France celebrates the father of modern art
01/10/2006
By Kevin Pilley
The father of modern art died one hundred years ago this October, and the town where he was born is celebrating his genius. Albeit belatedly.
For a long time Paul Cezanne was far from being Aix-en-Provence’s favourite son. “Aix has been very slow to recognise his achievements,” said my ‘Cezanne Trail‘ guide Yannick, as we stood in front of the statue only recently erected in the painter’s honour.
“Aix and Cezanne just didn’t get on. Even the new official statue is taken from a photograph of him walking around Aix somewhere else,” he continued. “His art was so new and exaggeratedly simple that people laughed at it. It was derided as childish. They hung it above doors in the inside of galleries so it could not be seen, and he rarely painted in the town centre for fear of public ridicule.
“No one could understand his style. The reduction of forms to geometric essentials; the dark tones and heavy fluid pigment. No one would buy his work. They thought it was rubbish. Now one painting by Paul Cezanne can fetch $60m.”
So now, after 100 years, Aix is holding a major exhibition of 116 of his oil and watercolour works. There are also guided “In the Steps of Cezanne” walking and bus tours in and around Aix which take in over forty Cezanne-related sights and all, of course, begin at his birthplace.
Cezanne was not successful at school but took drawing courses at the Ecole Specialize et Gratuite de Dessin from 1857 to 1862 and then at the Musee Granet which is staging the current commemorative exhibition in Cezanne’s hometown. All he wanted to do was paint.
A bookish and erudite young man he was drawn to the “boundless things of nature” and obsessed by a desire to evoke “a flavour of eternity”. He worked for a while as a bank clerk but never really needed to make a living. His father kept him although right up until the last years of his life his art was continually rejected. Cezanne only knew minor commercial success when he was in his sixties.
Three paintings – “View of Auvers”, “Maison du Pendu” and “A Modern Olympia” were shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Collector Victor Chocquet bought a Cezanneand although the artist sold virtually nothing he kept on painting encouraged by Camille Pissarro.
His atelier or studio is open to the public. On view are the actual vases, cups and skulls that recur in many of his still lifes as well as authentic, priceless personal belongings like hats, coats, his famous portable easel, his business card, cufflinks, a pipe, tie and inkwell.
After painting in the rain Paul Cezanne died of pleurisy on October 22nd 1906. He is buried in Saint-Pierre cemetery in Aix. The following year an exhibition of over fifty paintings was held in Paris’s Salon d’Automne.”
A hundred years after he gave the Provencal region its cultural identity Paul Cezanne is big business. Aix is beginning to say thank you. At last.