“How difficult it is to be precise about Cézanne,” said French writer and painter Maurice Denis more than a century ago.
Since then, countless words have been written about Paul Cézanne. Yet they fail to encapsulate his genius. Historians agree he’s a great painter. The challenge, it seems, is to succinctly describe what sets him apart.
Born in 1839, Cézanne was part of the same generation as Monet and Renoir. However, unlike the Impressionists, he was raised in the sunny south of France, the son of a wealthy banker and a creative mother.
During his youth, he was part of a tight-knit group of friends that included future novelist Émile Zola, who argued that true art should reflect human nature through the lens of one’s lived experience. The idea resonated deeply with Cézanne.
The artist’s skeptical father
In one of his earliest works, The Artist’s Father Reading L’Événement, Cézanne portrays his papa reading the left-leaning newspaper that hired Zola as its art critic. One of the artist’s own still life paintings hangs on the wall behind the patriarch.
In truth, the elder Cézanne viewed art as a foolish career choice and wasn’t shy about saying so. In turn, Zola called him mocking, bourgeois, and stingy.
The painting is more empathetic. The artist portrays Louis-Auguste Cézanne in a warm hat and slippers, trying to make sense of the art world. To me, there is something endearing about this steadfast figure who, in the end, gave his son a yearly allowance to chase a career he never really understood.
Simple themes, exquisitely fine-tuned
At age 22, Cézanne temporarily moved to Paris and began connecting with other struggling artists. Among them was the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, whom Cézanne affectionately called “that humble, colossal Pissarro—a man to consult and something like the good Lord.”
The coming together of Cézanne and Pissarro—their common cause, their peaceful coexistence, their rivalry, their contrariety—is a mystery. I cannot escape the feeling that if we could unravel it we would have in our hands the key to French painting.
Art historian T. J. Clark, “If These Apples Should Fall,” 2022
The two artists often painted together outdoors, where Pissarro taught Cézanne to translate strong emotions into lush images.
In House and Tree L’Hermitage, Cézanne omits everything he deems superfluous—even the presence of other people. His focus is on patches of paint that create complex rhythms across the canvas, resulting from intense scrutiny of each brushstroke.
While many art historians characterize Cézanne’s painting style as “emotionally distant” and “famously silent,” in my view nothing could be further from the truth.
House and Tree L’Hermitage possesses an inner light and a suspension of time that I find deeply comforting. If I were longing for a getaway, I could easily imagine myself here. No can say for certain what drew Cézanne to this residence near Paris. Clearly, he has a heartfelt connection to it.
His fondness for visual metaphors is also evident in Pot of Flowers and Fruit. No two leaves share the same character. Delicately nuanced colors emphasize the autumnal ripeness of every pear.
Human nature in all of its restlessness
Traditionally, the still life genre is considered less significant than history painting and psychologically rich portraits. Cézanne may be the first major artist to treat inanimate objects with the same gravity as stories drawn from history, religion, and classical mythology.
In The Peppermint Bottle, the artist reveals surprisingly little about the table. Instead, he artfully shapes yards of fabric into folds that undulate like a natural landscape. These sumptuous contours express a baroque exuberance seldom seen in painted fabric, before or after Cézanne.
Importantly, each object is on the cusp of falling. Look at the audacious asymmetry of the transparent flask and the bulging of its more luminous left side. Nothing sits still in a Cézanne still life.
In a similar piece titled Still Life with Apples, each object presses up against the picture plane. This wouldn’t occur in real life. It is a product of the artist’s imagination.
But for what purpose? Are these paintings a warning about our persistent instability or do they represent discreet expressions of pleasure? And isn’t the ambiguity interesting?
When I look at the sugar bowl perched on its carpet, or the apples rolling off their plate, or the wall carved out of blocks of ice, I know I am someplace beautiful but dangerous.
Art historian T. J. Clark, “If These Apples Should Fall,” 2022
The object of his gaze
Cézanne produced more than 30 self-portraits during his forty-year career. I find this truly surprising for a man often labeled anti-social.
Look closely at the 1880 self-portrait and that piercing right eye. What should we make of the wallpaper’s lozenge pattern behind him? Is it a coincidence that “stars” surround his head like a visual thought balloon? Or does this echo Zola’s belief that great art grows from memories?
In any case, Cézanne seems to be projecting his own reticence onto the portrait of his wife. Madame Cézanne—a former artist’s model—poses with a tilted head reminiscent of a penitent saint. The girlish puff of her sleeve creates a tender, visual dialogue with that angle.
The pure oval of the face, its vague eyes and lips, and the cool tones of the painting suggest an abstract conception of the model. Yet it appears to us a very human portrait, sensitive to the frail in this feminine nature.
Art historian Meyer Schapiro, “Cézanne,” 2004
Portraits of unquestionable honesty
As he matured, Cézanne’s life became more conventional, but his work did not. The years between 1890 and his death in 1906 are distinguished by a surge in creativity as he moved even further away from the Academic tradition of slavishly copying nature.
His love for painting those who had “grown old naturally in the country” culminates in Portrait of Vallier. Here, the artist portrays his gardener as big without swagger—a man at peace, far away from the hurly-burly.
A characteristic grace of this image of a tranquilly self-sufficient man is its lyrical, exuberant color. Cézanne has transposed to the human form…and especially to the clothes…all the life of his late landscapes.
No artist has ever painted a beard so colorfully, or given a sleeve such a marvelous abundance of tones.
Art historian Meyer Schapiro, “Cézanne,” 2004
We are human, after all
The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls Paul Cézanne one of the most influential artists in the history of modern painting. Why, then, is his contribution so tricky to define?
“Talking about art is virtually useless,” grumbled Cézanne, who isn’t exactly helpful. Art critic Henry McBride voiced a similar frustration with “writers who sign their names to nonsensical utterances about Cézanne, using strange words such as synthesis.”
I believe art historian John Berger is on the right track when he says, “Cézanne refused to let the principles of painting—a consistent perspective, local color, and classical composition—take precedence over the full experience of seeing.”
Scientific research supports Berger’s view. Today we know that vision is neither fixed nor wholly objective. The world is perpetually changing as the light changes and our physical viewpoint shifts. Even our moods shape how we perceive every person, place, and thing we see.
Cézanne embraced this fundamental truth and worked tirelessly to capture the subjective act of observation itself. That is his great secret—and his enduring legacy.
