Paul Cézanne, a son of a wealthy banker was born at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France on January 19, 1839. At his father's insistence he studied law, but in 1861 he finally persuaded his father to let him go to Paris. He attended the Académie Suisse, and in the afternoons went to the Louvre where his real teachers—the great colorists Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Rubens and the classicist Poussin—began to exert their lifelong influence.
His art is conveniently divided into three phases: a youthful romantic period from about 1864 to 1872; an impressionist period from about 1872 to 1882; and a final period, in which his ideas were increasingly condensed and intensified and which ended only with his death.
During the first period his early work had an undisciplined and Romantic enthusiasm for Delacroix, Daumier and Courbet, where sensational subject matter (L'Orgie, L'Enlèvement) was rendered with violent and dark color, heavily plastered on the canvas.
The impulse toward impressionism came to Cézanne primarily through the influence of Pissarro and his contact with the other impressionists, especially Monet and Renoir. The range of his subjects during this phase includes still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and figure compositions. “La Maison du Pendu” was his first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 and marked this transitional stage from Romantic ideas in his art.
Cezanne spent his last—and most creative phase—largely in seclusion at Aix-en-Provence. His late work shows a subtle balance between the deep space of nature and the flat picture plane, as well as a heightened contrast between purple and green, red and violet. Portraits, still lifes, and nudes in landscape settings were his major subjects. The logic of his ideas inevitably tended towards still life, in which he excelled, and ultimately towards abstraction. In this respect he may be looked on as the progenitor of cubism, which followed soon after the retrospective exhibition of his work in 1907.
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