Paul Cézanne

French painter, a bright representative of the new art, which influenced the emergence and development of such a modernist trend as Cubism. Cezanne is also called the primitive artist in the new painting.

The future artist was born in a well-to-do family of a pawnbroker, and then a big banker, Louis Auguste Cezanne. In his youth, Paul was interested in art and literature. He received a good education, excelling in exact sciences and languages. Thanks to the excellent memory, he could memorize whole works of the classics.

During his life, Cezanne created over 800 oil paintings, as well as a number of watercolor works. Some of them were destroyed by the artist himself.

Key Ideas:

– Basically diverging from the method of Impressionism, Paul Cezanne was intensely interested not in a vivid transfer of the dynamics of the light and air environment with its variability, but in stable laws and regularities of color forms and combinations, material tangibility, the weight of both the objective and the natural world. Comprehending these laws with enviable persistence, Cezanne worked for a long time on the same motif and the plot searching for the constructiveness of natural forms, as is clearly shown in numerous canvases and sketches with the image of Mount St. Victoire.

– The most famous postulate, preached by Cezanne is “depict nature with the help of cylinders, spheres and cones.”

– He argued about the need to “put Impressionism in order” to prolong its life in art, so that such paintings would be as eternal as the works of antiquity masters.

– In the artist’s works, qualities that are opposite to each other have joined together: harmony and dissonance, sense and passion, classics and modernity, individuality and mass character.

– Cezanne tried to convey the integrity of space. At the same time, there are almost no straight lines in his landscapes.