Cezanne’s art fascinates me because of its duality, both rooted in the Impressionist/Post-Impressionist tradition and straining toward what would become Cubism and a whole new kind of art. Not to mention that, by all accounts, Cezanne was a temperamental and frustrating man, prone to angry outbursts and deep, black depressions, who clearly suffered trying to create the absolute best art that he could. A story shared on the WebMuseum site is illustrative:
Cézanne’s pictures of people can be regarded as still lifes, because he demanded that his models sit absolutely still. Sitting for him was something of a nightmare. Not only was he foul-tempered, he was an extremely slow painter, probably the reason his subjects always look tired and sombre. Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who arranged Cézanne’s first one-man show a century ago, posed 115 times for a single painting, sitting absolutely still “like an apple” and then Cézanne, dissatisfied, abandoned the picture with only two unpainted spots remaining. He told Vollard that with luck he would find the correct color and could finish the painting. “The prospect of this made me tremble,” noted Vollard in his biography of the painter. In the artist’s eye, there was no difference between a human sitter and a bowl of fruit, except that the reflection value and the palette were different. In the end, both his subjects and his fruit wilted.
As trying as the sittings might have been for the subjects, Cezanne created some incredible portraits, such as my favorite:
"Portrait of Victor Chocquet"
But the works I enjoy most are the ones where Cezanne’s titanic impact on future artists is apparent. These pieces make me think that part of Cezanne’s famous moods and frustration must have come from knowing that he was an artist out of time, limited by the environment, desperately seeking an artistic language that didn’t exist yet. I’m fascinated by these revolutionary characters… Giordano Bruno comes to mind, born 50 years before the discovery of the mathematics that would illuminate his thinking.
For example, consider the canonical example:
"Still Life with Peppermint Bottle"
Here is a painting that visibly struggles to emerge from the Impressionist tradition. It retains the heavy, bold brush strokes and solid lines and much of the lack of blending of color but presented with a (lack of) perspective that clearly presages Picasso. There’s a feeling of geometrical precision in the echoing curves that can be found everywhere in the “center” of the composition, but at the same time the glass flask in the center is bulbous, the whole painting leans to one side as if there is a gravitational force working against the traditional symmetry.
Similarly examine the change in his landscape work, where his early work is clearly heavily Impressionist:
"The Pool"
To his final years when he has breached the abstract sphere, creating work that would easily have fit into an exhibition 50 years later as a “contemporary” piece:
"Bend in Forest Road"
The WebMuseum’s Cezanne section has many great paintings and a good bit of interesting biographical information of a painter that many know by name but too many haven’t looked at very closely…
