Cézanne, Paul (1839-1906)

French post-Impressionist painter. He was a leading figure in the development of modern art. He broke away from the Impressionists' concern with the ever-changing effects of light to develop a style that tried to capture the structure of natural forms, whether in landscapes, still lifes, or portraits. Joueurs de Cartes/Cardplayers (c. 1890-95; Louvre, Paris) is typical of his work.

Cézanne was educated at the Collège Bourbon of Aix, where he became a friend of French writer Emile Zola. His parents had intended him to study law, but he persuaded them to allow him to study art in Paris. He had, however, no regular training, failing in the entrance examination of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and his early work had an undisciplined and Romantic enthusiasm for Delacroix, Daumier and Courbet, where sensational subject matter (L'Orgie, L'Enlèvement) was rendered with violent and dark colour, heavily plastered on the canvas. His real apprenticeship began in the 1870s when his friendship with Camille Pissarro brought him within the orbit of Impressionism. ‘Never paint’, Pissarro advised him, ‘except with the three primary colours and their immediate derivatives’, and though he did not follow this advice literally, it made him aware of the importance of pure colour. A further result of Impressionist influence was to wean him from Romantic ideas and to focus on the study of nature. La Maison du Pendu, which he contributed to the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, marked this transitional stage in his art.

He found Paris generally unsympathetic, and his later life, the most creative phase, was spent largely in seclusion at Aix-en-Provence. Financially self-sufficient after the death of his wealthy father, he absorbed himself in nature and the problems of his art, which contained many interesting and fruitful contradictions. He wished to ‘refashion Poussin after nature’: on the other hand, the Louvre, he remarked, was ‘a good book but only a means to an end’. A sense of structure, opposed to the atmospheric preoccupation of the Impressionists, dictated not only the representation of an object by planes translated into colour, but also the representation of space (as in his Montagne St Victoire). The beauty of his later paintings lies in the subtle gradations of transparent colour from cold to warm, combined with and inseparable from a grand simplicity of form. In the watercolour medium itself he showed remarkable brilliance and successfully applied its transparency in oil. As in his Joueurs de Cartes, the human element was the result, but not the primary incentive, of his art, though he considered the study of the figure an important exercise and his many Bathers show a desire to achieve a great nude composition. The logic of his ideas inevitably tended towards still life, in which he excelled, and ultimately towards abstraction. In this respect he may be looked on as the progenitor of cubism, which followed so soon after the retrospective exhibition of his work in 1907.

In 1993, $28.6 million was paid for an oil on canvas titled Nature Morte: Les grosses pommes, the record for a Cézanne painting. In 1997, his painting Madame Cézanne au fauteuil jaune of 1888-90 sold for more than $23 million at Christie's in New York.