Dali House

A century after the death of the “father of modern art”, the world has calculated his proper value.

This is another of my Google Earth extravagances (see the earlier ones documented in Dorseyland, but certainly tracking the great Paul Cézanne all over France was pretty damned interesting. The GE post is here.

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In 2006, 100 years after his death, Paul Cézanne is considered the father of modern art, a vital bridge between the impressionist and cubist movements of the early 20th century, with his paintings selling for millions of dollars. But when he died on october 23, 1906, he was largely shunned and discredited by the public and critics alike, and had increasingly become a recluse in his beloved Provence.
It was the rich and jumbled southern French countryside, soaked in the searing Mediterranean sun, that provided most of the inspiration for Cezanne’s works, composed mainly of still-lifes and landscapes.
“Cézanne lived this Provence soil intensely, painfully and amorously. This year he will bring alive his native land which so inspired him,” says Maryse Joissains-Masini, mayor of his hometown Aix-en-Provence, which throughout the year is paying homage to his memory.
Events kicked off in Washington last weekend with a major exhibition, “Cézanne in Provence”, bringing together for the first time 117 of his greatest oil paintings. Most of Cézanne’s 900 works were scattered abroad following his death.
The exhibit will then move from June 9 to September 17 to the Musee Granet in Aix, where a whole series of events has been planned for the man who until now has not had a fitting shrine in France.

Not long after his death, Paul Cézanne was finally becoming appreciated for his importance in the great march of modern art. His career coincided with those of the great impressionists, but though he influenced most of them and used some of their techniques, he was too much the classicist, too much the technician, to be one of them. Importantly, he saw beyond the play of light and peered deep into structure, and thus foresaw cubism. Before the expressionists and the fauves, he was art’s first “wild man”, and indeed he had the temperament to justify the epithet. Stung by art critics and thus dismissive of them, scornful of his family, cold to his wife (whom he only married to legitimise their son) and belligerent to visitors even if they admired his work, he was a grumpy old man well into his final, ailing years. A meticulous, painstaking painter, he would fly into rages with little provocation and destroy canvases. But Cézanne’s very volatility saved him from the mechanical repetition that doused ambition in others. Every brushstroke was a step forward.

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1: Birthplace
Paul Cézanne was born here at 28 Rue de l’Opéra on January 19, 1839. It was at the time a charitable institution run by the young ladies of the Michel family, near Miss Aube’s Nativity boarding school. Paul’s father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne, who sold felt hats before opening a bank, did not marry Paul’s mother, Anne-Elisabeth Aubert, until January 29, 1844.
His sister Marie was born on July 4, 1841, at 55 cours Mirabeau, and another sister, Rose, on June 30, 1854, at 14 Rue Matheron.
Paul Cézanne, Nicolas Pioch writes, is certainly as great an artist as any that ever lived, up there with Titian, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt. Like Manet and Degas, and also Morisot and Cassatt, he came from a wealthy family. His banker father seems to have been an uncultivated man, of whom his highly nervous and inhibited son was afraid. Despite parental displeasure, Cézanne persevered with his passionate desire to become an artist.

2: L’Eglise Madeleine
The church on Place des Prêcheurs where Paul was christened on February 20 (some say the 22nd), 1839, and where his parents were married on January 30, 1844.

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3: Chapellerie
Louis-Auguste Cézanne’s hat shop and home at 55 Cours Mirabeau. The shop originally belonged to François Carbonnel and his wife Marie Aubert, who was probably related to Anne-Elizabeth Aubert. Cézanne’s father had worked in a wool factory but went to Paris to learn the hatter’s trade and, upon his return in 1825, worked in the Carbonnel workshop, where he met Anne-Elizabeth, a co-worker. He went into partnership with a friend to take over the hat shop and lived above it. After the birth of Paul the family lived here.

4: The family home, 1844 to 1850
The house at 14 rue de la Glacière was the registered home of Louis-Auguste Cézanne at the time of his wedding in 1844.

5: Father’s bank, original site
The Cézanne and Cabassol Bank at 24 rue des Cordeliers, co-founded by Paul’s father in 1848 with capital of 100,000 francs.
In “The Artist’s Father” (1866), writes Nicolas Pioch, we see a craggy, unyielding man of business, a solid mass of manhood, bodily succint from the top of his black beret to the tips of his heavy shoes. The uncompromising verticals of the massive chair are echoed by the door, and the edges of the small still life by Cézanne on the wall just behind: everything corresponds to the absolute verticals of the edges of the canvas itself, further accentuating the air of certainty about the portrait. Thick hands hold a newspaper – though Cézanne has replaced his father’s conservative newspaper with the liberal L’Evénement, which published articles by his childhood friend, the future author Emile Zola. His father devours the paper, sitting tensely upright in the elongated armchair. Yet it is a curiously tender portrait too. Cézanne seems to see his father as somehow unfulfilled: for all his size he does not fully occupy the chair, and neither does he see the still life on the wall behind him, which we recognize as being one of his son’s. We do not see his eyes – only the ironical mouth and his great frame, partly hidden behind the paper.

6: Public school
The primary school in Rue des Epineaux Paul attended from 1844 to 1850.

7: The family home, 1850 to 1870
The Cézanne family lived here at 14 rue Matheron, and Paul’s sister Rose was born here in June 1854.

8: The Saint-Joseph Boarding School
Paul attended Ecole Saint-Joseph at 16 Cours Saint-Louis from 1850 to 1852, and here met Henri Gasquet, who would be a lifelong friend and sit for one of Cézanne’s most famous portrait paintings. Gasquet’s son Joachim was the artist’s first biographer.

9: Collège Bourbon
Paul boarded at Bourbon college at 41 rue Cardinale (now Mignet College) from 1852 to 1857, and here befriended Emile Zola. Cézanne broke off relations with Zola in 1886 because he felt the character of a failed artist Zola’s novel “L’Oeuvre” was based on him, but was nevertheless deeply upset upon hearing of Zola’s death in 1902.

10: Father’s bank relocated
Louis-Auguste moved his bank to 13 rue Boulegon in 1856. Paul worked here after quitting law school in 1861, though he resumed his studies at the Municipal Drawing School. He left in November 1862 and returned to Paris, determined to become an artist.

11: École Gratuite de Dessin
In 1857 Cézanne enrolled at the Municipal Free School of Drawing, now the Granet Museum. The he won many prizes, he failed the baccalaureat in July 1858, but passed in November, earning his certificate with the level “assez bien” (good enough). From then on, until his graduation in August 1860, he paid closer attention, and a second prize for a study on painted faces had him dreaming about becoming a painter, a calling his father discouraged.

12: The Jas de Bouffan
Purchased by his father in 1859, this three-storey mansion on a 14-hectare site with lovely gardens was built by a courtier of Louis XIV. It belonged to his family for 40 years. Cézanne produced 41 paintings, 15 watercolours and 17 drawings here. Louis Auguste Cézanne died here in October 1886. In January 1888 Renoir was a guest, but he didn’t stay long “due to the dark miserliness that fills the house”.
Even after he abandoned the Jas as a motif in the late 1880s, Cézanne continued to work at the house, painting still lifes and his celebrated series of cardplayers that took as its models labourers at the estate. Cézanne was deeply upset when the family sold the property in 1899. The Jas de Bouffan will be opened to the public for the first time in April this year (2006). Below the painting is the GE satellite image of the Jas.

Fields at Jas de Bouffan
Click the painting for a larger image.

13: Aix Law Faculty
At his father’s insistence, Paul entered the Aix Law Faculty on Place de l’Université in 1859, but packed it in two years later, a year ahead of graduation, which would have allowed him access to the Bar and the Magistracy. He was only interested in being an artist, and only continued studying at the Law Faculty because his father made it a prerequisite to any further dabbling in art.

14: Rue des Feuillantines
Paul’s address from April to Septemer 1861, during his first exploratory visit to Paris while still a law student with artistic dreams. He attended the Académie Suisse, founded and run by the painter Charles Suisse, which provided the base on which impressionism was founded. Along with free models, it was a place where aspiring artists could air new and controversial ideas. Each year the Académie sponsored an exhibition where its members, often the professors themselves, judged entries. It was the restrictive nature of the judges, preferring established “accepted art”, that prompted Monet and some other painters to exhibit their works separately in Nadar’s studio. This historic exhibition in 1874 included Monet’s famous “Impression: Sunrise”, generally regarded as having given the movement its name.

House of Pierre LaCroix in Auvers
Click the painting for a larger image.

Emile Zola, Cézanne’s Aix friend from childhood, was a student here at the time, and Paul met Camille Pissarro and other future lights, but he’d been steeped in the classicism of David and couldn’t reconcile what he knew with the current vogue, and his failure to gain admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts sealed his discouragenebt. He returned to Aix to work in his father’s bank.
In 1863 Cézanne worked at the Académie while chumming around with Pissarro, Sisley, Monet and Oller and reproducing paintings in the Louvre. That same year he showed his early paintings in the Salon des Refusés, but failed to gain admission to the established Salon de Paris in ‘63 and again in ‘64. His early works were dark and heavy, but at the side of the man he called “the humble and colossal Pissarro”, Cézanne lightened his palette.
It was at this academy, too, in 1869, that he met Hortense Fiquet, a model, and “became her companion”. Their son Paul was born in Aix three years later, though they would not marry until April 1886. He kept both his relationship and his parenthood a secret from his father.

15: Café Guerbois
Cézanne’s early years, writes Nicolas Pioch, were difficult and his career was, from the beginning, dogged with repeated failure and rejection. In 1862 he was introduced to the famed circle of artists who met at the Café Guerbois at 9 avenue de Clichy, which included Manet, Degas and Pissarro, but his awkward manners and defensive shyness prevented him from becoming an intimate of the group. However, Pissarro was to play an important part in Cézanne’s later development.

La Mer a l’Estaque
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16: L’Estaque
Paul stayed in what was then small fishing village in 1864, still a struggling almost-artist, and took refuge here in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war, during which he was officially declared a draft-dodger. In January 1882 Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent a few days with him, painting together.
L’Estaque played a decisive role in the development of his artistic vision, for it was here, far removed from the artistic currents of Paris, that his style began to mature into a truly personal vision. Cézanne responded strongly to the brilliant light and vivid colour of the Mediterranean coast, writing to Camille Pissarro in 1876: “The sun here is so terrific that objects appear silhouetted not only in white or black, but in blue, red, brown, violet.” The village this year has hung copies of his paintings in the streets to mark the centenary of his death.

17: The Pénitents Blancs Chapel
The White Penitents Chapelin on Rue du Maréchal Joffre for 10 years exhibited the Bourguignon collection of Fabregoules, which was bequeathed to the town of Aix for the Granet Museum, then under construction. In October 1866, Cézanne wrote to Zola, “The elder Gibert of the museum invited me to visit the Bourguignon Museum, and … I found it all quite awful.”

A Modern Olympia
Click the painting for a larger image.

In 1866 Cézanne was tired of the constraints of indoor work. “You know,” he wrote a friend, “all pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as good as those done outside … I see superb things, and I must resolve to paint only outdoors.” Pictured here, nevertheless, his groundbreaking “A Modern Olympia”, which no one liked in 1873.

18: Rue de Chevreuse
In an lasting pattern beginning in 1867, Paul spent his summers in Aix and his winters in Paris. In 1871, with the Franco-Prussian war over, he lived here, in the same house as his Provencal friend, the sculptor Philippe Solari.
In the late 1860s Cézanne seemed tormented by themes of abduction, rape and murder. “Abduction”, seen here, impresses with its turgid force, held barely under his control.

19: L’Eglise Saint-Jean Baptiste du Faubourg
Paul Cézanne married Hortense Fiquet here on Cours Sextius the day after their civil wedding, on April 29, 1886. This was also where Louis-Auguste Cézanne’s funeral was held in October 1886.

20: The Café Beaufort
On the corner of the cours Saint-Louis and the cours des Arts et Métiers, this was the meeting point for the Aixois artist protesters: Ravaisou, Emperaire, Solari, Gasquet, sometimes accompanied by Cézanne.
Cézanne’s grasp of form and solid pictorial structures which came to dominate his mature style are by this time already becoming essential components of his painting. His overriding concern with form and structure set him apart from the Impressionists from the start, and he was to maintain this solitary position, carving out his unique pictorial language. Above, Cézanne in pastel by Renoir, 1880.

21: Pontoise
Cézanne spent August 1872 and all of 1873 in this village, painting alongside Camille Pissarro, and also in nearby Auvers, where he settled in May 1881, if that word can be applied to Paul, with his wife and infant son Paul, born on January 4, 1872. He spent his time “view-painting” and met Van Gogh. He returned for part of 1877. In the photo, Cézanne sits before Pissarro in the latter’s garden in Auvers.

22: Auvers-sur-Oise
Paul lived moved here with his wife and son in the autumn of 1872, spending what he called the two happiest years of his life in the house of Dr Paul Gachet, which became the famous painting shown here.
Gachet, who appreciated the young artists of the day long before most, is better known to history as the physician who tended to Vincent Van Gogh in the final months of his life.

23: Nadar’s studio
This was the site, at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, of the studio of Felix Nadar, the pioneering photographer whose inventiveness inspired Jules Verne’s “Five Weeks in a Balloon”. At Pissarro’s urging, Cézanne submitted “A Modern Olympia” and “House of the Hanged Man” for the first Impressionist show, held here, but his work was greeted with derision, and he was rejected once more by the Salon. The following year he moved to Rue de Vaugirard, but was often away in the south.
In 1887 and 1890 he exhibited with the Groupe des Vingt in Brussels. In 1888, while painting on the Ile de France, at Chantilly and on the banks of the Marne, he met Van Gogh for a second time, as well as Gauguin, but he expressed his displeasure at Le Douanier’s work.

24: Rue de l’Ouest
While dividing his time between Pontoise and an apartment here in 1877 Paul was persuaded to try exhibiting his work again, at the third impressionist show, but the 16 paintings he submitted met with the same critical and public disdain that had so stung him two years earlier. The critics hated him, with one famously advising pregnant women not to view his works because they risked giving yellow fever to their babies. He saw little of his friends, adding to his reputation as a temperamental recluse. Only in 1882 was he accepted by the Paris Salon, the only time in his career.
Similarly shunned by the Salon d’Automne, which held its first show on October 31, 1903, at the Petit-Palais, he was only invited to participate there in 1905, the year before his death. In 1907, with the importance of his contributions finally beginning to be understood, the Salon d’Automne posthumously dedicated a retrospective to him, with 56 of his paintings on view.

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Continue to Part 2