Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne was a French Painter, born on January 19th, 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, France. He was an Impressionist artist, and was the author of many landscapes of Provence in France, and especially of the countryside of Aix-en-Provence. The mountains of Sainte-Victoire was the centerpiece of many of his work and many feel that nothing influenced his early works more.

He also was a very close friend to Emile Zola, a French writer, journalist, and considered as the chief of naturalism. He was one of the most popular novelist, one of the most published, translated and commented in the world. But in the last years of his life, Paul Cezanne fell out with Emile Zola.

He first went to Law School at the University of Aix-en-Provence, but he realized real fast that it was not for him. So he went to a drawing school and did up a workshop at  his father’s residence. Then he went to Paris at the Swiss Academy where he met Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley. He was turned down from art school because of an excessive temper.

From 1862 to 1870, Cezanne was first called a romantic painter, or a baroque painter, inspired by Italian or Spanish baroque painters like Ribera or Zurbaran.  Then he went trough a period of impressionism because influenced by Pissarro. At this time, he was also associating with Vincent Van Gogh. But while this period of impressionism, many painters of this time were convinced that Cezanne had passed this phase, and was ahead in terms of painting.

Cezanne painted approximately 300 works, from landscapes to still-life. He also greatly affected the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism. As a matter of fact, his explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque and Gris, and others to experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same subject, and eventually to the fracturing of form.

Paul Cezanne was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.