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Paul Cézanne (January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906) was a French painter who represents the bridge from impressionism to cubism.

Considered the father of modern art, Paul Cézanne's work shows his need for formal design, geometrical composition and balance. His work often tied the foreground and background together to create patterns. By using colored planes and geometric patterns, Cézanne created paintings with a sense of three-dimensions.

Life and work

One of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century, and certainly one of the most influential artists on the development of art in the twentieth, Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence on 19 January 1839, and went to school there. From 1859 to 1861 he studied law in Aix, and continued his early love of art, taking drawing lessons. Against the objections of his father, he pursued his artistic development and left for Paris with his close friend Émile Zola in 1861. Gradually, his father reconciled to his course of life and supported him in it. He later received a large inheritance, on which he could continue living a comfortable life.

In Paris, he met Camille Pissarro and other impressionists. Pissarro was to influence Cézanne's painting over the years and they often painted together.

Cézanne's early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape, and comprises many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures, imaginitively painted. Later in his career he became far more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting that was to influence the impressionists enormously. In Cezanne's work we see a development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting, where the visual field is broken down into small, often very regular brushstrokes that build up the image in planes and areas of colour. His famous words: "I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums." seem to indicate that his struggle was to develop a hitherto unknown authenticity of observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find, and this, for him, involved breaking the surface of the painting into small, often repetitive strokes of the brush. He structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes to create the most telling image of his subjects. His geometric essentialisation of forms was to influence Pablo Picasso, George Braque and Juan Gris' cubism very profoundly. In fact when one examines closely the cubist paintings together with Cezanne's later works, it is immediately clear that a direct link exists between the two.

His paintings were in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon. The Paris Salon rejected Cézanne's submissions every year from 1864 to 1869.

He exhibited little in his lifetime and worked in increasing artistic isolation, remaining in the South of France far from Paris. He concentrated on a few subjects: still lifes, studies of bathers, and especially the Mont Sainte-Victoire, of which he painted innumerable views.

To early 20th-century modernists, Cézanne was the founder of modern painting. Henri Matisse called him, "the father of us all".

Cézanne and Zola disagreed, and never reconciled, over Zola's fictionalized depiction of Cézanne in the novel L'Oeuvre (The Masterpiece, 1886).

In 1906, Cézanne collapsed while painting in the outdoors during a thunderstorm. One week later, on October 22, he died of pneumonia.

On May 10, 1999, Cézanne's painting Rideau, cruchon et compotier sold for $60.5 million, the fourth highest price paid for a painting up to that time.

See also

• Post-impressionism
• Forest (painting)
• List of most expensive paintings

External links

• Cézanne at the WebMuseum
• Cézanne at Olga's Gallery
• Paul Cezanne studio
• The Murder c. 1867
• Looking quickly License to practice Cézanne's painting.

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