Welcome to the deep dive. Today, we're embarking
on a journey into the life and mind of an artist
who, while people routinely call him the most
important painter of the 19th century, yet his
name doesn't always have that immediate sort
of explosive recognition like some of his contemporaries.
We are peeling back the layers on Paul Cezanne.
That's absolutely right. And we're diving into
a stack of sources today that really establish
Paul Cezanne, the French post -impressionist,
living from 1839 to 1906, not just as a great
talent, which he was, obviously. Right. But as
the essential, you could say, foundational architect
of the modern visual world, he really is that
crucial link between the kind of fleeting, light
-obsessed observations of 19th century Impressionism.
Capturing the moment. Exactly. And then the structured,
sometimes fragmented reality that would explode
into 20th century movements like Cubism. He's
the bridge. So our mission. For you listening
is to move beyond maybe just the standard view
of his still lifes and landscapes, you know,
the apples and mountains. Sure. The famous ones.
We've gathered sources covering his life, which
was famously difficult, quite solitary. His unique,
almost scientific, artistic method. And then
this astonishing, really decades delayed triumph
of his legacy. We really want to understand not
just what Cezanne painted, but how his radical
approach fundamentally changed the rules of seeing,
of how we perceive things. And if you need just
one thing, one quote, to really cement his importance,
before we even dive in, let's go straight to
the giants who followed him. Okay. Both Henri
Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Hmm. I mean, the undisputed
titans of early modernism, they both reportedly
called Cezanne the father of us all. Wow. The
father of us all. Yeah. That's not just praise.
That's an admission. It tells you immediately
he's absolutely crucial, not just some historical
footnote. Modern painting, you could argue, starts
right there with him in Aix -en -Provence. So
when you hear that, you know, he wasn't just
another impressionist who kind of stuck around
a bit longer. If he's the father, what was the
revolutionary element? What did he actually change
on the canvas? Well, he introduced entirely new
ways of representing things. He basically rejected
the, let's call it the comfortable visual lie
of academic painting that had dominated for centuries.
Which was based on? Single point perspective.
You know, that fixed artificial window onto the
world. Cezanne deliberately broke that. He started
altering conventional approaches to perspective,
focusing instead on the underlying permanent
structure and importantly, the volume of objects.
He prioritized the formal qualities of art. The
composition, the balance, the weight of forms
over just imitating the surface appearance of
reality. His big goal really was to take the
discoveries about light and color made by the
Impressionists. Right. Their vibrant palettes.
And impose a kind of classical solid structure
onto it. So it wasn't just about capturing the
fleeting color of the apple, but maybe this fear
inside the apple. It's apple -ness. Exactly.
That's a great way to put it. He famously said
he wanted to make impressionism something solid
and lasting like the art in the museums. He wasn't
trying to just grab a single moment in time.
He was digging for the enduring truth of an object's
existence in space. OK, let's unpack some of
the contradictions in his personal life then,
because it starts with this really unusual financial
position for a, quote unquote, struggling artist.
We often picture post -impressionists as, you
know, starving in garrets. Right, the Van Gogh
narrative. But Cezanne had this remarkable financial
safety net. It's one of the great ironies of
his story, absolutely. His father, Louis -Auguste
Cézanne, started out as a milliner making hats,
but was incredibly shrewd. He pivoted entirely
and co -founded a successful regional bank, the
Banque Cézanne et Cabasol. Wow, from hats to
banking. Yeah, and that immediately put Paul
in a totally different financial category than
most of his peers. He had a security that artists
like Monet, Renoir, or certainly Van Gogh could
only dream of. It basically allowed him to pursue
his art for decades without the intense pressure
of having to sell constantly just to survive.
That security must have been absolutely crucial,
especially given the, well... decades of artistic
rejection he faced, he could absorb the criticism
without actually starving. Precisely. His father's
wealth eventually meant Cezanne inherited a huge
estate. The sources estimate it was around 400
,000 francs, which was an enormous sum back then.
This wealth completely relieved him of financial
worries later in life. But... And this is the
key. It did absolutely nothing to soothe the
intense self -doubt, the social awkwardness,
the public ridicule he endured for most of his
career. It was a strange mix, emotional poverty
alongside financial abundance. And his roots
were in Aix -en -Provence down south. That really
laid the foundation for his intellectual life,
didn't it? Particularly those childhood friendships.
Oh, definitely. He grew up there, and that's
where he formed that famous trio, Les Trois Inseparables,
the Three Inseparables. Sounds very romantic.
It does. It was Cezanne, Emil Zola, who'd become
this giant of naturalist literature, of course,
and Baptiste Mbaye. They formed this incredibly
tight intellectual bond, reading Homer and Virgil
together, swimming in the Arc River, debating
everything from classical philosophy to, you
know, the latest art trends. That early... grounding
in the classics definitely informed his later
ambition to bring that sense of classical permanence
back into painting. But his father, the banker,
had a rather different path in mind for his son.
Oh yes, the traditional, very authoritarian route.
Louis Gazelle basically demanded that Paul enroll
in law at the University of Aix -en -Provence
in 1859. Not exactly the artistic dream. Not
at all. And the sources make it pretty clear
that Cezanne actively neglected his law studies.
He much preferred spending his time doing life
drawing and writing these passionate, sometimes
maybe a bit melodramatic poems. The pull towards
Hart was already just overwhelming that pragmatic
security of a law career. So Zola encourages
him and he finally breaks away and heads to Paris
in 1861. What happened when he actually got there,
to the center of the art world? Did Zola's support
kind of ease the transition? Not really, no.
He immediately slammed into the brick wall of
the French art establishment, the Gatekeepers.
He applied to the super prestigious École des
Beaux -Arts and was flat out rejected. Ouch.
Not just once, either. Twice. In 1861 and again
in 1862. And this rejection apparently deeply
shook even Zola's own faith in his friend's talent
for a bit. Zola actually wrote to Bay about how
Cezanne wanted to just pack up and go straight
back home after the first refusal. That's devastating.
It's hard to square that uncertainty with the
later father of us all figure. Absolutely. But
again, his father's money provided that crucial
cushion that allowed him to stay even after the
rejection. Since he couldn't get into the official
École, he ended up attending the Free Academy
Suisse. It was much less rigorous, but it gave
him unrestricted access to models and drawing
practice. So he kept working. He kept working.
spent hours copying masters like Rubens and Michelangelo
at the Louvre. And crucially, his father, despite
his disapproval of the art career, secured him
a monthly stipend, over 150 francs, which was
enough for basic living expenses. But then his
personal life throws a massive wrench into the
works, threatening that financial lifeline entirely.
It really did. The big conflict blew up in 1878.
Louis Auguste, the father, discovered Paul's
long -standing relationship with Hortense Fiquet,
who was a part -time model. And crucially, he
discovered their illegitimate son, also named
Paul, Paul Phils, who had actually been born
six years earlier, back in 1872. And Cezanne
had kept this a secret? Completely secret. For
years. Precisely to avoid his very conservative
father's wrath. And the patriarch did not react
well, I take it? Not well at all. Swiftly, punitively,
he cut Paul's monthly allowance in half. Suddenly,
Cezanne found himself in a genuine financial
pinch for the first time in his life. He actually
had to beg Zola for help. Now, eventually, the
father did restore some of the funds, but that
whole episode just perfectly underscores the
constant tension in Cezanne's life. This pull
between the freedom his money gave him and the
emotional constriction imposed by his family,
by society. He had the means to paint, but he
had to hide the actual life he was living, the
life he was sometimes painting from. Okay, let's
shift to the evolution of his style. Starting
with that initial phase, often called the dark
period, roughly 1861 to 1870, and the Cezanne
from this period, well, he's almost unrecognizable
compared to the later work, isn't he? It's a
really stunning contrast. This early period was
all about thick, almost aggressive paint application
and subject matter, driven by pure raw emotion
rather than careful observation. He was soaking
up influences from the drama of romanticism,
you think of Delacroix, and also the sort of
grounded reality of Courbet. And the look. Very
high contrast canvases, dominated by dark tones,
lots of pure black, deep browns, murky grays,
really somber stuff. And the sources mention
a specific technique he used then that sounds
almost, well, physically forceful. It was incredibly
physical. He often used a palette knife. slapping
the paint on in these massive, thick impasto
strokes. He later actually referred to this phase
using a pretty coarse term, uncuillade. It's
a bit vulgar. Suggests a kind of ostentatious
virility or a really aggressive, masculine way
of applying paint, almost like he was attacking
the canvas. That makes sense, thinking about
the subject matter from that time. The sources
describe it as having demonic, erotic content.
Why so dark? Well, it likely reflects the really...
turbulent frustrated emotional state he was in
back then you know the rejections from the salon
the constant conflict with his father his own
intense self -doubt about his talent he was painting
scenes of Passion, violence, things that were
purely expressive coming from inside. Like specific
examples. Yeah, look at works like The Abduction
from 1867 or even more starkly The Murder from
around 1867 to 1870. It's exactly what it sounds
like. This dark, brutal scene of one man stabbing
a woman while an accomplice holds her down. These
paintings are driven entirely by internal psychological
turmoil. They completely lack that measured,
calm, objective analysis that would define his
mature work later on. Okay, so that raw dark
energy eventually gives way to the famous turning
point. the Impressionist turn, around 1870, 1878.
And the key figure here, the sort of artistic
mentor, is Camille Pissarro. Pissarro was absolutely
essential. You can't overstate his importance
for Cézanne. Cézanne's whole artistic identity
was basically transformed through the extensive
time he spent working alongside Pissarro, mostly
in Pontoise and Aversois, just outside Paris.
And Cézanne knew it, right? Oh, absolutely. He
revered Pissarro. He called him God the Father,
which tells you something, and later acknowledged
we all stem from Pissarro. the depth of his gratitude.
Pizarro essentially rescued him from that heavy
emotional expressionism of the dark period. So
how did Pizarro actually change Cezanne's process?
It sounds like it was more than just suggesting
brighter colors. It was a complete technical
revolution for Cezanne. Yes, Pizarro persuaded
him to abandon the nemi -darks and dramatically
lighten his palette, embracing the primary colors
red, yellow, blue used by the Impressionists.
But the really crucial shift was structural.
How so? Academic art. traditionally defined shapes
using lines. You draw an outline and you color
it in, basically. Pizarro taught Cezanne something
radical. Define shapes and volume only through
the gradation of color, of tonal values. Okay,
defining shape with tone, not line. What does
that actually look like on the canvas? It means
the entire painting becomes this field of carefully
modulated patches of color. If you want, say,
a sphere to look round and turn in space, you
don't draw a circle and shade inside it. Instead,
you put a small stroke of a slightly darker,
maybe cooler color right next to a stroke of
a slightly lighter, warmer color. Ah, the juxtaposition.
Exactly. The interaction, the contrast between
those two tones creates the optical illusion
of volume and form. It was this huge leap from
thinking like a draftsman to thinking purely
like a painter. And it immediately got rid of
that heavy, almost leaden feel of his earlier
dark paintings. But even with this fundamental
breakthrough, the public and the critics. They
remained viciously hostile. Oh, absolutely. The
official Solana Perry just kept rejecting him
year after year. And even when he participated
in the first Impressionist group exhibition in
1874, showing work with his new lighter palette,
it was met with intense. The sources use words
like indignation and derision. He seems to have
been a real lightning rod for scandal. Tell us
about some of the specific critiques from those
Impressionist shows. His work just seemed to
provoke people like nothing else. Take a modern
Olympia from 1873 -74. It was his own take on
Manet's already provocative painting, and it
caused a huge sensation even within the avant
-garde circle itself. And the critics. Ruthless.
Especially about his portraits. There's a famous
example, his portrait of Victor Choquet from
1876 -77. Louis Leroy, who was a very prominent,
very conservative critic. The same guy who inadvertently
coined the term Impressionism as an insult. Right.
Leroy absolutely savaged Cezanne's contribution
to the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877.
This is where that infamous yellow fever line
comes from. That's the one. Leroy attacked the
showcase portrait, claiming the sitter's head
looked the color of an old boot. OK, fair enough.
Maybe harsh, but. But then he takes it. way further
he escalated the absurdity suggesting the painting
was so offensive it could actually give a pregnant
woman a shock and cause yellow fever in the fruit
of her womb wow that's that's beyond art criticism
it's visceral hatred directed at the surface
texture and color choices Cezanne's lack of smooth,
conventional finish wasn't seen as radical, formal
experimentation. It was seen as sheer incompetence,
an insult. And that exhibition, 1877, that was
it. That was the last time he ever showed with
the Impressionists. He basically withdrew entirely
from the public art scene for decades after that.
So the rejection wasn't just professional. It
was social, too. And it became deeply personal,
didn't it? Which leads us to that painful break
with Emile Zola. Yeah, this is really tragic
because Zola had been his earliest and most steadfast
champion. But the friendship started fray as
Zola achieved just astronomical success. He became
incredibly wealthy, built this grand summer home
in Médon near Paris. Cézanne, meanwhile, remained
solitary, famously awkward socially, living this
very unassuming life back down south in Provence,
just consumed by his art and his self -doubt.
The stark contrast between Zola's glittering,
secure urban triumph and Cézanne's quiet rural
struggle, it just fueled Cézanne's own feelings
of inadequacy. And then Zola, maybe without meaning
to, delivered the final psychological blow using
his own weapon, literature. Exactly. In 1886,
Zola published his novel Leuph, which translates
as The Masterpiece or The Work of Art. The book's
central character is Claude Lantier, a painter
who is ultimately a failure. He's suicidal, unable
to translate his ambitious artistic vision into
reality, into realization, that key Cezanne term.
He just can't capture the truth he sees. And
Cezanne saw himself in this character. Deeply.
Even though Zola insisted it wasn't a direct
portrait, Cezanne recognized so many details.
The failed ambitions, the provincial background,
the specific artistic struggles. He basically
saw his own deepest, most painful insecurities
laid bare and judged his fictional failure. How
did he react to Zola? He sent Zola a very short,
very formal note, just thanking him for sending
the book. And for a long time, art historians
claimed that Was it contact ceased forever right
then, a complete and sudden rupture? But the
sources suggest it's more complicated. Yeah,
later discovered letters show that the truth
is maybe a bit more nuanced and possibly even
sadder. Well, the letters suggest that some form
of communication actually did continue for a
while after the book came out. So the official
break wasn't quite as clean or instantaneous
as the legend suggests, but the psychological
damage was done. It was irrevocable. Zola had
essentially diagnosed and then published Cezanne's
most private internal struggle, confirming his
deepest fear, that he was in fact a failure.
The emotional core of the friendship, that deep
trust, was just shattered. Cézanne retreated
even further into himself and into Provence after
that. And that same pivotal year, 1886, is also
when he finally married Hortense Fiquet. This
also sounds like it was more pragmatic than romantic.
Absolutely. Pragmatic seems to be the consensus.
The sources consistently paint a picture of a
quite strained relationship. Cézanne was often
described as being almost phobic about being
touched, very reserved emotionally. He didn't
marry Hortense out of some grand passion. So
why then? He married her specifically to legitimize
their son. Paul Fils, who was 14 years old by
then, and whom Cézanne adored. This act provided
a kind of domestic stability, just as his father
died later that same year. And his father's death,
of course, finally secured him that massive inheritance,
stabilizing Cézanne's finances permanently. So
by the end of 1886, he was free, materially at
least, to pursue his incredibly difficult, almost
impossible artistic quest in the relative solitude
of Provence. So with that financial freedom finally
secured, and that physical distance from the
often judgmental Parisian art world, Cézanne
really entered his mature period. And this is
where he truly becomes the philosopher of vision
we think of. As we touched on earlier, his goal
was incredibly profound. I want to make him impressionism,
something solid and lasting like the art in the
museums. Right. He wanted to fuse the ephemeral,
the fleeting light the impressionist captured
with the eternal, the durable geometry you might
see in someone like Poussin, a classical master
he admired. And this quest led to his most famous,
but also probably his most misunderstood piece
of advice. Ah, yes. The infamous geometry quote.
Given to the younger painter Emile Bernard in
a letter in 1904. treat nature according to cylinder,
sphere, and cone, and put the whole in perspective.
Why has that one line caused so much confusion
over the years? Mostly because the next generation,
particularly the cubists, figures like Albert
Gleises and Jean Metzinger, they really seized
upon that phrase, and they frequently misused
it, taking it as a kind of cold, formalistic
instruction manual. How did they interpret it?
They saw it as a direct order to mechanically
reduce nature to these basic geometric shapes.
You know, chop up forms, analyze them, and place
them geometrically on the canvas. Almost like
a blueprint. But the sources we have clarify
that interpretation. What was Cezanne actually
trying to get across? He was trying to articulate
a way of seeing the world. Not just a formula
for drawing it. He wasn't telling artists to
literally paint cylinders and cones everywhere.
He was urging them to recognize that, fundamentally,
a pair... has the volume of a sphere a tree trunk
relates to a cylinder, and that understanding
this underlying geometric truth is key to building
solid form through color. So it's about perception
first. Exactly. For Cézanne, if you could grasp...
that fundamental structure beneath the surface,
then you could use color modulation, those subtle
shifts in tone and temperature, to solidify that
form on the canvas. It was a philosophy about
finding the truth in perception, not just a technique
for abstracting things. And this search for underlying
structure drove his experiments with how our
eyes actually work, pushing him way beyond the
academic rules he hated. Absolutely. He was actively,
almost scientifically, exploring the phenomenon
of binocular vision. Traditional Renaissance
perspective assumes a single fixed eye looking
at the world like looking through a window. Right.
But our sources really emphasize that Cézanne
was trying to capture the complexity of having
two eyes, which see the world from slightly different
angles and perceive depth slightly differently,
simultaneously. This intentional shattering of
the single -point perspective creates an aesthetic
experience of depth that actually mimics the
reality of human sight much more closely. How
does that actually manifest on the canvas? If
someone listening were standing in front of one
of his still lifes, how could they spot this
binocular vision at work? You start noticing
the deliberate mistakes, the anomalies that aren't
mistakes at all. For instance, the edge of a
tabletop might appear to tilt up slightly on
one side and down slightly on the other, creating
almost two different horizon lines within the
same plane. Okay. Or an apple sitting on a plate
might be painted as if seen from the side, but
the front edge of that slate might be depicted
as if you're looking down on it from above, suggesting
you shifted your viewpoint. He wasn't getting
it wrong. He was deliberately compressing multiple
sequential moments of seeing into one single
cohesive image. He's trying to paint the object
as it exists in space over time, as our eyes
naturally scan and interact with it. And this
complexity, this attempt to capture lived experience,
is what the philosopher Maurice Merleau -Ponty
later analyzed so brilliantly, calling it a lived
perspective. Yes, Merleau -Ponty really provided
the deepest conceptual framework for understanding
this. He argued that Cézanne was striving to
reach a point where sight was also touch. He
wasn't just painting what the eye registered
passively. He wanted to paint the object as it
is experienced by a body moving in space. The
visual perception and the almost tactile feeling
of the object's volume and presence had to merge
to achieve a complete understanding. And this
helps explain the almost agonizing slowness of
his working method. It was meticulous to the
point of obsession. If achieving this deep realization
was tied to capturing this complex, multi -layered
perception, well, it simply couldn't be rushed.
The sources are full of accounts of this. A portrait
could take incredibly 150 sittings. 150 sessions.
Yeah. And he frequently regarded his own paintings
as unfinished. Not necessarily because he was
dissatisfied, but because he felt the act of
painting, of perception, was this never -ending
process of iteration, always getting closer to
that elusive perfect harmony, that realization.
He would often delay dating or even signing works
because he felt he might need to go back, make
just one more adjustment based on a new sensation.
So if we try to boil down his process, the sources
give us Cézanne's own triad of key terms that
essentially define his method. Aller sur le motif,
sensation, and realization. Those three terms
really are the blueprint for his mature work.
First, Allez sur le motif. This means literally
to go to the motif. But it's much more than just
setting up an easel outdoors. The motif isn't
just a subject like a landscape or a bowl of
fruit. It's the motivation itself. It implies
entering into this profound, almost meditative
relationship with the external objects or scene.
It requires intense presence and concentration.
Okay, so engaging deeply with the subject. Then
comes sensation. Sensation is the absolutely
critical intermediate step. It's the raw visual
perception. The sensory data coming in, plus
the psychological or emotional response that
the perceived object triggers within the painter.
He put it very clearly himself. Painting from
nature does not mean copying the object. It means
realizing its sensations. So it's subjective.
It's where the objective world meets the subjective
self. The color he chose, the way he applied
the paint became the perfect mediator, the bridge
between the external reality he was observing
and his internal personal emotional experience
of that reality. And finally, the ultimate goal,
realization. Realization is the culmination.
It's the crucial demanding act of physical translation,
the actual painting itself. It's where he tries
to merge these opposing movements, taking in
the world, impression, and then giving it back,
structuring it onto the canvas, expression. Cezanne
apparently feared failing at this crucial step
right up until his dying day. It was here that
the complex, lived perspective gained from the
motif and his unique personal sensation had to
be perfectly translated using color modulation
to achieve that solid sense of volume and structure.
This was the absolute heart of his lifelong,
often agonizing artistic struggle. Now, Cezanne
had certain subjects that he returned to again
and again, subjects that really allowed him to
fully explore this meticulous method of realization.
And we absolutely have to start with the natural
landmark that became his personal laboratory,
Mont Saint -Victoire. Ah, yes, the mountain.
It was his constant companion, his obsession,
really. The Montaigne Saint -Pictoire, this limestone
ridge near his home and studio in the hills above
Equis, was the absolute central theme of his
mature and final periods. He painted it, sketched
it, rendered it in watercolor. The sources say
over 75 times in total. Why this particular mountain?
Was it just because it was there, the proximity?
Well, proximity certainly played a huge role,
you can't deny that. But the sources offer a
really fascinating, almost modern counterpoint
to his obsession with timeless permanence. There's
the suggestion that the initial inspiration for
the specific series of paintings of the mountaineer
might have come from the views he saw from the
window of the newly opened Aix -de -Marseille
train line. The train line! Yeah, it began operating
in 1878. So think about that potential irony.
The painter most dedicated to capturing eternal
structure possibly being inspired by the fleeting,
fragmented views from a moving train window,
the very symbol of modernity's speed. That's
a fantastic juxtaposition. The blur of modernity
potentially pushing him hard. to find the underlying
permanence. Exactly. It might have accelerated
his desire to dissect and capture its fundamental
structure. And he approached the mountain not
just as a painter looking at a pretty view, but
almost like a geologist. He specifically noted,
and this is a great quote, in order to paint
a landscape correctly, I first have to recognize
the geological stratification. Geological stratification.
So he was literally thinking about the layers
of rock, the physical history, the weight beneath
the surface vegetation. That seems to be exactly
it. And that's why, especially in his later works,
the mountain begins to break down into these
distinct planes of color that seem to stack up,
recede, and interlock geometrically. He was painting
its volume, its mass, its geological history,
all filtered through the lens of his own intense
sensation. He wasn't painting a postcard. He
was painting a kind of cross -section of the
Earth's deep time observed right then and there.
Amazing. Okay, let's move indoors. His still
lifes, the apples and oranges, the jugs and cloths,
are arguably his most famous works, and they're
legendary for how they disrupt traditional perspective.
They really are masterpieces of compositional
engineering, you could say. The key thing to
remember about his still lifes is that they weren't
primarily about the objects themselves. the fruit,
the jugs, the skulls later on. They were about
the arrangement, the intricate balance of shapes,
colors, and weights on the two -dimensional canvas
surface. And to achieve this perfect inner balance,
he deliberately threw conventional linear perspective
out the window. You mentioned earlier he would
sometimes oversize objects. Can you expand on
that kind of deliberate distortion? How did that
serve the composition? He would manipulate objects
in ways that might defy real -world physics,
but made perfect sense for the painting's internal
logic. For example, he might paint a pair significantly
larger than, say, the pottery jug sitting right
next to it, purely to balance the visual weight
of the colors or forms in that specific section
of the canvas. You often see those tilting tabletops
we mentioned, objects that seem like they should
be about to fall over but feel perfectly stable
within the painting structure, or the ellipses
of jars and bowls that don't quite match up if
you try to apply strict perspective rules. He
was using these optical adjustments to create
a composition that felt more solid. more structurally
sound as a painting than a simple photorealistic
copy ever could. And his still lifes took a noticeably
darker turn towards the very end of his life,
reflecting his own internal state, didn't they?
Yes, absolutely. The theme of death, the traditional
Vanitas theme, emerges really powerfully in his
final years, roughly from about 1898 to 1905.
The most famous examples are those paintings
of skulls, like the Pyramid of Skulls from around
1901. These works definitely reflect his increasing
isolation, his bouts of depression, and a growing
sense of resignation towards mortality, feelings
that are echoed quite clearly in his letters
from that time. A morbid subject. It is, but
there's a fascinating detail about one of those
skull paintings mentioned in the sources. Emile
Bernard, who visited him near the end, noted
that Cezanne was still changing the color and
the form of the skull painting, almost daily.
It shows that even with this morbid subject,
the obsessive quest for realization, for getting
the sensation just right through color and form,
never stopped. Beyond the mountain and the fruit
bowl, there's that other massive, very complex
body of work. The Bathurst cycle. Ah, the Bathurst,
yes. This was a huge undertaking, about 140...
paintings and sketches on this theme throughout
his career. The Bathers cycle was really Cézanne's
major attempt to achieve a kind of modern Arcadian
harmony, consciously echoing classical masters
he admired, like Poussin. He was trying to unite
the human figure, often nude, with the landscape
in a kind of timeless, permanent, almost monumental
composition. This whole effort culminated, of
course, in the three large versions of the Great
Bathers, Les Grands, Benus, which are incredible
achievements. But there's often a noticeable
Maybe awkwardness or angularity in the figures
themselves, which seems to contrast a bit with
the geometric mastery we see elsewhere. Why is
that? It's generally thought to be because the
intensely private, solitary Cezanne really disliked
having nude models posing in his studio. He found
it very distracting, uncomfortable. So to create
these monumental figure compositions, he relied
almost entirely on his memory, on sketches he'd
made years earlier in life, drawing classes,
on photographs, and especially on his deep knowledge
of figures in old master paintings in the Louvre.
So he lacked that direct sensation from a living
model. Exactly. Without that immediate, intense
observation of a living model, his figures often
appear somewhat heavy, angular, even a bit stiff.
They fit into the landscape maybe less organically
than his apples fit on a tablecloth, but they
fit structurally, serving the overall geometric
architecture of the composition he was building.
Before we move fully into his legacy, we have
to touch on his revolutionary use of watercolor,
especially later in life. It apparently even
influenced his oil technique. That's a really
important point the sources bring out. In his
later years, watercolor wasn't just a preparatory
sketch medium for Cézanne. It became a major
autonomous form of expression. absolutely equal
in artistic stature to his oil paintings. He
used watercolor brilliantly to capture the absolute
essence of a form, often characterized by leaving
large areas of the white paper untouched, those
famous empty spaces flanked by very precise luminous
patches of color. And this fed back into the
oils. Yes, profoundly. Critics like Roger Fry
noted how this watercolor technique translated
directly back into his late oil paintings. He
started leaving small patches of the white brimed
canvas bare between his color strokes, allowing
the light of the canvas itself to shine through.
This gives his final oils, especially the landscapes,
an incredible luminosity, a kind of airy lightness,
despite their solid structure. Okay, so the story
is Cezanne's reputation. It's almost unbelievable
when you track it. Decades of obscurity and public
ridicule followed by this complete explosive
posthumous triumph that basically redirected
the entire course of 20th century art. And his
slow ascent really began with one key figure.
That would be the gallery owner and, well, very
shrewd art dealer, Ambroise Vollard. He was the
one who gave Cézanne his very first solo exhibition
in Paris, right? In 1895. Exactly. Vollard took
a huge gamble, actually. He tracked Cézanne down
an Esque, bought a massive batch of canvases
practically sight unseen, and put on this show
of about 50 works. This was the absolute turning
point, the inflection point for his reputation.
Who was buying initially? Interestingly, the
very first people to buy were his own, more established
impressionist peers, Monet, Degas, Renoir. They
recognized his genius immediately, even if the
public didn't. They were paying relatively small
sums at first, but Villar, being a savvy dealer,
quickly saw the long -term market potential.
And the prices for Cézanne's work started to
climb steadily, eventually hundredfold, though
Cézanne himself remained pretty aloof from all
the market buzz. And that recognition from fellow
artists is made powerfully visible in that famous
1901 painting, Homage à Cézanne. Right, by Maurice
Teny. That painting is essentially a group portrait,
almost like a group selfie of the Parisian avant
-garde, explicitly acknowledging Cézanne as their
master. It shows this circle of important...
Artists and critics, people like Redon, Sérusier,
Bonnard, Vuillard, and Voullard himself, all
gathered reverently in Vollard's gallery, paying
respects to one of Cézanne's still lifes, the
still life with bowl of fruit, which is on an
easel. It really cemented his status as a kind
of spiritual leader for the next generation,
even before he died. But the truly seismic shift,
the one that really made him the undisputed father
of us all, happened right after his death in
1906. The posthumous validation was incredibly
swift and dramatic. Just one year later, in 1907,
there were two major retrospectives in Paris
that changed everything. One was at the Bernheim
June Gallery, and the other was a massive, really
definitive showing of almost 60 works at the
Salon d 'Automne. And these shows were crucial.
Absolutely mandatory viewing for all the young,
ambitious artists in Keres at the time. These
exhibitions provided the direct visual evidence,
the concentrated dose of Cézanne's vision that
fueled the next great revolution in art. People
like Braque, Duran, Kandinsky, Matisse, and maybe
most importantly, Picasso. They all saw these
shows. And this brings us right back to that
explicit debt owed by the cubists. How exactly
did Cézanne's work become the sort of technical
manual for cubism? It was really Cezanne's systematic
approach to simplifying forms down to their underlying
geometry, combined with his radical use of multiple
simultaneous viewpoints on the same subject.
That's what directly inspired Cubism's signature
fracturing of form and space. Picasso himself
confirmed the debt, very clearly stating, Cezanne,
Cezanne was the father of all of us. They looked
at his methodical way of building paintings,
not primarily as a way to capture sensation,
as Cezanne intended, but as a formal technique.
to analyze and reconstruct space itself. And
the Cubists themselves were very conscious about
recording this lineage, weren't they? Oh, yes.
Very explicitly. In 1912, two leading Cubist
painters and theorists, Albert Gleises and Jean
Metzinger, published their defining treatise,
simply titled Du Cubisme on Cubism. And in it,
they directly credit Cézanne with teaching them
the most important lesson of all, that changing
the coloring of an object fundamentally changes
its structure. and that the goal of painting
was now about giving plastic form to our nature,
moving completely away from just imitating appearances.
And incredibly, his influence didn't just stay
within painting. It actually leaped across genres
entirely. We see echoes in literature, too. This
is one of those fascinating discoveries from
the sources, I think. Ernest Hemingway, the great
American novelist, famously compared his own
stripped -down prose style directly to Cezanne's
landscapes. Hemingway said he was trying to achieve
what he called structural depth in his writing.
He believed that if he wrote simply, declarative
true sentences and deliberately left out most
of the overt emotional description. Your reader
would feel it anyway. Exactly. That the underlying
structural truth of the story, the emotional
subtext, would resonate much more powerfully
beneath the surface, like the bulk of an iceberg.
So just like Cezanne might leave patches of canvas
bare, Hemingway left the emotional explanation
bare, trusting the reader or the structure itself
to convey the weight. Precisely. Hemingway's
famous iceberg theory. The idea that you only
show one -eighth of the story, the part above
the water, is essentially Cézanne's technique
applied to writing. Use the visible forms, simple
sentences, geometric shapes, to imply the massive
unseen structure and weight beneath. The emotional
truth... the object's volume. It's about power
through omission and underlying structure. This
radical shift in artistic perception, this influence,
is mirrored in an almost unbelievable seismic
shift in his financial value, which is maybe
the ultimate, if crudest, measure of his complete
reversal in public opinion. It is truly staggering
when you track the journey financially. The man
who struggled for decades to sell paintings for
maybe a few hundred francs now commands prices
that define the peak of the global art market.
Just a few examples. In 1999, his still -life
rideau, Crouchant et Compoutier, sold for $61
.5 million a record for a still life at the time.
Incredible. Then jump to his figure paintings.
One version of the card players, a subject from
his more popular earlier period, sold privately
in 2011 to the royal family of Qatar for an estimated
price somewhere between $250 million and $300
million. A painting that might have been ridiculed
or ignored in the 1870s now fetches upwards of
a quarter of a billion dollars. It's mind -boggling.
And just to anchor the value of his iconic landscapes,
in 2022, a beautiful version of La Montagne Saint
-Victoire was sold at auction for $138 million.
The man who literally withdrew from the world
because he felt it didn't understand him now
commands the most massive investment from that
very world. And maybe the ultimate sign of this
complete turnaround takes us right back to where
we started, his hometown, Aix -en -Provence.
Oh, the irony there is just incredibly rich.
Remember, back in 1903, the local press and many
locals were still so hostile that he reportedly
received anonymous messages asking him to leave
the town that they felt he was dishonoring with
his strange paintings. He apparently told his
coachman that because the world didn't understand
him, he withdrew into solitude. And today? Today,
it can't get enough of Cezanne. They are actively
marketing his life and legacy. The town now proudly
features five officially marched tourist trails,
allowing visitors to discover the places he painted
his family estate. Jard de Buffon, the Bibemus
quarry where he painted rocks, and so on. His
last studio up at Les Loves is now a dedicated
museum, a pilgrimage site. And for a while, they
even named the local university after him, Paul
Cezanne University, demonstrating just how completely
the town has reclaimed and embraced the difficult
artist at once, Korn. He's now their main cultural
export. So we've traced Paul Cezanne's incredible
path. From the privileged banker's son reading
Virgil with Zola through the decades as a ridiculed
impressionist who was apparently terrified of
physical touch, to finally becoming this profound
philosophical architect of modern art. His slow,
intense, obsessive pursuit of realization fundamentally
redirected the entire aesthetic course of the
20th century. I think the key takeaway, if there
is one, is that Cézanne was desperately trying
to paint reality not just as we're conditioned
to see it through centuries of artistic convention,
but as we truly, physically sense it in a lived,
temporal way. Merleau -Ponty, the philosopher
we mentioned, suggested Cézanne possessed almost
a kind of sixth sense, that he could somehow
sense reality in the process of becoming before
it fully coalesced into the stable objects we
normally perceive. He struggled relentlessly
his entire life to embody, as he put it, a personal...
perception and sensations what really stands
out to me now thinking about it all is the sheer
intentionality the slowness required for his
method we talked about the agonizing pace 150
sessions for a single portrait what if What if
Cezanne's incredibly slow, meticulous process,
his demanding, solitary way of working was actually
his deep, maybe unconscious reaction against
the accelerating speed and visual fragmentation
of his own modern era? The era of the railway,
the photograph, the very train that ironically
might have first inspired his most enduring subject,
Monseigneur Victoire. Maybe he instinctively
knew he had to slow way, way down to find the
underlying truth beneath the blur. That's a really
powerful framework to think about it. rejected
superficial speed in favor of deep structural
truth. So maybe, for you, the listener, living
today surrounded by instant images, constant
information overload, the relentless demand for
rapid output, how does cultivating something
like a Cezanne -like lived perspective, that
intentional, slow, deep way of viewing the world
where, as Merleau -Ponty suggested, sight becomes
touch, how might that help you organize the chaos
of your own modern life? How might it help you
achieve a truer realization in whatever field
you pursue? It's really the difference between
just skimming the surface and truly understanding
the structure beneath. Something to definitely
mull over. Indeed. Until our next deep dive.