Charles Writes: Cezanne

Chapter Four:  Cezanne the Father

The other gatekeeper to the modern for Picasso was the Provence recluse Paul Cezanne.  Cezanne painted in obscurity for over 40 years and then when his big break arrived, a large show in Paris arranged by Vollard, Cezanne chose to stay home and work on his painting rather than enjoy the glory of his new found fame.

Cezanne had been associated with the Impressionists over the years but he was different in his approach to painting nature in that he built up his images on the canvas rather than using a flowing line to define the subject.  Cezanne became the link from Impressionism to the Modern by his establishment of some other revolutionary techniques.

Cezanne gradually moved away from four hundred years of Renaissance perspective in painting to using a more two-dimensional painting representation of his subject matter.  Cezanne used color and a dabbing paint technique to build up his visual images and to go inside their meaning in order to build more depth on the surface of the canvas. 

Cezanne was the great distorter of images to get to draw you into a subject.  Take for example his over sixty paintings of Mount Saint-Victorie.  By the end of this sixty plus series the paintings were about the truth of the mountain and what he saw in the meaning of the mountain than the physicality of the mountain itself.

Picasso was so taken with his teacher that the last years of his life were spent living in a vast chateau at the foot of Sainte-Victorie where he could finally spread out his vast collection of Art and review his progress in the presence of his master’s shadow.

Cezanne’s reduction of his Art to two dimensions opened the way for modern Art and it’s use of color and space to provide the perspective.

It was not only what Cezanne had accomplished in his Art but it was equally important what he left undone.  The incompleteness in many of his later paintings spoke volumes about the future of Art.

Artists were now free to use the empty canvas surrounded by color in their paintings to express just the right gesture and emotion.

Cezanne was the other gatekeeper to the Modern for Picasso and Picasso dwelled by that gate his entire life.  In fact he is buried, in his private garden, facing Mount Sainte-Victorie and Cezanne’s ultimate image of truth.