Paul Cézanne, also known as the Master of Aix, was a preeminent French artist of the Post-Impressionist movement and is often credited with paving the way for the emergence of modern art, both visually and conceptually. Over the four decades of his career, Cézanne was a decidedly original artist, while at the same time remaining open to a variety of external influences. His oeuvre constitutes an essential link between the Impressionist school and early twentieth-century artistic movements, such as Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, and abstract art. Cézanne's art fundamentally influenced a number of Abstract Expressionist artists, most particularly the early work of Arshile Gorky.

• Cézanne rejected the Impressionist philosophy of painting, with its central focus on capturing the transcendent aspects of nature. He concentrated instead on the immanent qualities of objects through a new mode of artistic rendering and visual perception that had no direct precedent in the Western art tradition.
• Cézanne conceived of his own theory of art based on the "absolute concepts of painting," such as colors, forms, and the spatial relationships between them.
• Cézanne tended to explore the same subject in a series of paintings, whether landscapes, portraits, or still lifes, in order to extract its true essence through art.

Paul Cézanne was born on January 19, 1839 in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France. His father was a wealthy lawyer and banker who strongly encouraged Paul to follow in his footsteps. Cézanne's eventual refusal to obey his authoritative father's aspirations led to a long and problematic relationship between the two, though the artist remained financially dependent on his family until his father's death in 1886.

Cézanne was largely a self-taught artist. In 1859 he started attending the evening drawing classes in his native town of Aix. After moving to Paris in 1861, Cézanne attempted twice to enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but was turned down by the jury. Instead of acquiring professional training, Cézanne made frequent visits to the Musee de Louvre, where he copied works by Titian, Rubens, and Michelangelo. He was also regularly seen at the Academie Suisse, a studio where young students of art could draw from live models for a monthly fee of only ten francs. There Cézanne met Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Auguste Renoir, who were at the time struggling artists themselves, but would become established as the founding members of the Impressionist movement.

The early oils of Cézanne were executed in a rather somber palette. The paint was often applied in thick layers of impasto, adding a sense of heaviness to these already solemn compositions. Cézanne's early painting indicated a focus on color in favor of well-delineated silhouettes and perspectives preferred by the French Academy and the jury of the annual Salon.

While in Paris, Cézanne continuously submitted his works for the exhibition at the Salon. All of his submissions, however, were refused. The artist also travelled regularly back to Aix to secure funding from his continually disapproving father.

The year 1870 marked a crucial shift in Cézanne's painting, brought about by two reasons: the artist's move to L'Estaque in the South of France to avoid the military draft, and his closer association with one of the most distinguished Impressionists - Camille Pissarro. Cézanne was fascinated with the Mediterranean landscape of L'Estaque with its abundance of sunlight and the vibrancy of colors. Pissarro proved instrumental in persuading Cézanne to adopt a brighter palette as well as to abandon the heavy and ponderous impasto technique in favor of smaller and livelier brushstrokes. In L'Estaque Cézanne executed a series of landscapes dominated by the architectonic forms of the country houses, the dazzling blues of the sea, and the vivacious greens of the foliage.

In 1872 Cézanne returned to Paris where his son Paul was born. His mistress, Hortense Fiquet, would only become Madame Cézanne in 1886 after the artist's father's death. Cézanne painted over forty portraits of his companion, as well as several enigmatic portraits of their son Paul.

In 1873 Cézanne exhibited in the famous show of the artists refused by the Salon, known as Salon des Refuses, which also included the works of Eduard Manet, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro. The critics' reviews slammed the avant-garde artists, which deeply affected Cézanne. In the next decade he mostly painted away from Paris, in either Aix or L'Estaque, while no longer participating in the unofficial group exhibitions.

Cézanne's experience with painting from nature led him to develop his own theory of art. He strove to depart from portrayal of the transient moment favored by the Impressionists and instead sought true and permanent pictorial qualities of the objects surrounding him. According to Cézanne, the subject of the painting was first to be "read" by the artist through the understanding of its essence. Then, in the second stage, this essence must be "realized" on a canvas through forms, colors, and their spatial relations. The colors and forms thus became the dominant elements of his compositions, completely freed from the rigid rules of perspective and paint application promoted by the Academy.

Depicting reality as such was never Cézanne's primary objective. In his own words, it was "something other than reality" that he endeavored to reveal.

In Cézanne's mature work the colors and forms possessed equal pictorial weight. The primary means of constructing the new perspective included the juxtaposition of cool and warm colors as well as the bold overlapping of forms. The light was no longer an outsider to the depicted objects, but rather emanated from within. Instead of the illusion, he searched for the essence. Instead of the three-dimensional artifice, he longed for the two-dimensional truth.

These principles of painting were also applied to still lifes and portraits. In 1880's Cézanne executed a large number of still lifes, completely reinventing the genre in the two-dimensional mode. The central feature of these still lifes was the crucial shift of attention from the objects themselves to the forms and colors that were potentially communicated by these objects. This radical liberation of form and color from its actual carrier, the object, directly precipitated the basic principles of Cubism, Expressionism, and later experimentation with abstraction.

Cézanne's portraits, including a vast body of self-portraits, exhibit the same set of traits. The compositions are vividly impersonal, for it was not the sitter's character that Cézanne struggled to depict; rather, it was the formal and coloristic possibilities of the human body and its interior nature that he explored.

In the last decade of his life, Cézanne limited his artistic pursuits almost exclusively to the two pictorial motifs. One was the continuous depiction of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, which dominated his local landscape in Aix. The other was the final synthesis of nature and human body in the series of the so-called Bathers. The latest of these were becoming increasingly abstract in the ways the forms and colors fused on the canvas.

Paul Cézanne died in his house in Aix on October 22, 1906 after contracting pneumonia. The last decade of his life was marred by the development of diabetes and severe depression, which alienated the artist from most of his friends and family members.

When looking at Cézanne's late work, it is impossible to miss the emergence of a unique artistic approach. The rules of the Academy completely abandoned, and the aesthetics of the Impressionism employed (but not copied), Cézanne offered a new way of comprehending the world through art. With his reputation evolving steadily in the late years of his life, an increasing number of young artists fell under the influence of his innovative vision. Among them was young Pablo Picasso, who would soon steer the Western tradition of painting into yet another new and utterly unprecedented direction. It was Paul Cézanne who taught the new generation of artists to liberate the forms and colors in their art, thus creating a new and subjective pictorial reality, not merely a slavish imitation. The influence of Cézanne continued well into the 1930s and 1940s when a new artistic manner was coming to life - that of Abstract Expressionism.


Below are Paul Cézanne's major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.



"We must not paint what we think we see, but what we see .. sometimes it may go against the grain, but this is what our craft demands."

"You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well."

"I try to render perspective through color alone .. One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way, and furthermore, express oneself with distinction and strength."

"There must not be a single loose strand, a single gap through which the tension, the light, the truth can escape."

"A painter is revealing something which no one has ever seen before and translates it into the absolute concepts of painting. That is, into something other than reality."

"I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you"
Cézanne wrote to the French artist Emile Bernard in a letter dated October 23, 1905