Become an Instant Expert on Cezanne

Paul Cezanne – the father of modern art – is the focus of Tate Modern’s major autumn exhibition. Our expert, artist and art historian Michael Howard, explores Cezanne’s story, revealing how he achieved the results he did, and the ways other artists perceived him 

Cezanne’s Château Noir, 1900–4

‘It’s not what an artist does that counts, but what he is… What forces our interest is Cezanne’s anxiety – that’s Cezanne’s lesson...’

Picasso

Self-Portrait Against a Pink Background, 1875

1. STARTING OUT...

Ignored for so many years, by the time of his death in 1906, Paul Cezanne was hailed by his fellow artists as a prophet of modern art. Matisse referred to him as ‘the father of us all’ and for Picasso he was ‘my one and only master’. A difficult, irascible man, Cezanne produced out of a private obsession an art that has not only changed the way we look at the world, but one that has brought joy to millions. 

Cezanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839. His father, a wealthy banker, never understood his son’s vocation. The artist grew up running wild, swimming in local rivers and writing poetry, much of it in Latin. His constant companion was the future novelist and critic Émile Zola.

In 1861 Cezanne followed his friend to Paris, determined to become a painter. Through Zola he met with a group of young radical artists who soon become known as the Impressionists. Their focus was to create an independent art that would capture the éclat of modern life. 

Cezanne’s early work was wild, violent and erotic, full of dramatic contrasts of light and dark, and very much in the spirit of Zola’s early novels. He adopted the persona of a man of the soil – the absolute antithesis of a sophisticated Parisian – and on meeting with the urbane Manet he said by way of introduction: ‘I won’t offer you my hand, Monsieur Manet, I haven’t washed for a week.’

Still Life with Fruit Dish, 1879-80

2. ASTONISHING APPLES...

Through the influence of Camille Pissarro, Cezanne learnt to channel his passionate energies into a disciplined engagement with the colour, light and structure of the world around him. 

Each of his paintings was the product of a prolonged meditation; each touch of paint a response to a singular moment of vision. Those touches built into a sequence of deeply felt moments, each a profound response to the thing experienced: his ‘petits sensations’. 

Cezanne rejected all the time-honoured conventions of painting in order to find an equivalent, in paint, for the infinite majesty of the world, be it when painting an apple, the countryside around Paris or his own face. Uneasy with the apparently ephemeral qualities of modern life that so captivated Monet and Renoir, Cezanne was determined to create out of Impressionism ‘something more solid and durable, like the art of the museums’. And he did this with the most humble of subject matter: ‘With an apple I will astonish Paris,’ he once said.

It was this aspect of his work that so captivated DH Lawrence; in his essay on the artist the writer wrote: ‘Cezanne's apples are a real attempt to let the apple exist in its own separate entity, without transfusing it with personal emotion. Cezanne's great effort was, as it were, to shove the apple away from him, and let it live of itself.’

This painting, above, was purchased by Gauguin, who believed that it held within its painted surface the ‘secret of modern art’.

The François Zola Dam (Mountains in Provence), 1877–8

3. PROVENÇAL IDYLL

The Impressionist experiment of holding group exhibitions away from the Salon – the official exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris – had failed. Cezanne turned his back on Paris and returned to the town of his birth. 

He was overwhelmed by the brilliant light and colour of Provence and realised what would be his life’s work: to find the exact means to ‘realise his sensations’ in front of the landscape. He wanted to produce work as strong and as unified as that he saw – and felt – before him: the ineffable blue of the Provençal sky, the rich terracotta reds of the earth and buildings, the innumerable tones of green, and the brilliancy of the multicoloured shadows seen, not as dark tones, but as a sequence of violet and lilac hues. 

Famously, Cezanne once talked of his ambition to ‘re-do Poussin after Nature’ referencing his reverence for the great masters of the past. Here, in the painting above, he has reconciled the clarity of vision we associate with Pissarro with the swirling rhythms of Delacroix and the majestic architectural harmonies of Poussin. The colours and shapes echo and balance each other to create a dynamic harmony parallel with that he recognised in the rhythms and structures of the world around him. 

Gauguin owned this painting, too, and wrote that 'the path winding across the broken ground through the young trees reminded [him] of the lonely path along which Christ wandered in sombre thought towards the Mount of Olives’. Cezanne, however, would have been well aware that in setting down the two brilliant slabs of blue, he was painting the reservoir designed by Émile Zola’s father.

Portrait of the Artist's Son, 1881–2 

4. AN INTIMATE PAINTING

Cezanne was not the kind of artist who would seek out portrait commissions. 

Instead he treated his sitters – family, friends or locals – with the same respect and scrutiny that he gave his painting of a landscape, still life or nude. 

He was a truly democratic artist in that sense – like Walt Whitman exulting in the quiet beauty of the world. The painting above shows his 13-year-old son Paul, who was born to Marie-Hortense Fiquet, Cezanne’s future wife, in 1872.  

Cezanne’s exquisite pictorial judgement is evident here; the calm inner life of the sitter and the magisterial balancing of form, touch, colour and tone. His canvases were habitually painted on a warm cream ground. He would establish the composition with a delicate, thin blue line that was then modified, as each exquisitely judged touch of paint played its part to build up a tapestry-like surface. 

The final work is the result of constant adjustments of colour, tone and contour as Cezanne’s eyes chart the forms of his son’s head and shoulders. This is most evident in the lowering of the left shoulder and the balancing presence of the dusky pink. The composition as a whole is a subtle balancing of arcs and colours (essentially blue and dusky pink), which endow the work with a gravitas and humanity that we more readily associate with Piero della Francesca and early Picasso.

Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902–6

5. FROM HERMIT TO HERO

Cezanne's work was virtually unknown in Paris until 1895, when the visionary dealer Ambroise Vollard organised a comprehensive exhibition of his paintings in the capital. 

Cezanne, the mysterious ‘hermit of Aix’, was now considered a major force within the advanced artistic circles of the time. Artists and writers visited him to capture his words of wisdom – words that, along with his paintings and drawings, have become the foundation stones of so much 20th-century art. 

In 1901 Cezanne had a studio built just a few miles north of Aix. From there he could travel more easily than before into the surrounding countryside and gain magnificent views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, which dominates the horizon to the west of the town. 

His ambition and his anxieties never wavered: ‘I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses,’ he wrote to his son in September 1906. ‘I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature.’ In the same month he wrote to the artist Émile Bernard asking: ‘Will I reach the goal I’ve sought so much and so long pursued?… I’m working from nature as always, and I think I’m making some slow progress.’

Cezanne’s paintings are unfinished in the conventional sense of the word, but in a more exact sense they are complete. He has caught, in paint, the vibrancy, energy and dynamic power of the world as it unfolds before him: the clouds, mountain, dwellings and landscape all partake of the same barely contained cosmic energy.

6. SEEKING MEANING

As he grew older Cezanne became more and more determined to match the achievements of the great artists of the past that he loved so much. 

Central to this concern was his prolonged engagement with three large canvases of female nudes set within an Arcadian landscape. Perhaps this was his way of revisiting the happy days he had spent with Zola swimming in the waters around Aix. None of these paintings, the result of many years' labour, have been brought to a final conclusion – instead they are records of an ongoing creative dialogue between the artist, his chosen subject and his means of representation. 

Mysterious when first seen, they have retained their fascination and their resistance to any final interpretation. The American artist Ron Kitaj put it succinctly when asked why Cezanne’s paintings seem ‘unformed’; he replied, because ‘life is not composed.’

Cezanne died of pneumonia on 22 October 1906 following a severe chill caught while painting in the hills above Aix. A retrospective of his work was held in Paris the following year. It created a sensation – and modern art was born. 

Since then his paintings have obsessed, troubled and inspired so many artists, from Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Morandi and others of that generation to more recent masters such as Jasper Johns, Philip Guston and Bridget Riley. So many words have been written trying to explain these works that perhaps it is better to allow them to keep their mystery; like all great art their power lies precisely in their ability to escape the web of words that can, at times, diminish their special magic.

• Cezanne: the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition by Achim Borchardt-Hume, et al, from the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Gallery, 2022
• If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present by TJ Clark (Thames & Hudson, 2022)
• Cezanne: A Life by Alex Danchev (Pantheon, 2012)
• Cezanne by Michael Howard (Park Lane, 1990)
• Cezanne by Himself by Richard Kendall (MacDonald Orbis, 1988)
• Cezanne by DH Lawrence, 1929
• Letters on Cezanne [1907] by Rainer Maria Rilke (Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1988)
• Interpreting Cezanne by Paul Smith (Tate Publishing, 1996)

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