Symbols, colors and brushstrokes
Paul Cézanne ( 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and 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. Both Matisse and Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne "is the father of us all".
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Cezanne was born into a wealthy family of Louis Auguste Cézanne who founded his own banking firm. His mother, Anne Elisabeth Honorine Aubert, passed on to her son her perception and vision of life, being one of the biggest influence in his art. Apart from Paul, family had two daughters - Marie and Rose.
The woman in a greeen hat. Madame Cezanne (1894-1895)
Cezanne attended Saint Joseph school in Aix and in 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix where he met Émile Zola and Baptistin Baille. In 1857, he began attending the Free Municipal School of Drawing in Aix, where he studied drawing under Joseph Gibert, a Spanish monk. From 1858 to 1861, complying with his father's wishes, Cézanne attended the law school of the University of Aix, while also receiving drawing lessons. His father insisted on banking career of his son but eventually approved of his passion for arts. Cezanne's inheritance of 400 thousands franks allowed him not to worry about the finances and dedicate his life to experimenting with art. Cezannes’s artistry was highly influenced by his friend and teacher Camille Pissarro. His work often concerned with landscapes, grops of large heavy figures in the landscape.
The Card Players (1892–95)
Later he became more interested in painting from direct observation, developing light and airy painting style. Later he shifted to more solidified style of painting. Through struggle to develop his own unique style of representation, eventually he came to depicting whatever he observed in simple forms and large color planes.
Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley (1882-1885)
Still Life With the Commode (1883-1887)
Cezanne strived to ‘treat nature in terms of cylinder, sphere and the cone’. His experiments in order to reach desired way of depiction led him to explore binocular vision graphically. Cezanne used to paint a subject from multiple points of view, reaching the ‘stereoscopic‘ effect. He concentrated on a few subjects such as still life, portraits, landscapes and studies of bathers. Many of his paintings were drawn by memory due to the lack of available objects to study. His works made ctritics explain his innovative art as if he had sick retinas, pure vision or was influenced by the steam railway. Cezanne’s paintings were rejected many times by the jury, despite receiving an opportunity to hold a few solo exhibitions.
Still Life with a Curtain (1895)
Les Grandes Baigneuses (1898–1905)
Cezanne died in 1906 from pneumonia. He became a very influential person in the world of art, heavily impacting Cubist art and becoming an object of admiration of the Les Nabis group. Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris and others to experiment with ever more complex views of the same subject and eventually to the fracturing of form.