Movies

Six reasons why the artist Paul Cézanne is considered “the greatest of us all” | Paul Cézanne

September 30, 2022

Paul Cézanne, born in 1839, who painted quietly until his death in 1906, is the incomparable modern artist of the modern artist, called the “greatest of us all” by Claude Monet. The most intimate proof of this is the number of his successors who felt the need to settle on his land – literally. When Picasso announces to his dealer Ambroise Vollard that he has just bought “the mountain of Cézanne”, Vollard thinks that it is one of his canvases of the Sainte-Victoire mountain. In fact, Picasso had purchased an estate on his hillsides in the south of France.

Self-portrait of Paul Cézanne. Dated from the 19th century. — Self-portrait of Paul Cézanne. Photography: Universal History Archive/Universal Pictures Group/Getty

From now on, the abstract painter Sean Scully and his family “actually live near the Sainte-Victoire mountain, in Aix-en-Provence”. For Scully, the mountain “stands like a silent sentinel that we see every day. It is monumental but extremely delicate in the way it absorbs the light of time and the seasons. »

Monumental, yet extremely delicate – the same could be said of Cézanne’s commanding presence in the history of modern art. Scully is a 21st century artist who paints in the tradition of Cézanne who found the abstract in nature, with long, furrowed strokes reminiscent of plowed fields.

But he is by no means the only artist still eyeing Cézanne, 80 of whose paintings are on display this week in a major exhibition at Tate Modern. In the catalog, an array of contemporary artists, from Turner winner Lubaina Himid to Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, share their admiration. Cézanne defined modern art before anyone knew it existed, inspiring Picasso, Georges Braque, Matisse and Jasper Johns (a loanee from the exhibition).

Here are the six reasons why Cézanne is so admired:

1

For 500 years, Western artists imagined the world stretching out in perspective, until Cézanne turned his table upside down and shoved it in your face. His paintings are made of parallel planes of color, which may look like a traditional perspective “view” from afar, but turn out to be a flat arrangement up close. It was a bombshell in the minds of Picasso and Braque who, from around 1908, experimented with the implosion of Cézanne’s space to produce Cubism. In a cubist painting, Cézanne’s planes are still crashed to show you that reality is not an image at all, it is a chaos to which we claim to give meaning.

Still Life with Fruit Platter, 1879-80. Photography: www.scalarchives.com

2

Cézanne changed the relationship of art with the physical world. Before painting his apples, the artists tried to capture a general vision of reality in which each object is part of a bigger picture. But Cézanne lingers like a fetishist on individual things that he grasps with a mental fist. This transforms the older genre of still life into something much more atomized and brutal. It led, a few years after his death, Marcel Duchamp to invent the “ready-made”, affirming that an artist does not have to paint or sculpt but can simply “choose” something, just as Cézanne chose his fruits. .

3

Picasso revolutionized art by turning faces into masks – but he got this idea from Cézanne whose Bathers have faces seemingly carved out of wood. Cézanne saw them as masks, perhaps because he was socially distanced: even his wife appears encased in a porcelain Japanese mask in his portraits. His self-portraits can also be seen from the outside; he was a stranger to himself. This feeling of alienation is perhaps his greatest modern idea. He helped shape not only art, but also 20th century literature and philosophy in its sense of the isolated, perilous and unstable self.

‘He turned faces into masks’: Bathers c.1894-1905. Photography: Tate

4

Cézanne was the godfather of modernism from the 1910s to the 1950s, but when it gave way to postmodernism, it seemed to become a more distant ancestor. Yet it’s amazing how his fractured view of reality anticipated a television and digital age of pixelated images, bits of information, flickering screens. Digital artist Cory Arcangel and pop artist Richard Hamilton are among those who have applied a Cézanne-like vision to today’s media. But our entire fragmented infosphere is already there in Cézanne’s 1902-6 painting of Mont Saint-Victoire in the Philadelphia Museum of Art with its crushed bits of information pulsing in an electric sky as dense and complex as our lives.

5

Cézanne is the artist’s artist, in the same way that Einstein, who published the special theory of relativity while Cézanne was still painting in 1905, is the physicist’s physicist: Cézanne took art into a relativistic cosmos of uncertainty by re-painting Mount Sainte-Victoire and once again seeing it in a radically different way, because even something as solid as a mountain is impossible to fully or ultimately know. Monet, who survived him, imitated him in his Water Lilies.

Seated Man by Paul Cézanne, 1905-06 — Seated Man by Cézanne, 1905-06. Photography: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

6

Cézanne challenges writers to find words for his sheer quiddity. He went to school in Aix with the novelist Zola, who would play an unsuccessful – and unstable – young Cézanne in The Masterpiece. When the real Cézanne finally achieved fame, he was described as the god of modern art by Roger Fry, Robert Hughes, the poet Rilke and many others – all rising to the impossible and irresistible challenge of putting those apples in words. Art historian TJ Clark says in his new book If Those Apples Should Fall that after so many attempts, Cézanne “can no longer be written down” – but that’s exactly what he does in a book that shows how this great artist still stretches the spirits.