Paul Cézanne: The manufacturer of color forms Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839 - Aix-en-Provence, October 22, 1906) French painter
Early Years - Paul Cézanne , who had ancestors from Romagna, originating in Cesena, was the eldest son of Louis-Auguste, who owned a hat factory, and Anne-Elisabeth Honorine Aubert, working in the same factory: her parents were married Jan. 29, 1844, after the birth of another daughter, Marie, in 1848, Louis-Auguste Cézanne founded with a partner bank "Cézanne et Cabassol." In a family that enjoyed considerable wealth, Paul could attend the best schools after primary school from 1844 to 1849, from 1849 to 1852 at Saint-Joseph senior, he entered the Collège Bourbon - Mignet today - where he received a humanistic education, and had for companions, among others, Émile Zola - who was then living in Aix with his mother - with whom he tied to a deep friendship.
The same writer points out that friendship of young intellectuals, "We had books in their pockets and bags. For years, Victor Hugo reigned over us like an absolute monarch. He had won with his strong gait of giant, we kidnapped with his powerful rhetoric. " And the passion of Victor Hugo to go to that de Musset: "De Musset seduced us with his naughty bravado of genius. Tales of Italy and Spain are taking us in mocking unromantic, that rested there, without that we knew it, convinced of the romance of Victor Hugo. " This guided his spiritual formation to romance - Cézanne also wrote poems, which he read Zola - was not without consequences in his choice of painting. Even before, in 1859, the baccalauréat, he attended from 1856 to the Ecole de Dessin Aix, earning a second prize in drawing, and studied music, playing, along with Zola, in an orchestra.
The Romantic Period - After a brief stay in Paris, along with Zola and Jean-Baptistin Baille, another of his classmates, he returned to Aix to join, but only to satisfy the desire of his father, the Faculty of Law. Zola had been in Paris and the two friends kept a close contact of letters, even when Cézanne was not going to visit him every so often in the capital. From time was planning to devote himself to painting and in 1859, in a country house near Aix Jas de Bouffan call, organized his painter's studio. If the father - who could assess the practical bourgeois certain and the uncertain - was hostile to that activity which was neglecting his son a possible successful legal career, Paul was encouraged by his mother and sister Marie. He attended a small circle artists, painters formed Emperaire Villevieille and, by the sculptor Solari, from the writer Gasquet, his future biographer, art critic and Valabrègue. He was discharged from military service in 1860 and ceased to attend college. In the room of the house painted in a style "that suggests a clumsy fourteenth century fresco of a strange," the four seasons, signed jokingly Ingres, now transferred to canvas and kept at the Petit Palais in Paris. Obtained from the father permission to go to Paris, from April to September he attended the 'Académie Suisse, frequently visiting the Louvre and the Salon painters attracted by the historic delnaturalismo Meissonier. After searching in vain to enter the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, he returned to Aix to resume drawing classes and work, with no interest in his father's bank. He left the following year, however, to return again to Paris and return of the courses' Académie Suisse, here he met the painters Bazille, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley.
In May 1863 he visited the Salon des Refusés with Zola - the exhibition of the paintings rejected by the official Salon, which inspire the works in academic standards, promoting traditional painting - but it was especially attracted by the artists who could be admired at the Louvre: Here he practiced by copying the classics of the art, from Caravaggio to El Greek, from five to modern Venetian Delacroix, Daumier, Corot and Courbet. He returned to Aix in 1864 and stayed intervals at various locations in France. At the Salon of 1865 - that saw the "scandal" of 'Manet's Olympia - a work that was sent but declined, while Zola published his novel The Confession Claude de, dedicated to him and Baille. In the presentation of the book in Aix, Marius Roux, a friend of Cézanne and Zola, wrote that "great admirer of Ribera and Zurbarán, our painter proceeds only by himself, giving his works a particular timbre. I've seen him work in his atelier, and if I still can not predict the brilliant success of those who admire, however, are certain of one thing, that his work will never be mediocre. "In this year he painted nine, energetic portraits of 'oncle Dominique, his uncle Dominique Aubert, manufactured using largely to the spatula to the color intensity and sense of volume to the canvas and, despite the absence of contrasts of light, "the image is strongly pronounced, and although the problem space is absent here, at least as an issue of color space, as but after the lesson will be impressionistic, the image is determined in more concrete square and synthesized, in anticipation of quell'organicità monumental Cézanne reach in full after 1880. "After which was again rejected at the Salon of 1866 his painting, Portrait of Anthony Valabrègue, a writer friend of his, Cézanne wrote all'intendente of Fine Arts, responsible for the selection of the paintings, a letter of protest, claiming to reject the jury's and also wanted to expose his works: "I do not think that my desire has nothing exorbitant and if you were to ask all the painters who are in my position, I would answer all the jury to reject and want to participate in a or another in a show that must necessarily be open to all those who work seriously. " This is the time when Cézanne was looking for a personal style, out of any academicism and every school, but the references to artists he has known and studied are found equally: in addition to having learned academic drawing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Aix by Joseph Gibert, his first canvases show appeals to some artists of Provence , comeÉmile Loubon - paintings by this artist are on display in the Museum of Aix - the pupil of these, Monticelli and Paul Guigou, two romantic painters, and even the most well-known Daumier, the artist who sums up in himself and the romanticism of Delacroix Courbet's realism, the two great masters admired by Cézanne. Delacroix showed him how to open the forms, that the academic tradition preserved in the closure of plasticity, built according to the vibrations of color under the influence of light of Cézanne he said it was "the most beautiful palette of France" and that no one in France, as Delacroix had a sense of "vibration of color. We all paint according to him, "Courbet and the lesson served him as a corrective to the excesses of romantic Delacroix. From 1866 to 1870 was divided between Aix and Paris: there he met and coexisted, without knowing anything about the family, with a young Paris, Hortense Fiquet. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War was at Aix, but then, for six months, he settled with Hortense in L'Estaque, a fishing village near Marseille, and at the end of the war and the Revolution Communards, he returned to Paris, having avoided conscription by her father who paid his son a substitute for military service, as permitted by the laws then in force.
The Impressionist period - the highest result of this experience, which is the basis of the new direction taken by Cézanne, is the house of the hanged in Auvers, "Space is no longer amorphous, but the vibration light, achieved despite the usual thickness of the material, makes it almost compact, as a mass but not weight, but body, given the small size of steps. It is light that creates this synthesis volume and space, which gives a summary of things [...] the sense of their 'real life', the consciousness of the impact. Cézanne has merged his concept of monumentality [...] with the desire to structure learned from Pissarro and of course goes further because it is not satisfied with a purely optical images of her, but is already looking for an emotional dimension of the form '. In the capital, on Jan. 4, was born the son Paul, Cézanne, for two years before moving with his family in Auvers-sur-Oise, Pontoise stayed a few months, the country of Pissarro, with whom he painted, en plein air, and sometimes also the same themes, such as La Cote des boeufs in Pontoise, or the path of the river in Pontoise, now at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, while his Louvanciennes is even a copy of a painting by Pissarro. They wrote at that time that Cezanne "gives us hope and I've seen and I have with me a painting of a force and a major force." Pissarro taught him to pose in front of the subject with objectivity, loosely-structured on the canvas without coercion of literary superstructure, so that it is only then in accordance with its spirit, with the use of purely pictorial means, such as color tone and vibration of light. He returned to Paris in 1874 to attend the first Impressionist exhibition, I present to the house of a modern and Olympia, but did not get, like the other exhibitors to address Impressionist any success. As Cézanne Impressionism and share it to accept the goals, did not identify with it and its results are in fact different: the representation of reality by the vibration of light and color and did not undo the empty form, but ensures consistency and enhances the volumes; moreover, the same impression - except Pissarro, Monet and Renoir - showed distrust of his painting. In that exhibition Cézanne also presented the portrait of Victor Chocquet, his friend who encouraged him also a number of paintings. The similarity of Chocquet with a criminal named Bill, then well known to the news gave occasion to the public to rename the work ironically Billie chocolate. But for Venturi that portrait - the image of man serious, sensitive, with deep moral life - is an example of the union reached in Cézanne, through the particular values \u200b\u200bof Impressionism, painting and humanity, the object reaches the value of ' art as it is represented spiritual values. "The meat stand on a reddish background of light green tone effect so dark on light. The touches, though often in color, vary because the light can vibrate, or rather can itself form the image. " Cezanne - that continues to divide his time between Paris, Aix, Pontoise and Auvers Estaque - did not attend the second Impressionist exhibition, held in 1876, in compensation took part in the third exhibition in 1877, presenting sixteen paintings, watercolors, mostly, and getting the usual disapproval of critics, even those who watched with interest and understanding of the Impressionist movement. He took exception Georges Rivière, who wrote of him: "The artist most attacked, abused by more than fifteen years by the press and the public, and Cezanne. He is, in his works, a Greek of the belle époque, his paintings have a calm, serene and heroic paintings of ancient pottery, and ignorant people who laugh in front of the Bathers, for example, I make the effect of the Barbarians critical of the Parthenon. Mr. Cezanne was a painter and a great painter. Those who have never held a hand brush or a pencil, said he can not draw, and criticized the imperfections that are simply a refinement achieved through an enormous knowledge [...] His painting has the inexpressible Biblical Greek antiquity and charm, the characters' movements are simple and great as in the ancient sculptures, landscapes have a grand majesty, and his still lifes so beautiful, so precise in the tonal relationships have, in their truth, something solemn . In all his paintings, the artist moves, because he himself try, before nature, violent emotion that the ability to transmit to the canvas. "The continuous failure, the exhibitions at the Salons of the Impressionists as "official," who continued to reject the works that Cézanne regularly insisted to send him to a period of isolation, compounded by disagreements with his father who already disapprove of cohabitation of child with Hortense, when he learned of the birth of a child, came to ridurgli economic aid, which until then had failed to send him. Cézanne continued to maintain relations only with his mother and, in Medan, with Zola, while for the rest of the year living in Estaque.
The construction period - This awareness is the basis of the new painting by Cézanne sought "a new classicism, no longer based on imitation of the old school, but turned to form a new, concrete image of the world "to be found not in external reality, but in consciousness. This is to reject both the romantic conception of painting as' literary figure ", as that impressionistic painting as a" technique to render vividly the visual sensation. " The painting must express "the deep structures of being," must be "an ontological research, a sort of philosophy" in painting romantic reality is consciously transformed by the artist in his own reality: the perception of it is just the basis of 'processing of personal painter, impressionism, on the contrary, the reality must be made solely on the perception of objects: the more the perception is immediately grabbed and sent to the canvas, without disrupting operations of personal reflection of the painter, will be much more accurate, according to the impressionist , the reproduction of reality.
Even if reality exists outside of us, it can be known only as it is perceived by our consciousness, equally, we can investigate the structure of our consciousness only in so far as it contains real images: the structure of the real structure of consciousness coincide. The perception, once reduced to the level of consciousness, is not easier, not only consists of a quantity of light colored, but is structured in a complex image made up of sensitive data of light, color, mass, volume, space. The problem is not overwhelmed with the feeling intellectualistic superstructures: the thought has to take on the feeling merging with it and maintaining, as far as possible, the identity between the structure of consciousness and the objective structure. The painting is the canvas in the objectification of the actual sensitive data structured in consciousness.
recent years - Cézanne spent the last years in almost total isolation and voluntary. Having participated in the Third Impressionist Exhibition, the artist began to withdraw into himself, to search for new formal experiments. Another cause was his character ended with paranoid tendencies, which adapts poorly to the presence of friends around him: in this respect were the famous "tantrums" conManet ("not shake her hand, Mr. Manet, because they are two weeks does not work "), and Zola did not like in the circle. Just with the latter, a close friend since childhood, came to a breaking point, especially after, in 1886, a friend published the novel L'oeuvre, in which the main character, Claude Lantier - failed painter who committed suicide before a framework that fails to complete - the same would consist of Cezanne (Perhaps wrongly). The fact is that, since then, the two former friends were seen no more. With his wife and son in Paris, Cezanne lived solitary in Aix en Provence, dividing the city between the house and studio in town Chemin des Lauves, retiring to paint large canvases, representing mainly the Bathers or Mountain Sainte Victoire, and whose formal research clearly anticipating cubism. Only one to take care of him was the great art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who entered into a contract with him in 1895 and which was the first after 18-years-to exhibit and to organize an exhibition in his gallery. Nell ' October 1906, while painting en plein air, Cezanne was surprised by a storm. Brought home by a peasant in a cart open semincosciente and in the throes of violent pneumonia, died a few days later without being able to resume his brushes in hand. Hortense and Paul came to Aix when he was already dead.
In February 1907, at the Salon d'Automne, he was given a grand commemorative retrospective, which hit a whole new generation of artists (including Picasso and Modigliani), laid the foundations of cubism and opened the roads to the artistic avant-garde '900.
