Cezanne, Paul

(1839-1906)

Cezanne, Paul (1839-1906) Probably the greatest painter of the last 100 years,
Cezanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a wealthy banker and tradesman.
In 1861, after abandoning the study of law, he went to Paris, where he met
Pissarro, and from 1862 Cezanne devoted himself to painting. In the 1860s his
ardent Southern temperament expressed itself in a series of more or less erotic
and melodramatic pictures, which were not received with enthusiasm. While
closely associated with Pissarro, Cezanne began to paint landscapes in an
Impressionist technique. One of his pictures incurred the greatest public
displeasure. It was the most extraordinary of all the erotic fantasies, the
Modern Olympia. This painting represents a fat squatting female being disrobed
by a black woman while a man (probably Cezanne himself) watches with interest.
In the midst of the chaste Impressionist landscapes the effect must have been
startling, particularly as these early pictures are painted with a palette
knife. During the 1870s Cezanne digested the theories of color and light that
the Impressionists were then developing. He gradually calmed his exuberant
romantic temperament, and from about 1900 his genius was widely recognized. In
the last years of his life he returned to some of his favorite early themes in
which his lyricism and use of space and color became evident. Cezanne is
thought to be the innovating source of the movements in 20th-century art.

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