Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [88]
Although he began by exhibiting with the Impressionists (after being rejected by the École des Beaux-Arts and the Salon) and was tutored in open-air painting by Pissarro, Cézanne was too much of a loner to join any group. Encouraged to come to Paris from his native Aix-en-Provence by the novelist Zola, a childhood friend, Cézanne always felt alien in the city. Even among the Impressionists he was considered beyond the pale. Manet called him a “farceur” (a joke); Degas thought he was a wild man because of his provincial accent, comical clothes, and unorthodox painting style.
Cézanne, “Mont Sainte-Victoire,” 1902-4, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Unlike Monet’s series of canvases on one subject, Cézanne’s many renditions of this mountain do not vary according to season or time of day.
The public denounced Cézanne’s paintings with a vengeance: coarse, degenerate, incompetent were some of the milder opinions. At the first Impressionist exhibit in 1874, sneering crowds were loudest around Cézanne’s paintings, doubling up with laughter and hooting that his canvas was “one of those weird things evolved by hashish.”
Stung by ridicule, Cézanne retreated to Aix in 1886 and devoted himself tirelessly to his art. Obscure until his first one-man show in 1895, after which he was revered as a “Sage” by the younger generation of artists, Cézanne gained a reputation as an unapproachable hermit, almost an ogre. In the face of pervasive mockery and misunderstanding of his work, he continued what he called his “research” with gloomy intensity. Cézanne described his “one and only goal” as “to render, whatever our power or temperament in the presence of nature may be, the likeness of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our day.”
Cézanne, “Still Life with Apples and Oranges,” 1895-1900, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Cézanne wanted to express inner form, which he perceived as orderly geometric shapes, through outer form.
What made Cézanne’s art so radical in his day and appreciated in ours was his new take on surface appearances. Instead of imitating reality as it appeared to the eye, Cézanne penetrated to its underlying geometry. “Reproduce nature in terms of the cylinder and the sphere and the cone,” he advised in a famous dictum. By this he meant to simplify particular objects into near-abstract forms fundamental to all reality. “The painter possesses an eye and a brain,” Cézanne said. “The two must work together.”
MONT SAINTE-VICTOIRE. In “Mont Sainte-Victoire,” a landscape he painted more than thirty times, Cézanne portrayed the scene like a geodesic pyramid, defining surface appearance through colored planes. To create an illusion of depth, he placed cool colors like blue, which seem to recede, at rear and warm colors like red, which seem to advance, in front.
Cézanne believed that beneath shifting appearances was an essential, unchanging armature. By making this permanent geometry visible, Cézanne hoped “to make of Impressionism,” he said, “something solid and durable, like the art of the museums, to carve out the underlying structure of things.” His innovative technique, applied to favorite themes of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, was to portray visual reality refracted into a mosaic of multiple facets, as though reflected in a diamond.
STILL LIFES. Once nicknamed “Flowers and Fruit,” Cézanne was as systematic in his still lifes as in landscapes. A visitor described how Cézanne set up a still life: “Cézanne arranged the fruit, contrasting the tones one against another, making complementaries vibrate, the greens against the reds, the yellows against the blues, tilting, turning, balancing the fruit as he wanted it to be.... One guessed that it was a feast to the eye for him.” He painted and repainted so compulsively, fruit invariably rotted and had to be replaced by wax models.
Cézanne, “Large Bathers,” 1906,