Paul Cezanne: The Complete Story
Paul Cezanne was a French painter often called the father of modern art. Working alone in the south of France, he found a new way to build a picture out of patches of color and quiet geometry, and in doing so opened the door to Cubism and almost everything that followed.
Picasso and Matisse both called him the father of us all. Yet in his own lifetime he was mocked, rejected by the Paris Salon again and again, and known mostly for paintings of apples and a single mountain he returned to over and over.
He was stubborn, solitary and quietly radical. Here is the whole story.
Why Cezanne matters
Cezanne changed how artists see. Before him, a painting tried to be a window onto a scene. He treated it instead as a flat surface to be built, patch by patch, into a solid structure.
That shift, from copying nature to constructing it, is the hinge between the 19th century and modern art. Without Cezanne there is no Cubism, and arguably no abstract art either.
His style, decoded
A Cezanne can look rough or unfinished at first, until you see the system underneath.
Patches of color. He built forms from small planes of color set side by side, like a mosaic of brushstrokes.
Hidden geometry. He once advised treating nature through the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.
Shifting viewpoints. A still life seen from several angles at once, so a table tilts and a bowl leans. This idea fed straight into Cubism.
The unfinished look. Bare canvas left showing, as if the picture is still being thought out in front of you.
His work is the heart of Post Impressionism, the generation that pushed past Impressionism into something more structured.
Apples and a mountain
Cezanne is famous for two humble subjects he painted endlessly: apples, and Mont Sainte Victoire, the mountain near his home in Aix.
He reportedly said he wanted to astonish Paris with an apple, treating a simple bowl of fruit as seriously as any grand history scene. And he painted that one mountain more than 30 times, studying how to build its mass and light. The repetition was the point: he was solving the same deep problem again and again. His mastery of still life reset what the genre could be.
The bridge to Cubism
Cezanne’s tilting tables and faceted forms were a revelation to the next generation.
A few years after his death, a big memorial exhibition in Paris stunned young artists. Picasso and Braque took his shifting viewpoints and broken planes and pushed them into full Cubism. The quiet man from Aix had handed them the future.
The masters who shaped him
Cezanne learned from both the new and the old.
The Impressionist Camille Pissarro mentored him, taught him to lighten his palette and paint outdoors, and treated him as an equal when others laughed. From the old masters in the Louvre, especially Poussin, he took a love of solid structure, and from Delacroix a passion for color. He wanted, he said, to make Impressionism into something as durable as the art of the museums.
Zola, the friendship that broke
Cezanne’s closest boyhood friend was the writer Emile Zola, who grew up beside him in Aix.
Their friendship ended in pain. In 1886 Zola published a novel about a brilliant painter who fails and kills himself. Cezanne recognized himself in the character, took it as a betrayal, and the two men, once inseparable, never spoke again.
The slow, solitary man
Cezanne worked with painful slowness and lived increasingly apart from the art world.
A portrait of the dealer Ambroise Vollard supposedly took more than a hundred sittings, and even then Cezanne said only the shirtfront satisfied him. Backed by money from his banker father, he retreated to Aix and painted in near isolation, indifferent to fashion.
How Cezanne died
His death came from his devotion to working outdoors. In 1906 he was caught in a storm while painting in the fields and collapsed.
He developed pneumonia and died days later, at 67, still largely unrecognized by the public. Within a few years he would be hailed as the father of modern painting.
Where to see Cezanne
France holds the heart of his work, but he is everywhere now.
The Musee d’Orsay, Paris. The essential stop, rich in his still lifes, bathers and portraits.
The Atelier de Cezanne, Aix en Provence. His preserved studio, near the mountain he painted so often.
Paul Cezanne, quick questions
What is he known for? Still lifes of apples, Mont Sainte Victoire, and founding modern art.
What style is he? Post Impressionism, and the bridge to Cubism.
Where was he from? Aix en Provence, in the south of France.
How did he die? Of pneumonia in 1906, after being caught in a storm while painting.
Why apples? He used simple fruit to solve deep problems of form, color and space.
More on Cezanne: Interesting Facts About Paul Cezanne.
If Cezanne opened your eyes, keep going with these:
Is Cezanne the Greatest Painter?, our deeper case for the father of modern art.
Claude Monet, the Impressionist whose light Cezanne wanted to make solid and lasting.
What is Still Life Painting, the humble genre Cezanne turned into a laboratory.