Paul Cézanne (Critical Lives)

Few artists have exerted such an influence on modern art as Paul Cézanne. Picasso, Braque and Matisse all acknowledged a profound debt to his painting. This reassessment of Cézanne’s life and art discusses the key events, artistic relationships and friendships that shaped his work and places his painting in the context of the debates about art and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It details the reception of Cézanne, his early life and career, the crucial moment of his artistic development from the 1870s to the mid-1880s, and the period from 1886 to 1906 when we see important changes in his choice of motifs, style and working methods that characterize his late oeuvre.Jon Kear examines the formative period of Cézanne’s youth in Provence that left such a deep and abiding impression on his painting, as well as his turbulent beginnings as an artist in Paris and the larger-than-life artistic persona he created for himself in these years, which was integral to an initial style characterized by violent and explicit subject-matter and a rugged manner of painting. These early years were to give rise to an enduring mythology of the artist. The book explores key personal and artistic relationships that influenced Cézanne: his close friendship with the author Zola, his artistic dialogue with Manet, whose work he both emulated and critiqued in a series of paintings in the 1870s, and the close collaboration with Pissarro during the 1870s, as well as his association with the Impressionists. Read more