10 things to know about Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne, whose innovative Post-Impressionist paintings would pave the way for 20th-century modernism, was born in Aix-en-Provence. He was a childhood friend of Emile Zola, who would become the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century.

While studying at the Collège Bourbon, together with Louis Marguery and Jean-Baptiste Baille, they formed a close-knit group they nicknamed Les Inséparables. Cezanne defended Zola from bullies in the schoolyard, and one day Zola thanked him with a basket of apples. The moment had a great impact on Cezanne, and the apple would become one of his favoured subjects.

The two continued to support each other until 1886, when Zola used Cezanne as the basis for the failed artist character in his novel L’Oeuvre, putting a strain in their relationship.

Cezanne’s father didn’t initially support his artistic career. He wanted him to study law and manage their family-owned bank.

After two years at the law school of the University of Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne dropped out. Zola was then living in Paris and urged him to join the community of avant-garde artists and writers there. With his mother’s support, Cezanne convinced his father to let him go to the capital to study painting.

Once in Paris, Cezanne applied to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the training ground of Salon painters, but he was rejected. He took classes at the Académie Suisse, a walk-in studio school, but even there he wasn’t fully accepted — fellow attendee Camille Pissarro later recalled that Cezanne’s life studies ‘provoked roars of laughter from all the impotents of the school’. During this time, Cezanne was in his ‘Dark Period’, using expressive brushwork and dark tones to convey romantic and classical themes.

His submissions to the Salon were rejected year after year, and he participated in the famous 1863 Salon des Refusés, a showcase for artists who found themselves in the same position. Among the exhibitors were Pissarro, James McNeill Whistler and Edouard Manet, who presented his scandalous painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The Salon des Refusés brought a new type of art, beyond the bounds of the traditional establishment, into the mainstream.

It was at the Académie Suisse that Cezanne met Pissarro, nine years his elder, in 1865. They developed a close relationship, and for the next 10 years would paint together in the open air in villages outside Paris. Although their styles differed — as one onlooker put it, ‘Monsieur Pissarro, when he painted, dabbed, and Monsieur Cezanne smeared’ — they were both ambitious, unorthodox painters.

With little chance of success in the state-sponsored salons, they both responded by embracing their independence. This period marked a major turning point in Cezanne’s style, pulling him out of his Dark Period and into plein air, as he turned to the vibrant colours and intricate brushstrokes of Impressionist-style landscapes.

By contrast, Manet was considered by many to be the leading artist of the time, and this spurred Cezanne into competitive action. Manet’s flat style of painting, and his readiness to depict scenes of modern urban life, led Cezanne similarly to push against the bounds of artistic tradition. In 1865, Cezanne’s submission had been rejected by the Salon in favour of Manet’s Olympia. Nearly a decade later, Cezanne offered a retort in his painting A Modern Olympia — which caused an even greater scandal.

Cezanne’s ‘ideal of earthly happiness’, according to an interview in the late 1890s, was to create his own belle formule, or ‘beautiful way of painting’.

While he was working in the same milieu as the Impressionists, he was developing his own unique technique. In his early years, he would use a palette knife to block in large areas of colour in a flat, unmodulated manner. As his career went on, he repeatedly added small parallel or perpendicular strokes of paint in changing gradations of colour to build up forms. This technique of small brushstrokes was similar to that of the Impressionists, but it lacked their impulsiveness, since Cezanne was known to spend hours on a single line.

The artist’s analytical approach to painting was another step away from the Impressionists. Following the onset of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Cezanne left Paris for the south of France (he would divide his time between there and the capital for many years, eventually settling in the south around 1886). He began to paint landscapes in and around Aix and L’Estaque, near Marseille. Here he developed his theory that everything in nature could be reduced to its primary geometrical form of sphere, cone, cube or cylinder.

In his painted world, apples were spheres, houses were cubes, and trees were combinations of cylinders. His compositions were highly structured, with a focus on geometrical shapes. These shapes would often be slightly blurred, reflecting how he had studied them from various angles.

At the beginning of his career, Cezanne went through his aforementioned Dark Period (1861-1870). His works from this time are characterised not only by their Stygian palette with dramatic tonal contrasts, but by the thick layers of pigment applied with a palette knife — which worked together to communicate emotions beyond the subject itself. For example, in Antoine Dominique Sauveur Aubert (born 1817), the Artist’s Uncle, the harsh black outline of the figure’s form and equally harsh black strokes defining his features create a sense of repressed, violent fury. This technique, which reflected the psyche of the artist as well as the subject, opened the door for Expressionism.

Cezanne’s analytical approach, whereby he identified everything he saw with its primary geometric form, and the way he played with linear perspective and three-dimensional space — flattening objects in order to focus on their surfaces and viewing them from different angles — laid the foundation for 20th-century Cubism.

This flattening of shapes — and the use of colour to define form — also inspired the Fauvists, who favoured a new type of space defined by planes of colour.

Cezanne’s work became the bridge between 19th-century Impressionism and 20th-century Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism and, later, Abstract Expressionism.

Cezanne didn’t have much mainstream success until the final years of his life, but Ambroise Vollard — an important dealer and patron of avant-garde artists in Paris — was an early supporter. He was instrumental in raising Cezanne’s profile from unknown artist to highly sought-after painter.

Cezanne’s main admirers and collectors were fellow artists. Claude Monet first encountered Cezanne’s work in 1863 and made no effort to hide his unfettered admiration, calling him ‘the master of us all’. His personal art collection featured more works by Cezanne than by any other artist — 15 in total, with three hanging in his bedroom. The other Impressionists — Gustave Caillebotte, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro — all collected his work, too. Paul Gauguin even used to take one of his favourite Cezanne paintings to a nearby restaurant to show it off.

This admiration was equally strong among the next generation of artists, including Picasso and Matisse. Picasso went so far as to buy the land that contained Cezanne’s most important motif, Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Many critics considered still-life paintings to be less imaginative than portraits and landscapes, but Cezanne undermined that assumption. The genre gave him the time and space fully to develop his slow-moving, methodical technique, which was part of a larger, lifelong project to capture empirical truth in painting. He once said, ‘Painting from nature is not copying the object. It is realising one’s sensations.’

As a result, his still lifes feel simultaneously ‘alive’ and ambiguous. An expert at conveying the sculptural weight and volume of everyday objects by layering tiny brushstrokes in complementary colours, he would also constantly rearrange these objects, capturing them from multiple viewpoints.

The tablecloths in his paintings seem to rise up to meet the viewer and display the fruits upon them without any visible means of support. It often looks as if his apples, oranges and lemons could roll off the table, which is angled upwards to offer a better view. Multiple perspectives are conjoined in one image, and it is not clear where the table begins or ends. These still lifes — an important prelude to Cubism — were at once tangible and perplexing.

Cezanne was deeply attached to his native town of Aix-en-Provence. He spent his time between Paris and Aix, and moved back to the south after 1886. There, he painted landscapes firmly grounded in the details of local history and geology, such as the Bibémus quarry, the Château Noir and Mont Sainte-Victoire, together with images of bathers, card players and other figures.

Mont Sainte-Victoire was his favourite subject. He produced more than 80 paintings of the mountain, and these iconic works are especially notable for their proto-Cubist forms. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, ‘Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.’

Cezanne was still painting the countryside around Aix at the time of his death in 1906.

A number of retrospectives following Cezanne’s death played a key part in bringing his achievements to the public’s attention and inspiring the next waves of the avant-garde. Most important of these was at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1907. Picasso, Georges Braque and Matisse were among those who crowded in to admire the artist’s works.

Since then, Cezanne has featured in the collections of the world’s most prominent institutions. New York’s Museum of Modern Art houses an impressive collection of his still lifes, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris spans the full breadth of his career, and the Courtauld Gallery in London has a world-renowned collection of his landscapes. The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia has the largest holding of Cezanne paintings, numbering 69 works.

Some of the highest prices for the artist are commanded by his mature works from the 1880s onwards, such as Bouilloire et fruits (1888-90), which sold for $59,295,000 in 2019, and L’Estaque aux toits rouges (1883-85), which achieved $55,320,000 in 2021 — both at Christie’s in New York.

In 2022, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1888-90) sold for $137,790,000 at Christie’s as part of Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection, which remains a record price for the artist at auction.

Avant-Garde(s) including Thinking Italian and Moderne(s), une collection particulière européenne both take place on 23 October at Christie’s in Paris, with viewing from 17 October

Related artists: Paul Cezanne