Cézanne built Cubism's bridge with stubborn Aix brushstrokes
Paul Cézanne, 19 January 1839 to 22 October 1906, turned Post-Impressionist color planes into a new pictorial grammar between Impressionism and Cubism. Dealers laughed for decades; Ambroise Vollard's 1895 solo show and praise from Matisse and Picasso later christened him father of us all.
Cézanne grew up in Aix-en-Provence as the son of a hatter turned banker who expected him to inherit the bank. At Collège Bourbon he formed the Three Inseparables with Émile Zola and Baptistin Baille, swimming and fishing along the Arc. To please his father he studied law from 1859, but drifted to evening drawing classes at the Musée Granet. That year his father bought the Jas de Bouffan, a half-ruined baroque house whose salon walls Cézanne covered with murals of the four seasons, mockingly signed with the name of Ingres, a painter he disliked.
Urged on by Zola, he went to Paris in 1861, was turned down by the École des Beaux-Arts, and drew from life at the Académie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro. Within months he was back in Aix working at the bank; Zola wrote that his friend talked of leaving as soon as he arrived, and Cézanne destroyed a portrait Zola had commissioned to encourage him. He returned in 1862 on a monthly allowance, was rejected again, and came to know Monet, Renoir and Sisley. His friendship with Pissarro, first that of pupil and teacher, became a partnership of equals on painting trips to Louveciennes and Pontoise. A later inheritance of 400,000 francs ended his money worries.
His method built pictures from planes of colour and small, repeated strokes that stress the structure of objects over academic perspective. Critics mocked it, and his first buyers were mainly artists and the dealer Ambroise Vollard, whose 1895 solo show in Paris widened his audience. Matisse and Picasso are both said to have called him the father of us all, and his work is seen as the link between Impressionism and Cubism.
Source: Paul Cézanne
