Cézanne: A life

Cézanne

Also by Alex Danchev

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Cézanne

A LIFE

Alex Danchev

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

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First published in the United States of America in 2012 by

Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Copyright © Alex Danchev, 2012

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

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For D

Man perceives in the world only what already lies within him; but to perceive what lies within him man needs the world; for this, however, activity and suffering are indispensable.

—Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Book of Friends (1922)

The point is to give value to the man, just as he is, whatever he may be.

—Paul Valéry, Analects (1926)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Prologue: The Right Eyes

1.   The Dauber and the Scribbler

2.   Le Papa

Self-Portrait: The Brooder

3.   All Excesses Are Brothers

4.   I Dare

Self-Portrait: The Desperado

5.   Anarchist Painting

6.   La Boule

Self-Portrait: The Dogged

7.   The Lizard

8.   Semper Virens

Self-Portrait: The Plasterer

9.   L’Œuvre

10.   Homo Sum

Self-Portrait: The Inscrutable

11.   A Scarecrow

12.   Non Finito

Epilogue: Cézanne by Numbers

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

All images are by Cézanne unless otherwise specified. Titles and dates as per his catalogue raisonné (controversies over these matters are raised in the notes).

COLOR INSERT

1. Portrait of Paul Cézanne (1862–64). Oil on canvas, 44 x 37 cm, Private Collection. Image courtesy of ESKart, LLC, New York. Self-Portrait 1 in this book.

2. Self-Portrait (c. 1866). Oil on canvas, 45 x 41 cm, Private Collection. Image courtesy of Acquavella Galleries, Inc., New York. Self-Portrait 2 in this book.

3. Self-Portrait with Rose Background (c. 1875). Oil on canvas, 66 x 55 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Art Resource, New York. Self-Portrait 3 in this book.

4. Self-Portrait in a White Bonnet (1881–82). Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 46 cm, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich/The Bridgeman Art Library. Self-Portrait 4 in this book.

5. Self-Portrait in a Beret (1898–1900). Oil on canvas, 64 x 53.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund and Partial Gift of Elizabeth Paine Metcalf/The Bridgeman Art Library. Self-Portrait 5 in this book.

6. Self-Portrait with a Landscape Background (c. 1875). Oil on canvas, 64 x 52 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

7. Self-Portrait (c. 1877). Oil on canvas, 26 x 15 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library. Once owned by Pissarro.

8. Self-Portrait (1878–80). Oil on canvas, 61 x 47 cm, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Corbis.

9. Self-Portrait with Palette (c. 1890). Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm, Stiftung Sammlung Bührle, Zürich/The Bridgeman Art Library.

10. Still Life with Bread and Eggs (1865). Oil on canvas, 59 x 76 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio/The Bridgeman Art Library.

11. The Black Clock (1867–69). Oil on canvas, 54 x 74 cm, Private Collection/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

12. Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, Father of the Artist (c. 1865). Mural transferred to canvas, 167.6 x 114.3 cm, National Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York.

13. Louis-Auguste Cézanne, Father of the Artist, Reading L’Événement (c. 1866). Oil on canvas, 200 x 120 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

14. Marie Cézanne (The Artist’s Sister) (1866–67). Oil on canvas, 55.9 x 39.4 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase 34: 1934. Courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

15. Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1869–70). Oil on canvas, 55.9 x 39.4 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase 34: 1934. Courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

16. Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup (1865–66). Oil on canvas, 30 x 41 cm, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

17. Portrait of Antony Valabrègue (1866). Oil on canvas, 116 x 98 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

18. Marion and Valabrègue Setting Out for the Motif (1866). Oil on canvas, 39 x 31 cm, Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library.

19. The Lawyer (Uncle Dominique) (1866). Oil on canvas, 62 x 52 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library.

20. The Negro Scipio (c. 1867). Oil on canvas, 107 x 83 cm, Museu de Arte, São Paulo/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

21. The Abduction (1867). Oil on canvas, 90.5 x 117 cm, on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Courtesy of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum.

22. The Orgy (c. 1867). Oil on canvas, 130 x 81 cm, Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

23. Portrait of the Painter Achille Emperaire (1867–68). Oil on canvas, 200 x 122 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

24. Album Stock (1870). Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Roger-Viollet/Topfoto.

25. Camille Pissarro, Portrait of Paul Cézanne (c. 1874). Oil on canvas, 73 x 59.7 cm, on loan to the National Gallery, London. Courtesy of Graff Diamonds and the National Gallery.

26. Édouard Manet, Portrait of Émile Zola (1868). Oil on canvas, 146.5 x 114 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

27. Jean-Siméon Chardin, Self-Portrait (1775). Pastel, 46 x 38 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

28. Camille Pissarro, Self-Portrait (1873). Oil on canvas, 56 x 46.7 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library.

29. Portrait of Victor Chocquet (1876–77). Oil on canvas, 46 x 36 cm, Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

30. The Apotheosis of Delacroix (1890–94). Oil on canvas, 27 x 35 cm, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

31. Paul Alexis Reading to Émile Zola (1869–70). Oil on canvas, 130 x 160 cm, Museu de Arte, São Paulo/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library. Once owned by Zola.

32. Still Life with Soup Tureen (1877). Oil on canvas, 65 x 83 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library. Once owned by Pissarro.

33. Madame Cézanne in Striped Skirt (c. 1877). Oil on canvas, 72.5 x 56 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bequest of Robert Treat Paine II/The Bridgeman Art Library.

34. Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Armchair (1888–90). Oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ittleson Jr. Purchase Fund 1962 (62.45)/Art Resource, New York.

35. Madame Cézanne with Hortensias (c. 1885). Pencil and watercolor on white paper, 30.5 x 46 cm, Private Collection.

36. Madame Cézanne (c. 1885). Oil on canvas, 46 x 38 cm, Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Art Resource, New York.

37. Portrait of Madame Cézanne (1888–90). Oil on canvas, 90 x 71.7 cm, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia/The Bridgeman Art Library.

38. Madame Cézanne with Hair Down (1890–92). Oil on canvas, 62 x 51 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art/The Bridgeman Art Library.

39. Madame Cézanne with a Fan (1886–88). Oil on canvas, 92.5 x 73 cm, Stiftung Sammlung Bührle, Zurich/The Bridgeman Art Library. Once owned by Gertrude Stein.

40. Elizabeth Murray, Madame Cézanne in a Rocking Chair (1972). Oil on canvas, 89.5 x 90.2 x 2.9 cm, Collection of Katy Homans and Patterson Sims. Image courtesy of Katherine Sachs, the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

41. Armand Guillaumin, The Seine at Bercy (1873–75). Oil on canvas, 56.1 x 72.4 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg/The Bridgeman Art Library.

42. The Seine at Bercy, after Guillaumin (1876–78). Oil on canvas, 59 x 72 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg/The Bridgeman Art Library.

43. Camille Pissarro, The Small Bridge, Pontoise (1875). Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81.5 cm, Kunsthalle, Mannheim/The Bridgeman Art Library.

44. The Bridge at Maincy (1879–80). Oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

45. The House of the Hanged Man (c. 1873). Oil on canvas, 55 x 66 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

46. The Card Players (1890–92). Oil on canvas, 135 x 181.5 cm, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia/The Bridgeman Art Library.

47. Bathers at Rest (1876–77). Oil on canvas, 79 x 97 cm, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia/The Bridgeman Art Library.

48. Three Bathers (1879–82). Oil on canvas, 52 x 55 cm, Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée du Petit Palais/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library. Once owned by Matisse.

49. The Temptation of Saint Anthony (c. 1870). Oil on canvas, 57 x 76 cm, Stiftung Sammlung Bürhle, Zurich/The Bridgeman Art Library.

50. Large Bathers (1896). Color lithograph, 22.9 x 27.9 cm, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia/The Bridgeman Art Library.

51. Afternoon in Naples (1876–77). Oil on canvas, 37 x 45 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1985/The Bridgeman Art Library.

52. Three Pears (1888–90). Pencil and watercolor on white paper, 22 x 31 cm, on loan to the Princeton University Art Museum. Courtesy of the Pearlman Collection and the Princeton University Art Museum. Once owned by Degas.

53. Apples (c. 1878). Oil on canvas, 19 x 26.7 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Courtesy of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum.

54. Self-Portrait (c. 1895). Oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm, Private Collection. Image courtesy of GFS Management, Chicago.

55. Self-Portrait (c. 1895). Pencil and watercolor on white paper, 28.2 x 25.7 cm, Private Collection.

56. Portrait of Gustave Geffroy (1895–96). Oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library.

57. Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1899). Oil on canvas, 100 x 82 cm, Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée du Petit Palais/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

58. Portrait of Henri Gasquet (1896). Oil on canvas, 56 x 47 cm, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio/Art Resource, New York.

59. Portrait of Joachim Gasquet (1896). Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm, Národní Galerie, Prague/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

60. Woman with a Coffee Pot (c. 1895). Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 96.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

61. Old Woman with a Rosary (1895–96). Oil on canvas, 85 x 65 cm, National Gallery, London/The Bridgeman Art Library.

62. Gardanne (1886). Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York/The Bridgeman Art Library.

63. Portrait of the Artist’s Son (1881–82?). Oil on canvas, 34 x 37.5 cm, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

64. Still Life with Plaster Cupid (c. 1895?). Oil on canvas, 70 x 57 cm, © Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London/The Bridgeman Art Library.

65. Boy in a Red Waistcoat (1888–90). Oil on canvas, 79.5 x 64 cm, Stiftung Sammlung Bührle, Zurich/The Bridgeman Art Library.

66. Lake Annecy (1896). Oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm, © Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London/The Bridgeman Art Library.

67. Rocks at Fontainebleau (c. 1893). Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havermeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havermeyer, 1929 (29.100.194)/Art Resource, New York.

68. Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine (c. 1887). Oil on canvas, 66 x 90 cm, © Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London/The Bridgeman Art Library.

69. Large Pine and Red Earth (1890–95). Oil on canvas, 72 x 91 cm, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg/The Bridgeman Art Library.

70. Maurice Denis, Homage to Cézanne (1900–01). Oil on canvas, 180 x 240 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris/© DACS/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

71. Still Life with Compotier (1879–80). Oil on canvas, 46.4 x 54.6 cm, Fractional gift to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from a private collector. Acc. no: 69.1991, Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

72. Man with a Pipe (c. 1896). Oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm, © Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London/The Bridgeman Art Library.

73. Large Bathers (1895–1906). Oil on canvas, 133 x 207 cm, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia/The Bridgeman Art Library.

74. Jasper Johns, Tracing after Cézanne (1994). Ink on plastic, 46 x 74.8 cm, collection of the artist. Courtesy of Jasper Johns. Photo: Dorothy Zeidman.

75. Michael Snow, Paris de jugement Le and/or State of the Arts (2006). Color photograph on wood stretcher, 183 x 193 x 8 cm, collection of the artist. Courtesy of Michael Snow.

76. Bathers by a Bridge (c. 1900). Pencil and watercolor on white paper, 21 x 27.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Maria DeWitt Jesup Fund, 1951; acquired from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Collection (55.21.2)/Art Resource, New York.

77. Blue Landscape (1904–06). Oil on canvas, 102 x 83 cm, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg/The Bridgeman Art Library.

78. Maurice Denis, Cézanne Painting the Mont Sainte-Victoire (1906). Oil on canvas, 51 x 64 cm, Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

79. The Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves (1904–06). Oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm, Pushkin Museum, Moscow/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

80. The Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves (1904–06). Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 cm, Kunstmuseum, Basel/The Bridgeman Art Library.

81. Still Life with Carafe, Bottle and Fruit [Bottle of Cognac] (1906). Pencil and watercolor on white paper, 47 x 62 cm, on loan to the Princeton University Art Museum. Courtesy of the Pearlman Foundation and the Princeton University Art Museum.

82. Still Life with Milk Jug and Fruit (c. 1900). Oil on canvas, 46 x 54.9 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

83. The Gardener Vallier (1902–06). Oil on canvas, 107.4 x 74.5 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C./The Bridgeman Art Library.

84. The Gardener Vallier (1905–06). Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 55 cm, Tate Modern, London/Art Resource, New York.

85. The Gardener Vallier (c. 1906). Pencil and watercolor on white paper, 48 x 31.5 cm, Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Art Resource, New York.

86. The Gardener Vallier (1906). Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm, Private Collection. Image courtesy of Stonecroft Associates, LLC, New York.

BLACK-AND-WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

Frontispiece. Self-Portrait (c. 1880). Pencil on paper, sheet 34.1 x 28.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Walter C. Baker, 1971 (1972.118.198)/Art Resource, New York.

8 The Cézanne room at the 1904 Salon d’automne. Archives Vollard, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Repro-photo: Hervé Lewandowski. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

39 The Four Seasons: Spring (1860–61). Mural transferred to canvas, 314 x 97 cm, Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée du Petit Palais. Photo: Bulloz. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

39 The Four Seasons: Summer (1860–61). Mural transferred to canvas, 314 x 109 cm, Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée du Petit Palais. Photo: Bulloz. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

39 The Four Seasons: Autumn (1860–61). Mural transferred to canvas, 314 x 104 cm, Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée du Petit Palais. Photo: Bulloz. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

39 The Four Seasons: Winter (1860–61). Mural transferred to canvas, 314 x 104 cm, Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée du Petit Palais. Photo: Bulloz. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

57 Male nude (c. 1865). Black chalk on paper, 49 x 31 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (PD55–1961)/The Bridgeman Art Library.

64 Cézanne (c. 1861). Archives Vollard, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

70 Still from the film The Life of Émile Zola (1937), directed by William Dieterle, with Vladimir Sokoloff as Cézanne and Paul Muni as Zola. Corbis.

96 Page from Cézanne’s early sketchbook (carnet de jeunesse), with Marion’s diagrams and annotations. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Thierry le Mage. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

97 Page from Cézanne’s early sketchbook (carnet de jeunesse), with Marion’s diagrams and annotations. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Thierry le Mage. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

102 Zola (c. 1865). A. Pinsard, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library.

103 Portrait of Émile Zola (1866). Oil on canvas, 25.8 x 20.8 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Repro-photo: Hervé Lewandowski. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

117 Portrait of Achille Emperaire (1869–70). Charcoal and pencil on paper, 40.2 x 30.8 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

127 Francis Picabia, Dada artwork with stuffed toy monkey. Reproduced in Cannibale, 25 April 1920. Private Collection. Snark/Art Resource, New York.

131 Pissarro. Musée Marmottan Monet/The Bridgeman Art Library.

136 Cézanne and Pissarro near Pontoise (1877). Private Collection. Roger-Viollet, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library.

158 Self-Portrait with Apple (1880–84?). Chalk on paper, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, Gift of Miss Emily Poole/The Bridgeman Art Library.

168 Émile Bernard, Cézanne in his studio (1904?). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Repro-photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

177 Portrait of Madame Cézanne (1888–90). Oil on canvas, 90 x 71.7 cm, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia/The Bridgeman Art Library.

177 Diagram of Portrait of Madame Cézanne, from Erle Loran, Cézanne’s Composition [1943] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Courtesy of the Erle Loran Estate and University of California Press.

182 Alberto Giacometti, [After Cézanne: Self-Portrait] (undated). Pencil on paper, 33.2 x 25.2 cm, Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris (inv. 1994–1820). Courtesy of Fondation Giacometti.

190 Pissarro and his wife, Julie. Private Collection. Roger-Viollet, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library.

192 Pissarro Going to Paint (1874). Pencil on paper, 19.5 x 11.3 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Michèle Bellot. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

195 Cézanne and Pissarro and others in Pontoise (c. 1874). Pissarro Archives, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Left to right: Martinès (the photographer); Alfonso (medical student and painter); Cézanne; Lucien Pissarro; Aguiar (Cuban painter and doctor); Pissarro.

198 Cézanne and his band, near Pontoise (1874). Pissarro Archives, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Left to right: Alfonso, Cézanne, unidentified, Pissarro.

199 Cézanne (1874). Pissarro Archives, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

206 Portrait of Camille Pissarro (c. 1873). Pencil on paper, 13.3 x 10.3 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris, gift of John Rewald. Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

206 Camille Pissarro, Portrait of Cézanne in a Felt Hat (c. 1874). Pencil on paper, 24.2 x 13.0 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Michèle Bellot. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

207 Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne (1874). Etching, plate 26.6 x 21.5 cm, sheet 44.5 x 34.6 cm, Musée Bonnat, Bayonne/The Bridgeman Art Library.

212 Pissarro in his studio. Roger-Viollet/Topfoto.

223 Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Georges Braque (1909). Private Collection. Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library.

253 Zola reading (c. 1881–84). Pencil on paper, 21.7 x 12.5 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, purchased with funds provided by Margaret Olley, 2003/The Bridgeman Art Library.

263 Dornac (Paul François Arnold Cardon), Zola in his study at Médan. Archives Larousse/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

280 Gustave Geffroy (c. 1894). Private Collection. Roger-Viollet/The Bridgeman Art Library.

297 Alberto Giacometti, [After an Egyptian sculpture: Sesostris III; after Cézanne: Self-Portrait] (undated). Pencil on paper, 32.8 x 25.3 cm, Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris (inv. 1994–0710). Courtesy of the Fondation Giacometti.

301 Josse Bernheim-Jeune, Cézanne in the garden of his studio at Les Lauves. The Illustrated London News Picture Library, London/The Bridgeman Art Library.

319 Émile Bernard, Cézanne at Fontainebleau (1905). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Repro-photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

324 Gertrude Osthaus, Cézanne on the terrace of the studio at Les Lauves (13 April 1906). Photo Marburg/Art Resource, New York.

325 Studio interior, Les Lauves (1902). Private Collection. Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

332 Émile Bernard, Cézanne near Aix (1904). Archives Vollard, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The Granger Collection/Topfoto.

336 Ker-Xavier Roussel, Cézanne painting the Mont Sainte-Victoire (1906). John Rewald Papers, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gallery Archives.

345 Émile Bernard, Cézanne in his studio, Les Lauves, in front of the Large Bathers (1904). Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

346 Close-up of Cézanne in his studio, Les Lauves, in front of the Large Bathers (1904). Private Collection. Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library.

360 Cézanne’s son and grandson. Roger-Viollet/Topfoto.

365 Cézanne room in the Morozov Gallery (c. 1923). Hermitage, Saint Petersburg/The Bridgeman Art Library.

370 Cézanne on his way to the motif, near Auvers (1874). Musée du Louvre, Paris. RMN/Art Resource, New York.

Cézanne

Prologue: The Right Eyes

The most consequential exhibition of modern times opened in Paris on 1 October 1907: Exposition rétrospective d’œuvres de Cézanne, the first posthumous retrospective, a year after his death. It was part of the Salon d’automne. Two rooms of the Grand Palais on the Champs-Élysées were given over to fifty-six Cézannes—more Cézannes than anyone had ever seen.

Everyone went. They went to see and be seen, to marvel, to mock, to argue, to pore over the paintwork, to make up their minds about what they had heard, to investigate what he had been doing, to try to understand how he did it, and perhaps to make use of it if they could. The exhibition ran for three weeks. Some went every day.

In 1907 the Salon d’automne was still short on tradition. Founded in 1903, its primary purpose was to show new work by living artists—in a word, modern art. Its very creation was a calculated act of protest, or insolence, cocking a snook at the existing salon: the Salon national des artistes français, the reactionary institution Cézanne called the Salon de Bouguereau, after the leader of the time-serving Société des artistes français, William Bouguereau. Bouguereau did voluptuary by numbers. He painted ample buttocks on angelic maidens in allegorical poses at astronomical prices. This line had given him everything a man could desire. For a long time he was the last word in the fashionable classical, the epitome of the academy, the embodiment of artistic prowess and social success, and he knew it. In keeping with his station, Bouguereau was a figure of monumental self-importance. Rumor had it that it cost him five francs, by his own reckoning, whenever he stopped painting to relieve himself.

By the turn of the century his authority had been comprehensively undermined, but no one told Bouguereau. Among painters, he and his manner were quietly mocked. Degas and his friends had a word for the chocolate-box effect of any piece of work that looked too slick or too fancy: it was bouguereaued. When the Douanier Rousseau was found gazing at a Bouguereau in the Musée du Luxembourg, the old painter was ragged mercilessly by the young Fernand Léger and his avant-garde comrades-in-arms. But the Douanier was not as naïve as his painting. Look at the highlights on the fingernails, he told them. The fingernails had been bouguereaued. Many an artist appropriated those effects. Meanwhile the power of official patronage remained deeply entrenched. The Salon de Bouguereau never stooped to admit Paul Cézanne.

For living artists, the opportunity to exhibit within the stately portals of the Grand Palais was a welcome change of scene, whatever they might think of the potboilers of salon painting. For the hoi polloi, on the other hand, new work meant nothing more than newfangled, and living artist was a contradiction in terms. Modern art was not what they were accustomed to seeing, shamelessly displayed in public places. No living artist could enter the Louvre. Museums were for the dead, by definition. The art they contained was meant to conform to certain standards. The technique should be competent, the people recognizable, the plot legible, the skies blue and the trees green. Contemplation of the work should be pleasurable or profitable, or both. By these standards, modern art was an uncouth riddle. The conclusion was clear. If it had to be made, modern art was a matter for consenting adults meeting in private. Even the most consenting found it hard to understand, and on occasion hard to stomach. When André Derain saw the work that became Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in Picasso’s studio, that same year, he observed mordantly that painting of this sort was an impasse at the end of which lay only suicide; one fine day we would find Picasso hanging behind his big canvas.

Coming to terms with Cézanne was not easy. The work itself gave ample grounds for offense. On first acquaintance, it ranged from the inexplicable to the intolerable. What is more, it was unfinished, and apparently unfinishable. Cézanne skirted the bounds of the traditional proprieties. He was in many ways a profoundly civilized creature, but he found the forms and trappings of civilization irksome. The feeling was returned in kind. All his days he was characterized as a kind of barbarian. He lived on the margins, beyond the pale. When the writer Jules Renard went to the 1904 Salon d’automne, he discovered works by Carrière, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Renoir. Carrière, good, but a little too tricksy. Lautrec, vice couched in majesty. Cézanne, barbarian. One would have to like a lot of rubbish to like this carpenter of color. Renoir, perhaps the strongest, and excellent!¹

Barbarian painting exhibited every kind of imperfection and distortion. Supporters and detractors alike agreed on a single proposition: Cézanne was strange. He seemed not to see as others saw, but slant. Painter by inclination, he said of himself: a Delphic remark, characteristically difficult to interpret. In his pictures, the perpendicular is scorned. Joachim Gasquet’s wife told how her husband had often observed Cézanne out painting with his easel at a slope. Does this help to account for the inclination in his work? It makes no odds, Cézanne would say.² The angle of the easel was a matter of indifference to him.

The errors were easy to spot; the effects were difficult to fathom. The story was told of a client who stood amazed before a Cézanne landscape amid the marble and onyx of the Galerie Paul Rosenberg. He had never seen anything like it. Paul Rosenberg put him right. No, Monsieur, he interposed grandly, it is not a landscape, it is a cathedral.³ Stories of this sort were common currency. Apollinaire published a satire on the theme, featuring the president of the Salon d’automne, Frantz Jourdain, selecting works for the retrospective. In this instructive flight of fancy, Jourdain sallies forth from the Grand Palais to the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune to view some Cézannes. He is attended by members of the selection committee, one of whom carries his box of sweets, another his spittoon, a third his handkerchief.

Upon arriving at Bernheim’s, he charged at an admirable painting by Cézanne, a red painting, needless to say: the portrait of Mme. Cézanne…. [He] then turned on a landscape. He charged, running like a madman, but that painting of Cézanne’s was not a canvas, it was a landscape. Frantz Jourdain dived into it and disappeared on the horizon, because of the fact that the earth is round. A young employee of Bernheim’s who is a sports enthusiast exclaimed: He’s going to go around the world!

Luckily that did not happen. Those assembled saw Frantz Jourdain emerge, all red and out of breath. At first, he looked very small against the landscape, but he grew bigger as he approached.

He arrived, a bit embarrassed, and wiped his brow. What a devil, that Cézanne! he murmured. What a devil!

He stopped before two paintings, one of which was a still life with apples and the other a portrait of an old man.

Gentlemen, he said, I defy anyone to say that this is not admirable.

I will say it, Monsieur, replied Rouault. That hand is a stump.

And Frantz Jourdain had to remain silent, for there in fact is the chink in his armor. For him, painting is reduced to this question: is a hand a stump or is it not? Whatever he may say or do, he cannot avoid that stump. But when a man has spent twenty years proclaiming his admiration for Cézanne, he cannot be expected to admit that he does not know why he admires him.⁴

Apollinaire had hit a nerve. Admirers of Cézanne’s art have always been extravagant in their admiration, but they have always had difficulty explaining themselves. The painter-theorist Maurice Denis remarked on this phenomenon in an influential appraisal of the artist published just as the retrospective was due to open. I have never heard an admirer of Cézanne give me a clear and precise reason for his admiration, he began; and this is true even among those artists who feel most directly the appeal of Cézanne’s art. I have heard the words—quality, flavor, importance, interest, classicism, beauty, style … Now for Delacroix or Monet, for example, one could put forward a reasoned opinion, briefly stated, easily intelligible. But how difficult it is to be precise on the subject of Cézanne!⁵ As if to prove the point, Roger Fry, who translated and disseminated that article in the august pages of The Burlington Magazine, for the edification of the English, concluded his own pioneering study of Cézanne a generation later with a sigh of resignation: In the last resort we cannot in the least explain why the smallest product of his hand arouses the impression of being a revelation of the highest importance, or what exactly it is that gives it its grave authority.⁶

Back to work, as Cézanne might have said. Frantz Jourdain is continuing his inspection:

Among the dozen Cézannes at Bernheim’s, there was a fruit bowl, all lopsided, twisted, and askew. M. Frantz Jourdain had some reservations. Fruit bowls generally look better than that, they stand more upright. M. Bernheim took the trouble to defend the poor fruit bowl, mustering all the graciousness of a man who frequents the most noble salons of the Empire:

Cézanne was probably standing to the left of the fruit bowl. He was seeing it at an angle. Move a little to the left of the painting, M. Frantz Jourdain…. Like this…. Now close one eye. Is it not true that in this way the painting makes sense? … So you see, there was no error on Cézanne’s part.

On the way back to the basement of the Grand Palais, M. Frantz Jourdain was deep in thought; his wrinkled brows attested to the seriousness of his preoccupation. Finally, having thought over the battles he had fought, he pronounced the following words with a sincerity that brought tears to the eyes of every member of the jury:

The dozen Cézannes at Bernheim’s are extremely dangerous! He thought a bit more, then added:

As for me, I stop at Vuillard.⁷

In the event, the works in the retrospective came not from Bernheim-Jeune but chiefly from two considerable private collectors, Maurice Gangnat and Auguste Pellerin, or straight from Cézanne’s son. Making all due allowance for the fantastical, Apollinaire’s account was a plausible fiction. Whether or not it had any foundation in fact, he made a point of returning to the fray while the salon was still in progress: There is no need for us to speak about the art of Cézanne. Let it be known, however, that M. Frantz Jourdain, under the pretext of not wishing to tarnish the glory of that great man and of not displeasing the clientele of his backer, Jansen, deliberately under-represented him at the Salon d’automne.⁸

The members of the Société du salon d’automne were undeniably bold. Even so they had their limits. Article 21 of their statutes decreed that political or religious discussions were strictly forbidden. Their most significant innovation lay in the mounting of regular retrospectives, often of artists still warm. These retrospectives were relatively small-scale—one or two rooms—but they had a huge impact. In 1905, for example, besides the notorious Fauves, or Wild Beasts, with their orgy of raw color, there were retrospectives of Ingres (1780–1867), Manet (1832–83), and Seurat (1859–91), each of them electrifying. In 1906 it was Gauguin (1848–1903). In 1907 came Cézanne (1839–1906) and Berthe Morisot (1841–95). Interestingly enough, it was Morisot who had the bigger build-up and the bigger exhibition. Her work was light and airy; it was well executed; it had a certain delicacy, perhaps even a finesse. There were those who found it preferable. Camille Mauclair, for one, could not imagine a more striking contrast with the awkward, the effortful Cézanne, where the subtle nuances are constantly betrayed. It’s the difference between a laborer and a princess.⁹

Gratifyingly for M. Frantz Jourdain, the salon was packed. The spectators were various. Some came as if on safari, to gawp at the exotic plumage and take potshots at the easy targets. Others came to preen and confirm their prejudices. Apollinaire knew their game only too well.

Wear your best skirt, pretty one,

And put your bonnet on!

We’re off to have a lark

With contemporary art

At the Autumn Salon.¹⁰

Cézanne had been shown at the Salon d’automne before, as Jules Renard had witnessed. In 1904 he was given an individual room, the Salle Cézanne. Puvis de Chavannes (1824–98), Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), and Redon and Renoir (both still living) were similarly honored. This was a modest retrospective of thirty-three paintings, for the most part selected by his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, whose animal cunning and astute hoarding were crucial to Cézanne’s rise to world power status. The Salle Cézanne was a luxuriant affair, complete with potted palm, stove, oriental carpet, and velvet sofa. The paintings were spaciously hung. Unusually, they were topped with several panels of photographs of other works by Cézanne, not in the exhibition: a typical piece of showmanship by the artful Vollard—a trick repeated in the 1907 retrospective, where photographs by Druet showed the artist’s youthful rendering of The Four Seasons on the walls of the Cézanne family home in Aix-en-Provence. The photographs contributed to the sense of commemoration. They were much remarked, as was the artist’s sportive signature, Ingres.¹¹

The Salle Cézanne confirmed his somewhat paradoxical position. He was at once unknown and famous, as one commentator had observed. Among painters, he was an object of fascination. His peers were his earliest collectors. Monet owned fourteen Cézannes. Three of them hung in his bedroom. Pissarro owned twenty-one. Gauguin used to take one of his favorite Cézannes to a nearby restaurant and hold forth on its amazing qualities. They all tried to penetrate his secrets. How does he do it? asked Renoir. He has only to put two strokes of color on the canvas and it’s already something.

The path he trod to painting was a tortuous one. As a professional artist, he was remarkably unsuccessful. He did not even qualify to take the examinations for the École des beaux-arts. The Bozards joined the Salon de Bouguereau in his periodic raillery against the establishment. Institutions, pensions and honors are made only for cretins, humbugs and rascals. His first sojourn in Paris in 1861 made him miserable. He was thirty-five before he sold a single painting to anyone other than friends and supporters. He was continually at war with an indifferent world and a domineering father who declared him, aged forty-seven, sans profession.

Late in life, after his first one-man show, in 1895, at the age of fifty-six, things began to change. Awestruck young artists would make their way to Aix, as if on a pilgrimage, to seek him out and hear him speak—and if they were very lucky, see him paint. As accounts of these meetings began to leak out, so the word spread. The sayings of Cézanne circulated like the fragments of Heraclitus. In 1904 Émile Bernard published a laudatory article on him in the journal L’Occident, complete with a collection of Cézanne’s Opinions, apparently straight from the source. They were avidly consumed. Matisse asked his friend Marquet to buy and send him a copy: In this issue there is Cézanne’s doctrine by Bernard, who often reports Cézanne’s own words…. It’s very interesting.¹² Cézanne had decided opinions. To paint from nature is not to copy an object; it is to represent its sensations. Within the painter, there are two things: the eye and the mind; they must serve each other. The artist must work at developing them mutually: the eye for the vision of nature and the mind for the logic of organized sensations, which provide the means of expression. The following year, Charles Camoin published a further selection, taken from his own correspondence with the master.¹³ Not to be outdone, Bernard’s celebrated Memories of Paul Cézanne appeared in two parts in the Mercure de France in 1907.¹⁴ Cleverly timed to coincide exactly with the retrospective at the Salon d’automne, these articles were immediately ransacked for their testimony from beyond the grave. There was more to come. Émile Zola’s correspondence began to appear that same year. The letters of his youth included no fewer than nineteen to his best friend, Paul Cézanne.¹⁵

Interest in these morsels reflected a certain willful elusiveness on the part of the living, breathing "primitif du plein air," as Camoin called him. In the art world, and the social world, he remained an outsider, a phantasm. Much speculation and little information gave him a kind of fictional quality. To this unstable mix he added ingredients of his own. He had a temperament, as he often said, or rather a temmpérammennte (rolled around the tongue, in his broad Provençal accent).¹⁶ For Cézanne, temperament was a test of character and moral worth, or moral fiber. According to this conception, temperament governed human potential—more exactly, human-being potential. In art, as in life, temperament was the fundamental requirement. Only original capacity, that is, temperament can carry someone to the objective he should attain, he instructed Camoin.¹⁷ Cézanne thought of himself as seeing nature through a painter’s temperament. With only a little temperament, he told Bernard, one can be a lot of painter.¹⁸

At the Salon d’automne, the struggle continued. The novice Maurice Sterne had wandered in the Salle Cézanne in search of enlightenment, without success. In 1905 he returned to the fray. Repeated visits to a group of Cézannes left him baffled as ever. Late one afternoon came a breakthrough by example. "I found two elderly men intently studying the paintings. One, who looked like an ascetic Burmese monk with thick spectacles, was pointing out passages to his companion, murmuring ‘magnifique, excellent.’ His eyes seemed very poor, and he was very close to the paintings. I wondered who he could be—probably some poor painter, to judge from his rather shabby old cape."¹⁹ The poor painter was Degas.

Cézanne’s death was announced midway through the 1906 salon. Black crêpe was attached to his name in the exhibition room, where ten paintings kept a silent vigil. More than one visitor never forgot the black crêpe.²⁰ This was the year that the American artist Max Weber had his epiphany. Long afterwards he remembered his first sight of the ten Cézannes, and how he returned again and again to gaze at them. "I said to myself, ‘This is the way to paint. This is art and nature, reconstructed’ … I came away bewildered. I even changed the use of my brushes. A certain thoughtful hesitance came into my work, and I constantly looked back upon the creative tenacity, this sculpturesque touch of pigment by this great man in finding form, and how he built up his color to construct the form…. When you see a Cézanne, it’s like seeing the moon—there’s only one moon, there’s only one Cézanne."²¹

The following year Weber was back for the retrospective. He went with his friend the Douanier Rousseau. "We came there and found the galleries packed…. It was a great event…. Rousseau and I walked round, we looked, and he became quite absorbed, picture after picture. Then he turned to me and he said, ‘Oui, Weber, un grand maître, this is a great artist, mais, vous savez, je ne vois pas tout ce violet dans la nature, I don’t see so much violet in nature.’ Then he looked up at a picture of bathers, probably the largest canvas that Cézanne painted. And, of course, much of the barren paper is visible…. So Rousseau found it, of course, an unfinished picture. So he looked up, and he said, ‘Ah, Weber, if I had this picture at home—chez moi—I could finish it.’ "²²

The Douanier was not the only one to harbor reservations. The American critic James G. Huneker wrote to a friend: "The Autumn Salon must have blistered your eyeballs. Nevertheless Cézanne is a great painter—purely as a painter, one who seizes and expresses actuality. This same actuality is always terrifyingly ugly (imagine waking up at night and discovering one of his females on the pillow next to you!). There is the ugly in life as well as the pretty, my dear boy, and for artistic purposes it is often more significant and characteristic. But—ugly is Cézanne. He could paint bad breath."²³ Walter Sickert also recognized a great artist, but came to think he was incomplete and overrated. As two men went by in the Salon d’automne, he was tickled to catch some drollery about overexposure: They will succeed in killing Cézanne, said one to the other, as if surfeited.²⁴

Rilke may have eavesdropped on the same conversation. The ardent young poet experienced something close to a religious conversion. I’m still going to the Cézanne room, he wrote to his wife on the tenth day. I again spent two hours in front of particular pictures today; I sense this is somehow useful for me…. But it takes a long, long time. When I remember the puzzlement and insecurity of one’s first confrontation with his work, along with his name, which was just as new. And then for a long time nothing, and suddenly one has the right eyes….²⁵

The next morning he went with the painter Mathilde Vollmoeller. As usual, Cézanne prevented us from getting to anything else. I notice more and more what an event this is. They settled down with the paintings. After a while, Rilke was startled by his companion’s observation: He sat there in front of it like a dog, just looking, without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive. Vollmoeller was a penetrating student of Cézanne’s way of working. ‘Here,’ she said, pointing to one spot, ‘this he knew, and now he’s saying it’ (a part of an apple); ‘just next to it there’s an empty space, because that was something he didn’t know yet. He only made what he knew, nothing else.’ ²⁶ He used to say that he wanted to astonish Paris with an apple: another saying full of meaning.²⁷ In Cézanne, the empty space is as astonishing as the apple. This was a new concept of painting—not the thing, but the effect it produces, as Mallarmé had it.

Rubbing shoulders with Rilke was the next generation: Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Gris, Léger, Vlaminck, Modigliani, Duchamp—they were all there. Léger fastened on a canvas representing two working class chaps playing cards: one of the famous Card Players. It cries out with truth and completeness. For Léger, he was the Cézanne-Christ, who had eventually to be denied. His struggle to escape Cézanne’s clutches became one of Léger’s best stories. It was an epic battle. Then, one fine day, I said, ‘Zut!’ He was free, or so he thought.²⁸ For Braque, prolonged immersion in Cézanne was a revelation of affinity and a process of anamnesis, a memory of what he did not know he knew. He set about a systematic investigation of Cézanne and the secret something he sensed in the painting. But it was not only the work that seized him; it was the life. Cézanne! He swept away the idea of mastery in painting. He was not a rebel, Cézanne, but one of the greatest revolutionaries; this will never be sufficiently emphasized. He gave us a taste for risk. His personality is always in play, with his weaknesses and his strengths. With him, we’re poles apart from decorum. He melds his life in his work, the work in his life.²⁹

Others engaged in front of the works themselves. Conversations could be heard among artists, writers, dealers, collectors, museum directors, critics, and philosophers, in Dutch, English, French, German, Russian, Japanese. Two influential voices from Japan were already there, as an advance guard: Arishima Ikuma, who published a long essay on Cézanne as early as 1910, and Yasui Sotaro, who was said to paint in the Cézanne style.³⁰ Gertrude Stein sailed in, escorted by Alice B. Toklas, and found what she was looking for. And then slowly through all this and looking at many pictures I came to Cézanne and there you were, at least there I was, not all at once but as soon as I got used to it. The landscape looked like a landscape that is to say what is yellow in the landscape looked yellow in the oil painting, and what was blue in the landscape looked blue in the oil painting and if it did not there was still the oil painting, the oil painting by Cézanne.³¹

Insular Englishmen came and went. Philip Wilson Steer, a founder member of the New English Art Club, admired The Black Clock, an early work of exquisite color and no oddity of form, but little else. That painting reappeared some years later in an exhibition at Burlington House, over against some ridiculously malformed apples, proclaimed by the mystagogues to achieve rotundity by being irregular polygons, shabby in color as well. Steer was one of the unbelievers. Determined to bypass the perpetual yapping of the patriarch’s name, he and Henry Tonks took to calling him Mr. Harris.³²

For the rest, it was the Congress of Europe all over again. The Russian collectors were there: Sergei Shchukin, who acquired eight Cézannes between 1904 and 1911, and Ivan Morozov (eighteen between 1907 and 1913), Shchukin indulging his favorite pastime of visiting the Egyptian antiquities in the Louvre, where he found parallels with Cézanne’s peasants.³³ The Germans were there, in strength, among them the influential art historian Julius Meier-Graefe, one of the first to write about Cézanne, studying the paintings day after day, like Rilke, in the company of Count Harry Kessler, the well-known patron and collector; Karl Ernst Osthaus, founder of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen (Westphalia), who had visited the artist in his lair in Aix the year before; Hugo von Tschudi, director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Tschudi was a man of taste and discrimination, who bought his first Cézanne in 1897. He seems to have been having fun. Discussing the works with the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, he went so far as to say that he enjoyed a Cézanne like a slice of cake, or a piece of Wagnerian polyphony. The Frenchman was stunned. These Germans are amazing, he reflected. The sentimental academic style of Böcklin sends them into ecstasy, while they find Carrière inexpressive…. But Cézanne! Surely such a people were incapable of appreciating Cézanne—and yet this particular German evidently shared his passion for the master of the masters. For Blanche, Cézanne was in a class of his own.³⁴

Ironically, Blanche himself has been cast by posterity as a kind of foil. Posterity has taken its cue from Pablo Picasso. One of the boldest pronouncements ever made by one artist in homage to another was made by Picasso in homage to Cézanne:

It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cézanne wouldn’t be of the slightest interest to me if he had lived and thought like Jacques-Émile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What is of interest to us is Cézanne’s inquiétude, that is Cézanne’s lesson … that is to say, the drama of the man. The rest is false.³⁵

For Picasso, as for Braque, it was the man that mattered—what he is. That pronouncement was made in 1935. It serves to isolate the primary condition with which Cézanne was identified in life and afterlife: inquiétude—anxiety, restlessness. In the sense pervading so many accounts, this was an almost pathological condition. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s celebrated essay Cézanne’s Doubt (1945) made the same point in slightly different terms. Merleau-Ponty did not shrink from speculating on his morbid symptoms, psychological disequilibrium, and schizoid make-up.³⁶ Cézanne the musical has yet to appear—no one has dared—but the opera, by Daniel Rothman, is Cézanne’s Doubt (1996).³⁷

Who first pinned inquiétude on him is difficult to establish with certainty, but by 1907 it was already received wisdom. Maurice Denis spoke of him then as "perpétuellement inquiet, Émile Bernard as tormented. As early as 1873, the Cézanne character in one of Zola’s novels had been introduced as twitching with a habitual nervous inquiétude." In 1895, Gustave Geffroy proposed that he was dominated by that very characteristic.³⁸ Soon Cézanne and inquiétude were almost reflexively associated. Inquiétude was his lot, or the cross he bore: his fate, his plight, his tragedy. But it was also the mark of his moral stature. Chronic doubt made for epic struggle. That was the drama of the man: the hard-fought engagement on the battlefield of the interior. The legendary knight Bayard was sans peur et sans reproche. The legendary artist Cézanne was just the opposite. Timid or tormented, he was human, all too human. Yet he overcame. He mastered himself and his epoch. He made those paintings.

Significantly, Picasso’s propagandists were keen to assert that he, too, "knew inquiétude."³⁹ It was as if he had inherited the condition, or taken on the mantle. Inquiétude was no longer a stigma but a badge of honor. Cézanne’s struggle became a legend, his journey a quest, his condition an index of greatness: artistic greatness, to be sure, but something more. The sublime little grimalkin, D. H. Lawrence’s marvelous characterization, attained an unexpected grandeur.⁴⁰ If in the final analysis a great artist is a man who has lived greatly, as Albert Camus proposed, Cézanne seemed to exemplify what was required. Cézanne shows what human beings are capable of. His victory was in the end a moral victory—a victory of temperament, perhaps, over doubt, discouragement, and dismay. His life story is the exemplary life story of the artist-creator in modern times. Countless artists take Cézanne as their model. And not only artists—poets and philosophers, writers and directors, thinkers and dreamers. The sublime little grimalkin created a new world order. His way of seeing radically refashioned our sense of things and our relationship to them. He once said of the mighty Woman with a Coffee Pot (color plate 60) that a teaspoon teaches us as much about ourselves and our art as the woman or the coffeepot. The revelations of Cézanne are akin to those of Marx or Freud. The transformational potential is as great. The impact on our selves and our world is as far-reaching.

Of the successor generation, the one with the most profound understanding of Cézanne’s moral valence was Henri Matisse. Matisse felt impelled to buy his first Cézanne on 7 December 1899, at great personal sacrifice, long before he had any success as an artist. Three Bathers (color plate 48) became his talisman. He worshipped it in private for thirty-seven years, before parting with it, tenderly, as a gift to the Museum of the City of Paris in 1936. "Yesterday I consigned to your shipper Cézanne’s Bathers," he wrote to the director of the museum.

I saw the picture carefully packed and it was supposed to leave that very evening for the Petit Palais. Allow me to tell you that this picture is of the first importance in the work of Cézanne because it is a very dense, very complete realization of a composition that he carefully considered in several canvases which, though now in important collections, are only the studies that culminated in this work.

In the thirty-seven years I have owned this canvas, I have come to know it quite well, though not entirely, I hope; it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance; for this reason, allow me to request that it be placed so that it may be seen to its best advantage. For this it needs both light and adequate space. It is rich in color and surface, and seen at a distance it is possible to appreciate the sweep of its lines and the exceptional sobriety of its relationships.

I know that I do not have to tell you this, but nevertheless I think it is my duty to do so; please accept these remarks as the excusable testimony of my admiration for this work which has grown increasingly greater ever since I have owned it. Allow me to thank you for the care that you will give it, for I hand it over to you with complete confidence.⁴¹

For Matisse, Cézanne was God. There are, you see, structural laws in the work of Cézanne which are useful to a young painter. He had, among his great virtues, the merit of wanting the tones to be forces in a painting, giving the highest mission to his painting. On another occasion he added, Cézanne’s paintings have a peculiar construction; reversed, looked at in a mirror for example, they often lose their balance.⁴² If that was an insight into the investigation of one master by another, then the emphasis on structure or architecture (the word used by Matisse) is surely revealing. What Matisse was trying to discover was what Baudelaire called the secret architecture of the work.

The deity appeared at the 1907 retrospective in a solitary self-portrait, painted around 1875, when he was in his mid-thirties (color plate 3). Rilke was fascinated by his gaze: How great this watching of his was, and how unimpeachably accurate, is almost touchingly confirmed by the fact that, without even remotely interpreting his expression or presuming himself superior to it, he reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.⁴³

1: The Dauber and the Scribbler

The schoolboy Paul Cézanne was a sensitive brute. At thirteen, he was almost full-grown. He entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix as a half-boarder in the sixth grade in 1852. Half-boarders slept at home—in Cézanne’s case, a bourgeois house in the center of the town, a fifteen-minute walk away—but spent most of their waking hours at school, from seven in the morning (six in summer) until seven in the evening. Like many Aixois families, the Cézannes took advantage of the opportunity to combine public education and domestic education, as the school prospectus tactfully put it, for a modest three hundred francs per year, dinner and snack included. This arrangement continued for his first four years. For the last two he became a day boy. Whether he was by then sufficiently domesticated must be open to doubt.

Intelligent, spirited, somewhat introverted, he was clever enough and sturdy enough to get by with the other boys. He boasted of translating one hundred Latin verses in no time at all, for the price of two sous. I was a businessman, by Jove!¹ It was as commercial as he ever got. His ambitions were inarticulate. Among friends, he was eager for adventure: boys’ own pursuits, of a wholesome kind, spiced with poetry. Girls were out of bounds. They could be adored but not accosted. Making love meant serenading the object of one’s affections from afar—the ungovernable in search of the unattainable. For Cézanne, romantic fervor and libidinous impulse vied with conventional inhibition. He was unsure of himself, but Aix was his stamping ground. Here, he knew the form. He had the patter, or the patois. He spoke the language.

In the year below was little Émile Zola, a boarder.² Émile did not mix well. My years in school were years of tears, says the hero of his fiercely autobiographical first novel, La Confession de Claude (1865). I had in me the pride of loving natures. I was unloved because I was unknown and I refused to make myself known.³ Émile did not speak the language. He spoke with a lisp and a Parisian accent; his name sounded foreign; he was fatherless (Zola père died of pleurisy when Émile was six); his mother and grandmother came to visit him every day, in a parlor reserved for the purpose. In the bear pit of the boarders, Zola was a mama’s boy. He could not pass for Provençal. He did not care. The insult was cordially returned: they called him le Franciot (Frenchy). Among the bourgeois Aixois, Zola was different. They were fat, he was thin. Worse, he was poor. His early writing fairly pulsates with contempt for the good-for-nothing bourgeois. The last lines of the novels are often revealing. The last line of Le Ventre de Paris (1873) is the Cézanne character’s parting shot—one of the real Cézanne’s favorite expressions—a muttered imprecation against the plump of the world: What bastards respectable people are!

Zola craved renown and respectability. At the Collège Bourbon, he was deprived of both. He was a boursier, a scholarship boy, living on charity. Beggar! the other boys taunted him. Parasite! Sometimes they beat him up. Sometimes they refused to speak to him altogether. For the smallest thing, he was put in quarantine, Cézanne remembered. And really our friendship stemmed from that … from a thrashing I got from everyone in the playground, big and small, because I took no notice, I defied the ban, I couldn’t help talking to him anyway…. A decent sort. The next day, he brought me a big basket of apples.

Recounting this to the young Joachim Gasquet, the son of Cézanne’s friend Henri Gasquet, some forty years later, he added with a sly wink, Cézanne’s apples, see, they go back a long way.⁴ Apples were not only Cézanne’s capital subject, the subject he succeeded in knowing fully, "all round," as D. H. Lawrence aptly said; they were freighted with meaning and complex emotion.⁵

In Zola’s novel Madeleine Ferat (1868), this story of origins (minus the apples) becomes the tale of Jacques and Guillaume at a local collège in Véteuil. The family backgrounds are transposed, and the character sketches jumbled, but the thrust is clear. Guillaume is christened Bastard and persecuted by the other boys. He is tearful and wretched, but soon enough he finds his savior.

Guillaume, however, had one friend at school. As he was about to start his second year, a new pupil entered the same class. He was a big, strong, sturdy boy, who was two or three years older. His name was Jacques Berthier. An orphan, having only an uncle, a lawyer in Véteuil, he had come to the school in that town to complete the humanities course he had begun in Paris…. On the very day he arrived, he noticed a big rascally boy bullying Guillaume. He raced over and made the boy understand that he would have to reckon with him if he tormented the others like that. Then he took the arm of the persecuted one and walked with him throughout the break, to the outrage of the other boys who couldn’t understand how the Parisian could choose a friend like him…. Guillaume… developed an ardent friendship for his protector. He loved him as one loves