Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

Who was Paul Cezanne? Paul Cézanne was a painter born on 19 January 1839 in the South of France (about 170 years ago) He was interested in art from an early age and determined to become an artist even though his father wanted him to be a lawyer. Friends in school with other artists – Zola, Pisarro who encouraged him to pursue his art. Eventually, his father supported his choice of career. Cézanne later received an inheritance from his father, which allowed him to work as an artist without having to get another job.

Cezanne’s Art Cezanne went to live and work in Paris for a while where he met many of the Impressionist painters and saw their work. Cezanne liked how they worked outside and painted from direct observation, trying to record how light was different at different times of day. Cezanne did not like how loose and unstructured Impressionist paintings were. Cezanne wanted to make something more “solid and durable.”

Cezanne and Geometry As part of his interest in putting more structure into his paintings than the Impressionists had in theirs, Cezanne began to focus on finding the basic geometric shapes found in nature. Cezanne said that everything in the natural world takes the form of a few different basic geometric shapes – the cylinder, the sphere and the cube. When he painted, he showed how geometric forms were found in nature.

Cezanne and Cubist Perspective Cezanne was also the first painter to begin to think about the idea of showing objects from different points of view in the same painting. Cubism shows objects from all points of view at once, as though you are looking at an object while standing in 10 different places at one time. Cubists wanted to represent what artists knew to be there, and not only what he or she could see at a certain moment, from a certain place. Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired other artists like Picasso to experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same subject. Cézanne sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, and one which affected the development of modern art.