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Paul Cézanne

Geburtstag: 19. Januar 1839
Todesdatum: 22. Oktober 1906

Paul Cézanne war ein französischer Maler. Cézannes Werk wird unterschiedlichen Stilrichtungen zugeordnet: Während seine frühen Arbeiten noch von Romantik – wie die Wandbilder im Landhaus Jas de Bouffan – und Realismus geprägt sind, gelangte er durch intensive Auseinandersetzung mit impressionistischen Ausdrucksformen zu einer neuen Bildsprache, die den zerfließenden Bildeindruck impressionistischer Werke zu festigen versucht. Er gab die illusionistische Fernwirkung auf, brach die von den Vertretern der Akademischen Kunst aufgestellten Regeln und strebte eine Erneuerung klassischer Gestaltungsmethoden auf der Grundlage des impressionistischen Farbraumes und farbmodulatorischer Prinzipien an.

Seine Malerei rief in der zeitgenössischen Kunstkritik Unverständnis und Spott hervor. Bis in die späten 1890er Jahre waren es hauptsächlich Künstlerkollegen wie Pissarro, Monet und Renoir sowie Kunstsammler und der Galerist Ambroise Vollard, denen sich Cézannes Schaffen erschloss und die zu den ersten Käufern seiner Gemälde zählten. Vollard eröffnete im Jahr 1895 in seiner Pariser Galerie die erste Einzelausstellung, die zu einer breiteren Auseinandersetzung mit dem Werk des Künstlers führte.Aus der Vielzahl der nach Cézannes Tod sich an dessen Werk orientierenden Künstler sind im Besonderen Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque und André Derain zu nennen. Die gegensätzliche Ausrichtung der malerischen Werke der genannten Künstler lässt die Komplexität des Cézanne’schen Werks erkennen. Cézanne zählt mit seinen Werken aus kunsthistorischer Sicht zu den Wegbereitern der Klassischen Moderne.

Cézannes Bildthemen waren oft Badende, die Landschaft um das Gebirge Montagne Sainte-Victoire, Stillleben und Porträts seines Modells, seiner Geliebten und späteren Frau, Hortense Fiquet.

Zitate Paul Cézanne

„Maybe Delacroix stands for Romanticism. He stuffed himself with too much Shakespeare and Dante, thumbed through too much Faust. His palette is still the most beautiful in France, and I tell you no one under the sky had more charm and pathos combined than he, or more vibration of colour. We all paint in his language, as you all write in Hugo's.“

— Paul Cézanne
p. 197 in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre'

„Wouldn't it be wonderful to paint a nude here? [along the river near Aix ] There are innumerable motifs here on the banks of the river; the same spot viewed from a different angle offers a subject of the utmost interest. It is so varied that I think I could keep busy for months without changing my place, simply turning now tot the right and now to the left.“

— Paul Cézanne
Quote in a conversation with Vollard, along the river near Aix, 1896; as quoted in Cezanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 74

„Listen, monsieur Vollard, I worked a lot out of doors at. Except for that there was no other event of importance in my life during the years 1870-71. I divided my time between the field and the studio... Zola closed his letter by urging me to come back to Paris too [in 1872 Cézanne went back to Paris].... but all the same, something told me to go back to Paris. It was too long since I had seen the Louvre. But understand, Monsieur Vollard, I was working at that time on a landscape which was not going well. So I stayed at Aix a little while longer to study on my canvas.“

— Paul Cézanne
Quote in: Cezanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 32-33

„As a painter I am beginning to see more clearly how to work from Nature... But I still can't do justice to the intensity unfolding before my eyes.“

— Paul Cézanne
Quote in Cezanne's letter to his son Paul, a few months before his death; as quoted in The Private Lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, p. 268

„Yes, a bunch of carrots, observed directly, painted simply in the personal way one sees it, worth more than the Ecole's everlasting slices of buttered bread, that tobacco-juice painting, slavishly done by the book? The day is coming when a single original carrot will give birth to a revolution.“

— Paul Cézanne
p. 68, in: 'What I know or have seen of his life'

„You can't ask a man to talk sensibly about the art of painting if he simply doesn't know anything about it. But by God, how can he [ Zola was his youth friend, who used Cezanne as a model in Zola's novel 'L'Oeuvre'] dare to say that a painter is done because he has painted one bad picture? When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one.“

— Paul Cézanne
Quote in a conversation with Vollard in Cezanne's studio in Aix - after the death of Zola in 1902; as quoted in Cézanne, Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 74

„.. But there is better. Simplicity, being direct. Everything else is just a game, just building castles in the sky... Basically I don't think of anything when I paint. I see colours. I strive with joy to convey them on to my canvas just as I see them. They arrange themselves as they choose, any old way. Sometimes that makes a picture. I'm brainless animal. Very content if I could be just that..“

— Paul Cézanne
p. 158-159, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

„Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet. That's why colour appears so entirely dramatic, to true painters. Look at Sainte-Victoire there [the hill, which Cézanne painted again and again] How it soars, how imperiously it thirsts for the sun!.. For a long time I was quite unable to paint Sainte-Victoire; I had no idea to go about it because, like others who just look at it, I imagined the shadow to be concave, whereas in fact it's convex, it disperses outward from the center. Instead of accumulating, it evaporates, becomes fluid, bluish, participating in the movements of the surrounding air. Just as over there to the right, on the Pilon du Roi, you can see the contrary effect, the brightness gently rocking to and fro, moist and shimmering. That's the sea.... That's one needs to depict. What one needs to know. That's the bath of experience, so to speak...“

— Paul Cézanne
p. 153, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

„Until the war [between France and Germany] as you know, my life was a mess. I wasted it. It was only at l'Estaque, when (1870-1871) I thought things over, that I really understood Pissarro, a painter like myself... He was a determined man. I was overcome by a passion for work. It wasn't that I hadn't been working before, I was always working. But what I always missed, you know, was a comrade like you..“

— Paul Cézanne
p. 208 in: 'What he told me – III. The Studio'

„A builder. A rough and ready plasterer. A colour grinder. He Courbet is like a Roman bricklayer. And yet he's another true painter. There's no one in this century that surpasses him. Even though he rolls up his sleeves, plugs up his ears, demolishes columns, his workmanship is classical!... His view was always compositional. His vision remained traditional. Like his palette-knife, he used it only out of doors. He was sophisticated and brought his work to a high finish... His great contribution is the poetic introduction of nature - the smell of damp leaves, mossy forest cuttings - into nineteenth century painting; the murmur of rain, woodlands shadows, sunlight moving under trees. The sea. And snow, he painted snow like no one else!“

— Paul Cézanne
p. 198 in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre'

„But what an eye Monet has, the most prodigious eye since painting began! I raise my hat to him. As for Courbet, he already had the image in his eye, ready-made. Monet used to visit him, you know, in his early days... But a touch of green, believe me, is enough to give us a landscape, just as a flesh tone will translate a face for us..“

— Paul Cézanne
p. 164, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

„You positively paint like a madman.“

— Paul Cézanne
As quoted in: 'Mercure de France', 16 December 1908, p. 607 remark to Vincent van Gogh, ca. 1886 in Paris. Van Gogh showed Cezanne some of his recent paintings, he recently made in Paris