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At the turn of the century, Cézanne began to be taken more and more seriously by the avant-garde: Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Vlaminck, Derain, and others, among them young Russian painters whose new art owed much to the master from Provence. However, many of Cézanne’s contemporaries did not realize his true greatness.

The Four Seasons

1859–1860

Oil on canvas, 314 × 104 cm each

Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

When Paul Cézanne died in October 1906 in Aix-en-Provence, the Paris newspapers reacted by publishing a handful of rather equivocal obituaries. “Imperfect talent,” “crude painting,” “an artist that never was,” “incapable of anything but sketches,” owing to “a congenital sight defect” – such were the epithets showered on the great artist during his lifetime and repeated at his graveside.

Two Women and Child in an Interior

1860

Oil on canvas, 91 × 72 cm

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

This was not merely due to a lack of understanding on the part of individual artists and critics, but above all to an objective factor – the complexity of his art, his specific artistic system which he developed throughout his career and did not embody in toto in any single one of his works.

Uncle Dominic as a Monk

1865

Oil on canvas, 65.1 × 54.6 cm

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Cézanne was perhaps the most complex artist of the nineteenth century. “One cannot help feeling something akin to awe in the face of Cézanne’s greatness,” wrote Lionello Venturi. “You seem to be entering an unfamiliar world – rich and austere with peaks so high that they seem inaccessible.”

Man in a Cotton Hat

1865

Oil on canvas, 79.7 × 64.1 cm

Museum of Modern Art, New York

It is not in fact an easy thing to attain those heights. Today Cézanne’s art unfolds before us with all the consistency of a logical development, the first stages of which already contain the seeds of the final fruit. But to a person who could see only separate fragments of the whole, much of Cézanne’s œuvre must naturally have seemed strange and incomprehensible.

Bread and Eggs

1865

Oil on canvas, 59 × 76 cm

Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati

Most people were struck by the odd diversity of styles and the differing stages of completion of his paintings. In some paintings, one saw a fury of emotion, which bursts through in vigorous, tumultuous forms and in brutally powerful volumes apparently sculpted in colored clay; in others, there was rational, carefully conceived composition and an incredible variety of color modulations.

The Strove in the Studio

1865–1868

Oil on canvas, 42 × 30 cm

Private Collection, London

Some works resembled rough sketches in which a few transparent brushstrokes produced a sense of depth, while in others, powerfully modeled figures entered into complex, interdependent spatial relationships – what the Russian artist Alexei Nuremberg has aptly called “the tying together of space.”

Portrait of the Artist’s Father

1866–1867

Oil on canvas, 119.3 × 198.5 cm

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Cézanne himself, with his constant laments about the impossibility of conveying his own sensations, prompted critics to speak of the fragmentary character of his work. He saw each of his paintings as nothing but an incomplete part of the whole.

The Abduction

1867

Oil on canvas, 93.5 × 117 cm

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Often, after dozens of interminable sessions, Cézanne would abandon the picture he had started, hoping to return to it later. In each succeeding work he would try to overcome the imperfection of the previous one, to make it more finished than before: “I am long on hair and beard but short on talent.”

The Black Scipion

c. 1867

Oil on canvas, 107 × 83 cm

Museu de Arte, São Paolo

Exactly a month before his death, Cézanne wrote to Émile Bernard: “Shall I attain the aim so ardently desired and so long pursued? I want to, but as long as the goal is not reached, I shall feel a vague malaise until I reach the haven, that is, until I achieve a greater perfection than before, and thus prove the tightness of my theories.”

The Temptation of Saint Anthony

1867–1870

Oil on canvas, 57 × 76 cm

E. G. Bührle Foundation, Zurich

Such thoughts, shot through with bitterness, are a tragic theme recurring in Cézanne’s correspondence and conversations with his friends. They are the tragedy of his whole life – a tragedy of constant doubting, dissatisfaction, and lack of confidence in his own ability.

Murder

1867–1870

Oil on canvas, 65.4 × 81.2 cm

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

But here, too, was the mainspring of his art, which developed as a tree grows or a rock forms – by the slow accumulation of more and more new layers on a given foundation. Often Cézanne would take a knife and scrape off all he had managed to paint during a day of hard work, or in a fit of exasperation throw it out of the window.

Girl at the Piano (Overture to “Tannhäuser”)

1868

Oil on canvas, 57.8 × 92.5 cm

Hermitage, St. Petersburg

He was also prone, when moving from one studio to another, to forget to take with him dozens of paintings he considered unfinished. He hoped eventually to render his entire vision of the world in one great, complete work of art, as did the geniuses of classical painting, and having “redone Nature according to Poussin,” to emulate Poussin.

The Madeleine or Sorrow

1868–1869

Oil on canvas, 165 × 125 cm

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

But to a person living at the end of the nineteenth century the surrounding reality seemed far more complex and unstable than to someone living in Poussin’s time. Cézanne devoted many years to the search for such means, hoping eventually to bring them all together.

Green Pot and Tin Kettle

c. 1869

Oil on canvas, 64 × 81 cm

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

His ultimate aim was to paint a masterpiece, and he did create many works that we now consider to be masterpieces. But apart from that, he evolved a new creative method and a new artistic system which he adhered to consistently throughout his life.

Luncheon on the Grass

1869–1870

Private Collection, Paris

In creating this system he contributed to the birth of twentieth-century art. It would be useless to look for the essence and meaning of Cézanne’s new artistic system in his own pronouncements. Cézanne had no use for thoughts on art expressed by any other means except “with brush in hand.”

Portrait of Anthony Valabrègue

1869–1871

Oil on canvas, 60.4 × 50.2 cm

J. P. Getty Museum, Malibu

His pronouncements bear the stamp not so much of theoretical postulates as of practical advice to fellow artists. It is not therefore to the artist’s theoretical statements but to his works that we must look for an explanation of how his creative method gradually came into its own, how the links of the whole chain which today we justly call “Cézanne’s artistic system” were forged.

Pastoral

1870

Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

In April 1861, the 22-year-old Paul Cézanne, son of a wealthy banker in Aix-en-Provence, arrived in Paris. His aim, his passion, his most fervent wish was to devote himself body and soul to art. Behind him was a solid classical education received in the college of Aix, rather modest successes (according to his teachers) at the local school of drawing and, above all, years of rapturous absorption of the unrestrained romanticism of Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Charles Baudelaire, years of youthful dreaming, together with Émile Zola, of the lofty calling of the artist and of their future collaboration in the field of art.