Color and Form Unveiled: The Genius of Paul Cézanne

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Paul Cézanne was a French artist and one of the most influential figures in the transition from 19th-century Impressionism to 20th-century Cubism. Born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, France, Cézanne is renowned for his innovative approach to art, focusing on the underlying geometric forms in nature and exploring the complexities of color and light.

The text below is the excerpt of the book Paul Cézanne (ISBN: 9781780422909), written by Anna Barskaya and Yevgenia Georgievskaya, published by Parkstone International.

It is generally acknowledged today that the twenty-five paintings by Paul Cézanne in the possession of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg constitute an extremely important part of the artist’s legacy. They are not only of a high standard but are superb examples of the main periods in his artistic career. Besides such recognized masterpieces as The Banks of the Marne, Great Pine near Aix, and Mont Sainte-Victoire, there are also some unique works, unparalleled in Cézanne’s oeuvre, such as Girl at the Piano (Overture to “Tannhäuser”) and Pierrot and Harlequin (Mardi Gras).

Portrait of the Artist, c. 1873–1876, Paul Cézanne — *Portrait of the Artist*, c. 1873–1876. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

All the paintings were acquired at the beginning of the twentieth century by two outstanding Russian collectors, Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, men of impeccable taste with a true eye for great art, which accounts for the exceptional quality of their collections. In buying Cézanne’s canvases, they were also encouraged by the keen interest which the Russian artistic public evinced in the master from Provence. As early as 1904, the year of Cézanne’s first personal exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, the St. Petersburg magazine Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) published reviews by Igor Grabar and Stepan Yaremich of Cézanne’s exhibitions in Berlin and Paris. These were followed by a number of articles in the art magazines Iskusstvo (Art), 1905, Vesy (Scales), 1906, Zolotoye Runo (The Golden Fleece), 1908, and Apollon (Apollo), 1910 and 1912. It was during this period that most of Cézanne’s canvases now in Russia were acquired. In 1907, after Cézanne’s posthumous exhibition at the Salon d’Automne, Ivan Morozov purchased two of his paintings, Plain by Mont Sainte-Victoire and Still Life with Curtain.

In a text of this size, it would be impossible to encompass Cézanne’s entire oeuvre, and, more importantly, hardly be necessary as it has been done in the fundamental works of Gerstle Mack, Lionello Venturi, John Rewald, Jack Lindsay, among others. But even in the most comprehensive of these treatises, the researcher was not able to treat the master’s enormous output, comprising over 800 pictures, about 500 drawings, and 350 watercolors. Each researcher therefore made his own selection from this treasure and evaluated each piece chosen according to its merits. The author of this text analyses Cézanne’s artistic development based on the works collected by Morozov and Shchukin.

Still Life with a Ginger Pot, 1890–1893, Paul Cézanne — *Still Life with a Ginger Pot*, 1890–1893. Oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm. Philips Collection, Washington DC.

This is particularly interesting in view of the fact that Russian artists and critics also contributed to the collecting of Cézanne’s works in their country and that several generations of Russian painters have drawn inspiration from the Cézannes in Morozov’s and Shchukin’s collections. Although a limited range of works cannot give a complete picture of Cézanne’s artistic evolution, the author still hopes that this analysis will shed new light on it.

This work which brooked no predilections, no favouring, no selective discriminations, whose least element had been weighed in the balance of an infinitely restive conscience, and which so incorruptibly reduced what is to its color content that it commenced a new existence in a dimension beyond color, unencumbered by earlier memories. It is this unrestrained objectivity, which rejected all meddling with another person’s oneness, which makes people find Cézanne’s portraits offensive and risible…

Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters about Cézanne)

Melting Snow at L’Estaque, c. 1870, Paul Cézanne — *Melting Snow at L’Estaque*, c. 1870. Wildenstein Collection, New York.

Thus the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke described the profound impression Cézanne’s work had on him at the Salon d’Automne of 1907. And indeed, at the turn of the century Cézanne began to be taken more and more seriously by the avant-garde: Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Vlaminck, Derain and others, and among them young Russian painters whose new art owed much to the master from Provence. However, many of Cézanne’s contemporaries, including such well-known authors as Arsene Alexandre and Camille Mauclair, did not realize his true greatness. When Paul Cézanne died in October 1906 in Aix-en-Provence, Parisian newspapers reacted by publishing a handful of rather equivocal obituaries. “Imperfect talent,” “crude painting,” “an artist that never was,” “incapable of anything but sketches,” owing to “a congenital sight defect” — such were the epithets showered on the great artist during his lifetime and repeated at his graveside.

This was not merely due to a lack of understanding on the part of individual artists and critics but above all to an objective factor: the complexity of his art, his specific artistic system which he developed throughout his career and was not embodied in toto in a single one of his works. Cézanne was perhaps the most complex artist of the nineteenth century. “One cannot help feeling something akin to awe in the face of Cézanne’s greatness,” wrote Lionello Venturi. “You seem to be entering an unfamiliar world – rich and austere with peaks so high that they seem inaccessible.” It is not, in fact, easy to attain those heights. One does not reach them by the old, well-trodden paths of literary subjects and familiar associations with everyday life.

Some of the featured masterpieces of Paul Cézanne: