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Paul Cezanne
Paul Cezanne is a French painter whose works formed the basis for the transition to a new, completely different world of art of the 20th century.
Cezanne laid a bridge between impressionism of the late 19th century and a new art direction of the early 20th century - Cubism.
Paul Cezanne was born on January 19, 1839 in Aix en Provence, he was the eldest son, besides him there were two other children in the family.
Paul was baptized on February 22 in the church of Saint Madeleine, his parents were married only in January 1844.
It is known that the ancestors of Cezanne in the XVII century emigrated to the south of France from the small town of Cesana Turinese in the Italian Alps.
For the next two hundred years, the family achieved nothing outstanding.
There were shoemakers, hairdressers, tailors in it, but no one rose higher.
The artist's father, Louis Auguste Cezanne, went to Paris to study the hat craft.
Returning to Aix after several years of apprenticeship, he invested his savings in the wholesale and retail trade of hats, succeeded in this and eventually began to lend money to manufacturers of hat felt.
He soon became the most successful moneylender and a major banker in Aix.
The artist's mother, Anne Elizabeth Honorine Aubert, is the daughter of a wood turner from Marseille.
In 1852, Cezanne studied at the Bourbon College, a gymnasium rich in humanistic traditions in Aix en Provence (now the Lycée Mignet), where he became friends with Emile Zola, whose father created the project and built the canal and dam in Aix, and Jean Baptiste Bayle.
Three young friends, “inseparable", as they were called in the gymnasium, in their free time go on long walks around the neighborhood, hunt, fish, swim and swim in the small river Ark.
They argue endlessly about art, read Homer and Virgil together, admire the romantics Victor Hugo and Alfred Musset.
They practice poetry with obvious pleasure.
Cezanne, an excellent student, with an undoubted penchant for ancient languages, often composes poems in Latin.
He received many awards in mathematics, Latin and Greek.
From an early age, Cezanne was drawn to art, but at first glance, he did not have any pronounced talents.
The carefree time for the three friends suddenly ended when, in February 1858, Zola left Aix for Paris.
Zola, who painfully perceives the absence of a friend, persuades Cezanne to come to him in Paris to choose the path of a painter there.
Cezanne's father sees his only son as the successor of his banking business in the future.
Following the desire of his father, Cezanne, after graduating from high school, first enters the law faculty of the University in Aix.
Paul spends two years at the university studying his unloved law, but every free minute he draws or composes poetry.
Since 1859, Cezanne began to attend evening drawing courses from nature at the Municipal Drawing School, which was located in the Aix Art Museum, the Granet Museum, where he again met his former Bourbon college comrades Achille Amperer, Philippe Solari and Numa Costa.
He receives a prize for pictorial sketches of figures.
More and more, Paul neglects the study of law and gives himself up to painting, often copying in the Granet museum.
But, as before, his desire to go to Paris meets the resistance of his father.
In 1859, Cezanne's father purchased the former summer residence of the governor of Provence (the estate of Madame de Buffan), and Paul's life there is becoming more and more unbearable.
He is increasingly moving away from the family, and the father finally gives up his strict ban and allows his son to leave the Ex.
In April 1861, Cezanne goes to Paris, where Zola is already impatiently waiting for him.
However, the high hopes that Cezanne had for Paris are not justified, although he often visits the Louvre and copies the works of Titian, Rubens and Michelangelo there.
"The Louvre," Cezanne wrote later,”is the book from which we learn to read."
Paul meets with Zola and regularly studies at the Suis Academy.
At Suis, he meets Camille Pissaro, who is nine years older than him, as well as Armand Guillaumin, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir.
Nevertheless, Paul feels uncomfortable in Paris and soon he begins to think about leaving.
Zola, struck by the depressed state of Cezanne, decides on a trick and offers him to paint his portrait.
Cezanne agrees, but is so dejected by the result that he destroys the painting.
Having been refused admission to the School of Fine Arts, deeply shocked, in September he returned to Aix again and entered his father's bank, at the same time he again attended the drawing school in Aix.
"I thought," Cezanne wrote to a friend, " that by leaving Aix, I would get rid of the boredom that haunted me.
In fact, I only changed my desire, and the boredom remained with me”"
Paul Cezanne, 1861.
Photo In 1862, Cezanne built a workshop in Ms. de Buffan, left his father's bank and a career as a lawyer, and in November went back to Paris.
Paul receives a monthly allowance of 100 francs from his father.
Immediately after his arrival, he returned to the Academy of Suis and, at the insistence of his father, made an attempt to enter the Ecole de Bozard.
The few works submitted by Cezanne to the competition, including a portrait of his father and a self portrait, forced the examiners to fairly assess his painting as "violent".
He was refused admission, but this did not discourage the young artist.
By this time, he had lost his inclination and interest in academic painting and continued his studies at the Suis Academy, where he regularly worked until 1864.
The early stage of creativity did not bring the young artist either satisfaction or recognition.
Cezanne, obeying a violent imagination, began to paint pictures, the subjects of which were passion, sensuality, death.
Trying to achieve fame, Cezanne every year presented paintings to the Salon exhibition of Modern Art, which was under the patronage of the French Academy of Fine Arts, which was the main arbiter of public taste.
And every year, without exception, all of Cezanne's works were rejected.
When selecting the submitted paintings, the Academy members were guided by strict criteria: any originality, any innovations and deviations from the academic manner were strictly rejected.
Nevertheless, the cherished goal of every artist remained the desire to be exhibited in the Salon, since this was the only opportunity to appear before the public, become famous and sell paintings.
But when in 1863 too many paintings were not allowed into the Salon and this caused mass protests from artists, Napoleon III agreed to arrange a parallel exhibition of rejected works.
This "Salon of the Rejected" was supposed to give the audience an opportunity to judge for themselves about the rejected works.
In 1863, Cezanne exhibited together with Manet, Pissaro,Yonkind, Guillaumin, Whistler, Fantin Latour in the Salon des les Miserables.
He often copies Delacroix's paintings in the Louvre.
The public, not used to any extent to independent judgments about contemporary art, perceived the exhibition in the "Salon of the Outcasts" as an occasion for ridicule and mockery.
Ridiculed by critics and despised by the public, Cezanne stifled his frustration with hard work.
Gradually, the unique individual style began to be developed, which will be so clearly manifested in the great landscapes and still lifes of his mature time.
At the first stage of creativity, which lasted until the early 1870s, Cezanne sought to express his intense inner experiences.
he set himself tasks not only formal, but also substantive, and it was not easy to solve them.
While his contemporaries Pissaro or Monet painted idyllic views of the Parisian surroundings, he created erotic and often scary canvases that confused and disturbed his friends.
Cezanne's picturesque creations are full of flaws: the figures are clumsy and disproportionate, the space is depicted unreliably.
There is too much based on the narrative and too little connection with the form.
When the Franco Prussian war broke out in the summer of 1870, Cezanne moved from Aix to the fishing village of Estac near Marseille and avoided the threatened conscription.
For a year he has been living with Orthanz Fike (she is eleven years younger than him), a pamphleteer, whom he met in Paris, where she worked as a model.
However, this connection does not bring him the desired release from loneliness.
For eight years, Cezanne has kept this relationship a secret from his father, fearing a reduction in monthly maintenance.
It was only in 1886 that he legalized his relationship with Ortanz and married her.
After the end of the war, Cezanne and Ortanz returned to Paris, where their son Paul was born in January 1872.
Cezanne moves with his family to Auvers sur Oise, where he works together with Pissaro.
Cezanne hopes to get from Pissaro what he lacks for further development - a picturesque craft, a picturesque technique.
"Pissaro was like a father to me... like a good God," Cezanne will say later about his older friend and mentor, who firmly believed in Cezanne's unusual talent.
First, Pissaro made him remove dark colors from the palette.
He shows him how to build a picture on the basis of chiaroscuro contrasts, he encourages him first of all to observe nature conscientiously and only transfer these observations to the canvas.
Without their own interpretation, without bringing fantasy.
A painter should be nothing more than an attentive and honest viewer.
In 1873, Cezanne met Dr. Gachet, in whose house he painted pictures.
He meets the paint dealer Julien Tanguy.
Meets at Tanga with Van Gogh.
Tangi is a happy case for C ezanna: he acquires many of his paintings, freeing him from caring about the materials for painting.
In 1874, the first Impressionist exhibition was held by the photographer Nadar, where Cezanne's paintings (The Hanged Man's House in Auvers, the Landscape near Auvers, Modern Olympia) cause desperate disputes.
Paul spends the summer in Aix, since September again in Paris.
In 1875, Cezanne was again rejected by the Salon.
Renoir introduces him to the customs inspector and art lover Victor Choquet, who becomes one of the most devoted collectors of his paintings.
In 1878, 1879, 1885 again rejected by the Salon, Cezanne decides not to send anything there anymore.
"Cezanne is an artist who has been attacked and treated most fiercely by the press and the public for fifteen years.
There is no such offensive epithet that would not be attached to his name; deafening laughter is the only reward that has so far fallen to the share of his works…
But I confess that I do not know a painter who would give less reason for fun than Cezanne.”
Thus, during the third Impressionist exhibition in May 1877, Georges Riviere, an art critic and friend of Renoir, defended the painter.
Since the beginning of the 80s, Cezanne has increasingly used geometric shapes in his works and emphasized the meaning of harmony.
The image of unstable fleeting phenomena of nature, which the Impressionists did with such skill, was hindered by the materially constructive basis of perception of the world, characteristic of Cezanne.
Therefore, during this period, when he perfectly mastered the transmission of the light air medium, the artist strengthens the structural and objective elements of his compositions.
In 1886, Emile Zola published the novel “Creativity " about an unsuccessful artist.
In this book, Zola clearly endowed the main character, the artist Claude Lantier, with the features of Cezanne, who vainly strives to realize his goal and commits suicide.
The artist's pride was deeply offended and a break occurred between the two friends.
In October 1886, Cezanne's father died, leaving his son a significant fortune.
In the period of 1888-1899, Cezanne created a solid, steadily mobile image of nature.
Flexible and plastic strokes of the master simultaneously create a form and outline the space, they seem to cling to each other, forming a single, inseparable structure of the canvas.
Human figures do not oppose the landscape background, they are just like the surrounding vegetation, permeated with light and air.
At the turn of the 1880-1890 years, Cezanne is increasingly interested in the so called figure genres.
In 1890, Cezanne exhibited three paintings at the Brussels exhibition "Group of Twenty".
In the summer, he spends five months with his family in Switzerland.
In the autumn, he returns to Aix.
He gets diabetes.
The 1900s were marked by the appearance of the so called spontaneous painting in his work: the composition of the picture is not thought out in advance, it appears as if by itself in the process of work.
The artist's courageously harsh palette begins to acquire lyrical shades.
Fame comes to Cezanne at the end of his life.
A pilgrimage of artists, collectors and critics begins in Aix.
The influence of his art affected the work of Paul Gauguin and the artists of the Nabi group, the Fauvists and Cubists, the Russian "Cezannists" from the Jack of Diamonds.
Cezanne was sometimes considered as an "artist for artists” and a representative of "pure painting", sometimes, on the contrary, as the creator of a kind of philosophical concept of the world and art.
In 1897, Cezanne spends most of his time in Aix, and in October the artist's mother dies.
The National Gallery in Berlin buys a Cezanne painting, the first work of the artist gets into the museum.
In 1902, Zola died, and in 1903, Pissaro died.
When the Zola collection is sold at auction, the prices for Cezanne paintings reach an average of 1,500 francs.
In 1906, Cezanne took part in the Autumn Salon.
On October 15, 1906, while working in the open air, Cezanne was caught by a strong thunderstorm, and for a long time he was moking in the cold rain until a cart picked him up and brought him home completely exhausted.
Cezanne died on October 22, 1906 in the early morning from pneumonia.
The artist is buried in Aix at the Saint Pierre cemetery.
“My age and my health will not allow me to fulfill the dream that I have been striving for all my life.
But I will always be grateful to those intelligent art lovers who, despite my hesitation, understood what I was trying to achieve in order to update my art.
I believe that you do not replace the past with your art, but only add a new link to it.”
Paul Cezanne
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