1880s, when he left Paris and returned to Aix to paint in isolation. He painted the landscape of Provence—Mont Sainte-Victoire rising over the valley, the quarries of Bibémus, the pine trees and the limestone cliffs—with obsessive dedication. He painted still lifes: apples and oranges arranged on tilted tables, their forms simplified into spheres and cylinders, their colors built in careful layers. He painted portraits of his wife, Hortense, and of the peasants of Aix, their faces masks of stoic endurance.

His style was unlike anything that had come before. He built his paintings in patches of color, each brushstroke a small slab of paint laid carefully beside the next, creating forms that seemed to shift between the flatness of the canvas and the solidity of the visible world. He abandoned the rules of perspective, tilting tables forward, collapsing space, creating a new kind of order that was truer to the act of perception than to the conventions of representation.

Influence on His Contemporaries

Cézanne’s influence on the artists who followed was immediate and profound. Camille Pissarro, his old friend, admired his work and carried his influence into his own late landscapes. But it was the younger generation that fully understood what Cézanne had achieved.

Vincent van Gogh, who arrived in Paris in 1886, saw Cézanne’s work and was struck by its intensity. Paul Gauguin, who collected Cézanne’s paintings, carried his influence into the Symbolist movement. Henri Matisse called Cézanne “the father of us all.” Pablo Picasso, arriving in Paris from Spain, found in Cézanne’s work the foundation for Cubism. The story of early modern art is, in large part, the story of artists absorbing and transforming Cézanne’s innovations.

Legacy

Cézanne’s reputation grew slowly. He exhibited rarely, lived in isolation, and died on October 22, 1906, at the age of sixty-seven, from pneumonia contracted after a day of painting in a storm. At his death, he was known to a small circle of collectors and artists but had not achieved the fame of Monet or Renoir.

The generation that followed changed that. The first major retrospective of his work was held in 1907, the year after his death, and it was a revelation. Picasso, Matisse, and Georges Braque saw in Cézanne’s paintings the foundation for a new art. His influence radiated outward: through Cubism to the abstract art of the twentieth century; through Matisse to Fauvism and the color-driven painting that followed; through the Russian and German avant-gardes to the international language of modernism. He is now recognized as the artist who, more than any other, transformed the art of the nineteenth century into the art of the twentieth—the father of modern painting.

Art Gallery: Paul Cézanne Virtual Museum