Paul Cezanne Essay, Research Paper

Paul Cezanne

Cezanne was born at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France on Jan. 19, 1839. He went to school in Aix, forming a close friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He also studied law there from 1859 to 1861, but at the same time he continued attending drawing classes. Against his father’s resistance, he made up his mind that he wanted to paint and in 1861 joined Zola in Paris. His father soon accepted the fact and gave Cezanne a lot of money. His father soon died and he received a huge inheritance that would allow him to live well until he died. In Paris he met Camille Pissarro and came to know others of the impressionist group. He soon exhibited with them in 1874 and 1877. Cezanne, however, remained an outsider to their circle. From 1864 to 1869 he submitted his work to the official Salon and saw it consistently rejected. His paintings of 1865-70 form what is usually called his early “romantic” period. Extremely personal in character, it deals with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in harsh, somber colors and extremely heavy paintwork.

Soon enough Cezanne rejected that kind of approach to his way of painting while his art is conveniently divided into three phases. In the early 1870s, through a helpful association with Pissarro he worked on the principles of color and lighting of Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork. Yet he kept his own sense of mass and the interaction of planes, as in House of the Hanged Man.

In the late 1870s, Cezanne entered the phase known as “constructive,” named by the grouping of parallel hatched brushstrokes that build up mass. He continued in this style until the early 1890s, when, in his series of paintings titled Card Players; the upright posture of the players’ backs creates a sense of solidness.

Finally, living as a solitary in Aix, Cezanne moved into his late phase. Now he concentrated on a few basic subjects. Still objects set around the same type of things like apples, statuary, and tablecloths. The landscape paintings of his final years, much affected by Cezanne’s contemporaneous practice in watercolor, have a more transparent and unfinished look, while the last figure paintings are more spiritual in how they look. By the time of his death on Oct. 22, 1906, Cezanne’s art had begun to be shown and seen across Europe, and it became a basic influence on the Fauves, the cubists, and virtually all advanced art of the early 20th century