Paul Cézanne
A painter from Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. He explored a way of rebuilding nature and objects from firm forms and planes of color, which greatly influenced 20th-century painting. The Artizon Museum holds his work.
Paul Cezanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence into a banker's family. A friend from his school days was the future writer Emile Zola. He studied law at his father's wish but went to Paris to become a painter. In the 1870s he worked outdoors near Paris with Pissarro and took part in the first Impressionist exhibition.
Cezanne gradually moved away from the Impressionist way of capturing fleeting light and aimed to express the form and mass of things with certainty. In his still lifes of apples and pitchers he gathered forms seen from several viewpoints into one picture. In the second half of his life he worked mainly in his native Aix and painted Mont Sainte-Victoire, rising on the outskirts, many times in oil and watercolor. In 1895 his first major solo exhibition was held at the dealer Vollard's gallery, drawing the attention of young painters.
"Mont Sainte-Victoire and Chateau Noir" (around 1904-06) at the Artizon Museum was painted in the last few years before his death. It depicts the mountain and a house standing in the woods by piling up planes of color. In 1906 he died in Aix after being caught in a storm while painting outdoors. His idea of building a picture from form and color was inherited by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque.
