Touring Cezanne's Cultural Roots

A bucolic escape from busier ports of call, Aix-en-Provence in the south of France is known for olive oil, lavender, garlicky foods... and the master painter Paul Cezanne. Cezanne's death 100 years ago will be observed this year with art exhibitions in Washington, D.C., and Provence.

Cezanne had a complicated personality. He was considered a "lunatic" by fellow townspeople and was known as a loner. He hated his family, calling them "the nastiest people in the world." They were unsupportive of his artistic career.

In Paris, Cezanne found a small circle that understood him: the Impressionists. But his hometown gallery -- the Aix Museum-- banned his works for years because it was considered too radical.

Cezanne is renowned for his still lifes of fruit, often painted fresh from a local farmer's market. He arranged them carefully, put coins underneath some fruit to vary their height, and painted their structure and patterns.

Phillip Conisbee, Senior Curator at Washington's National Gallery, said Cezanne's early still lifes were stolid and dull until Pisarro taught him to loosen his brushstrokes in the Impressionist style. "You couldn't imagine biting into one of his apples, yet at the same time they seem to have the quintessence of appleness," said Conisbee.

Four years before he died, Cezanne built a studio on the edge of Aix. It has high ceilings, a window to let in Northern light, and still holds his two easels, paintboxes and palattes. It was in this studio that Cezanne painted his last and most memorable works. Bathers, a common theme in Cezanne's paintings, influenced the way Matisse -- Cezanne's junior by 30 years -- painted. Picasso, born 42 years after Cezanne, was also influenced by Cezanne's naked bathing ladies. He eventually created his own Cubist work of nudes -- angled and outrageous -- but called Cezanne "the father of us all."

The nearby limestone mountain, Mt. Sainte-Victorie, obsessed Cezanne throughout his career and is visible from his studio window. According to Michelle Fressay, director of the Cezanne studio, the artist tried in 80 canvases to capture the mountain, but was never quite satisfied. In 1906, Cezanne was painting near his beloved mountain when a thunderstorm soaked him and he had to be carried home in a laundry cart, unconscious. Diabetic and frail, he died just a few days later at age 67.

Grandson Philippe Cezanne will represent the family's interests during the "Year of Cezanne" in Provence. The area is expecting many visitors, and the town of Aix, which had little use for the artist during his lifetime, hopes for a Cezanne bonanza in this centenary of his death. "I think he would laugh about all that," his grandson says.

I love Cezanne's work. In case there are other Freepers who agree, here's the proper press release from the National Gallery in Washington with the dates of the show. I enjoyed Susan Stamberg's story this morning on NPR.

Cézanne in Provence will be the principal international exhibition marking 2006 as the centenary of the death of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). A key figure in the impressionist and post impressionist movements, he is often seen as the father of modern art. This exhibition, by focusing on the works Cézanne painted in and around his native Aix-en-Provence, will celebrate the landscape and the rich associations it had for him.

Approximately 100 of Cézanne's greatest oil paintings and watercolors will demonstrate his intense, emotional engagement with the countryside of his birthplace, where he painted some of his most compelling landscapes, penetrating portraits of family members, and the monumental Bathers from the National Gallery, London. Works depicting such scenes as Cézanne's family home of Jas de Bouffan, Mont Sainte-Victoire, the Mediterranean coast at L'Estaque, the dramatic quarry at Bibémus, and the Château Noir will come from public and private collections throughout Europe and the United States.

This exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from the DaimlerChrysler Corporation Fund.

The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Schedule:

National Gallery of Art, January 29 - May 7, 2006 Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence, June 9 - September 17, 2006

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/cezanneinfo.shtm

I actually don't like his still lifes nearly as much as his landscapes. There's one of Bibemus Quarry that I would kill for (well, almost...).

When there was a Cezanne retrospective in Philadephia several years ago, I went on my own and felt that it was like a pilgrimmage. Some of his earlier works are really heavy and ugly, showing a great deal of struggle. But the light and space and balance of his later landscapes are transcendent (I think). But many Freepers will disagree.

Portrait of Cezanne's father 1866 (an interesting contrast to a recent post about a portrait of Rembrandt's father being stolen).

Still life with Peppermint Jar, 1890. I actually like this still life, perhaps because it is most like a mountain.

Mt. Ste. Victoire from Bibemus Quarry 1880s.

I actually visited Provence and Aix in 2002. I was able to climb a bit of the mountain, kids in tow, and my husband went further (without the kids). It's a pretty busy town with few signs about Cezanne's studio, etc., so we never found that to visit. I expect the signs will be better this year. I'm tempted to return to see the show, or to plan a trip to D.C. There's something wonderful about his work; but it is really hard to explain.

Cézanne

The man who changed the landscape of art

"If you want to learn to paint," said artist Camille Pissarro, "look at Cézanne." In this centennial year—Cézanne died October 23, 1906, at age 67—two shows focus on different aspects of the career of the gutsy iconoclast who has been called the father of modern art.

"Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne & Pissarro 1865-1885," an exhibition organized by New York City's Museum of Modern Art, is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until January 16. The show, which goes on to the Musée D'Orsay in Paris (February 28 to May 28), highlights the period of Cézanne's immersion in Impressionism, when he often painted side by side with Camille Pissarro. An exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., "Cézanne in Provence" (January 29 through May 7), features more than 100 paintings the artist executed in and around his hometown of Aix-en-Provence in southern France. The exhibition will move to the newly renovated Musée Granet in Aix (June 9 through September 17) as a highlight of a national celebration in France officially marking 2006 as the Year of Cézanne.

"It was by painting his own particular, familiar landscape," says the National Gallery's Philip Conisbee (co-curator of the exhibition with Musée Granet director Denis Coutagne), "that Cézanne changed the way later generations would see the world."

Paul Cézanne wanted to make paint bleed. The old masters, he told the poet Joachim Gasquet, painted warmblooded flesh and made sap run in their trees, and he would too. He wanted to capture "the green odor" of his Provence fields and "the perfume of marble from Saint-Victoire," the mountain that was the subject of so many of his paintings. He was bold, scraping and slapping paint onto his still lifes with a palette knife. "I will astonish Paris with an apple, " he boasted.

In the years when his friends Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir were finally gaining acceptance, Cézanne worked mostly in isolation, ridiculed by critics and mocked by the public, sometimes ripping up his own canvases. He wanted more than the quick impressions of the Impressionists (nature, he wrote to a fellow artist, "is more depth than surface") and devoted himself to studying the natural world. "It's awful for me," he told a young friend, "my eyes stay riveted to the tree trunk, to the clod of earth. It's painful for me to tear them away." He could often be found, according to one contemporary, "on the outskirts of Paris wandering about the hillsides in jackboots. As no one took the least interest in his pictures, he left them in the fields."

Yet by the end of his life, Cézanne had been recognized, at least by some critics, as a true revolutionary who overturned the rules of painting and upended conventional theories of color. "I don't think you can find any artist who compares with Cézanne in the whole history of painting," declared Renoir.

From this months Smithsonian Magazine

Thanks for the ping! I hadn't heard about this exhibit and will schedule a trip once Mr. C. and I look at our calendars.

For others who are thinking about traveling to see the show, The Tabard Inn is the only place to stay in Washington (unless someone else is paying and then of course it's the Hay Adams.) This is an urban, Victorian B&B with slightly fatigued antique furniture, no TV's in the rooms, an amazing restaurant and free breakfast in an ivy covered, walled courtyard, a working fireplace (wood,not gas) in the library AND modest rates. The Phillips collection and the National Gallery on the mall are within walking distance or a short cab ride.

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