A bank, a son, a refusal
Start with the father. Louis-Auguste Cézanne was a hatter who got into banking in Aix and by the 1860s was one of the richest men in town. He wanted his son to be a lawyer. Paul, born 19 January 1839, dutifully tried, then with his father’s grudging permission decamped to Paris in 1861 to paint.
What it bought him was the rarest thing a French painter could have in the late 19th century: the freedom not to sell. Cézanne never had to flatter the Salon or court a dealer; his father’s money kept the household running through Cézanne’s own death in 1906. He told Émile Zola (the two had known each other since school) that he was trying to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums. The Impressionists tried to catch the moment. Cézanne wanted to build the thing the moment was passing over.
Cards, bathers, the mountain
He worked in series. Once he found a subject he could believe in, he stayed with it for years.
The Card Players (about 1890–95, five versions painted at the Jas de Bouffan, the family farmhouse outside Aix) — two or three local farm laborers at a small wooden table, a bottle between them, looking down at their cards in silence. Peasant gravity rendered with the seriousness Caravaggio would have given a saint. The fifth sold privately in 2011 for a figure between $250 and $320 million — at the time the highest price ever paid for a painting.
The Bathers (three large versions, 1890s–1905). The biggest, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is about 7 ft × 8 ft 2 in, and Cézanne worked on it for seven years. The figures are blocky, with mask-like faces; the trees lean inward to form a Gothic arch over the scene. This is not eroticism; it is architecture made of bodies. (The Bathers will haunt Picasso when he paints the Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907.)
And Mont Sainte-Victoire — about 30 oils and many more watercolors, early 1880s to 1906. The early versions are recognizable landscapes. The late ones, from the studio he built at Les Lauves in 1902, strip out almost everything; by 1906 the mountain is a slope of overlapping blue and green and orange planes with the white of the canvas showing through. It has become its own scaffolding.
One sentence
This is where Cézanne accidentally gives modernism its catechism.
A young painter named Émile Bernard (1868–1941), formerly close to Gauguin in Pont-Aven where the two had worked out Synthetism together in 1888, had come down to Aix in early 1904 to visit Cézanne. They talked about painting. Bernard went home to Paris; they began a correspondence. On 15 April 1904 Cézanne wrote him the letter (original at the Courtauld Gallery, London) that contained the sentence the whole 20th century would quote: Allow me to repeat what I said when you were here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, the whole put into perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point.
Be careful what this is. Not a manifesto. One sentence in an informal letter to a younger painter who had asked for technical advice. Cézanne meant something modest: when you look at a tree, see the underlying cylindrical mass of the trunk; when you look at an apple, see the sphere; when you look at the roof of a barn, see the cone. Build the picture out of those geometries first, then add the rest. A sketcher’s piece of advice. What Picasso and Braque and Bernard himself did with the sentence — quote it back at the world as the founding theorem of modern art — was their decision, not Cézanne’s. He died two and a half years later.
The rainstorm
He died on 22 October 1906, in Aix, at 67. He had been working outdoors, was caught in a thunderstorm, kept painting, walked home soaked, collapsed in the street, was carried back to his bed, developed pneumonia, and died days later. He had been at work on another Mont Sainte-Victoire. It was unfinished.
Now watch what happens to him in death, because the speed of it is the point. Vollard’s 1895 one-man show had given him a Paris market, and the Salon d’Automne (the modernist annual founded in 1903) had been giving him memorial rooms while he was still alive: 1904, 1905, 1906. Then in October 1907, one year after his death, the Salon d’Automne mounted the full retrospective — about 56 works, late ones included — and every young painter in Paris filed through it. Picasso was 25, Braque 25, Matisse 37, Derain 27, Vlaminck 31. They all came out of it changed.
Picasso would say, later, that “Cézanne was my one and only master.” Within months of the 1907 retrospective Picasso was painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — the picture with which Cubism begins. (The Cubism page is the next door over.) The cumulative effect of the late Cézannes coming out of Aix into Paris is the single most concentrated transmission line in modern art. The mountain refused to dissolve, and the young men in Paris saw it.
