 The French painter Paul Cézanne , who exhibited
little in his lifetime and pursued his interests increasingly in artistic isolation, is
regarded today as one of the great forerunners of modern painting, both for the way that
he evolved of putting down on canvas exactly what his eye saw in nature and for the
qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass,
and color.
Cézanne was a contemporary of the
impressionists, but he went beyond their interests in the individual brushstroke and the
fall of light onto objects, to create, in his words, ``something more solid and durable,
like the art of the museums.''
Cézanne was born at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France on Jan. 19, 1839. He went to
school in Aix, forming a close friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He also studied
law there from 1859 to 1861, but at the same time he continued attending drawing classes.
Against the implacable resistance of his father, he made up his mind that he wanted to
paint and in 1861 joined Zola in Paris. His father's reluctant consent at that time
brought him financial support and, later, a large inheritance on which he could live
without difficulty. In Paris he met Camille Pissarro and came to know others of the
impressionist group, with whom he would exhibit in 1874 and 1877. Cézanne, however,
remained an outsider to their circle; from 1864 to 1869 he submitted his work to the
official SALON and saw it consistently rejected. His paintings of 1865-70 form what is
usually called his early ``romantic'' period. Extremely personal in character, it deals
with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in harsh, somber colors and extremely heavy
paintwork.
House of the Hanged Man
Thereafter, as Cézanne rejected that kind of approach and worked his way out of the
obsessions underlying it, his art is conveniently divided into three phases. In the early
1870s, through a mutually helpful association with Pissarro, with whom he painted outside
Paris at Auvers, he assimilated the principles of color and lighting of Impressionism and
loosened up his brushwork; yet he retained his own sense of mass and the interaction of
planes, as in (1873; Musee d'Orsay, Paris).
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