Paul Cezanne

Uploaded on May 28, 2006

 

I really don’t know if Cezanne is in “Midnight in Paris or not but this below review says that he was. Therefore, I will discuss this great french painter today.

The last time Woody Allen opened a film with such a loving tribute to a city was in “Manhattan” (1979), shot by Gordon Willis. “Midnight In Paris,” shot by Darius Khondji, opens with another breathtaking urban overview, this time of the French capital. Visiting Paris is Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a hack film writer trying to write a novel; his fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams); and his materialistic future in-laws. None of them understand Gil’s literary ambitions or his desire to stay in Paris. That desire is in part due to the city’s legendary status in the 1920s as a place where American writers, artists and musicians discovered their artistic potential.

In taking midnight walks alone, Gil finds an antique cab that regularly stops at a corner and whisks him off to his golden age, Paris in the 1920s, populated by members of the Lost Generation following World War I. Arriving at a lively party featuring Cole Porter at the piano, Gil eventually encounters Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddelston) and his unstable wife, Zelda (Allison Pill), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) and other creative geniuses. Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), American expatriate and novelist who maintained a salon, reads and critiques his novel, focused, appropriately enough, on nostalgia.

Gil also meets and courts Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who has had affairs with Hemingway, Picasso and Modigliani and is also afflicted with nostalgia for a different period, the Belle Epoque of the 1880’s. Ironically, they meet painters Cezanne and Degas, who want to go back to the Renaissance. Gil doesn’t share Adriana’s desire to stay in the 1880s and begins to gain wise perspective on the  temptations and inadequacies of nostalgia. While his forays around in Paris with some of the 20th century’s greatest artists is presented most entertainingly in this charming film, Gil comes to realize that it is only in the present that he can find creative and personal fulfillment.

________________________

 

Assuming that he was, I have chosen to discuss him next.

Paul Cézanne was a French painter, often called the father of modern art, who strove to develop an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression, and abstract pictorial order.

Cézanne was born in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839, the son of a wealthy banker. His boyhood companion was émile Zola, who later gained fame as a novelist and man of letters. As did Zola, Cézanne developed artistic interests at an early age, much to the dismay of his father. In 1862, after a number of bitter family disputes, the aspiring artist was given a small allowance and sent to study art in Paris, where Zola had already gone. From the start he was drawn to the more radical elements of the Parisian art world. He especially admired the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and, among the younger masters, Gustave Courbet and the notorious Edouard Manet, who exhibited realist paintings that were shocking in both style and subject matter to most of their contemporaries.

Many of Cézanne’s early works were painted in dark tones applied with heavy, fluid pigment, suggesting the moody, romantic expressionism of previous generations. Just as Zola pursued his interest in the realist novel, however, Cézanne also gradually developed a commitment to the representation of contemporary life, painting the world he observed without concern for thematic idealization or stylistic affectation.

The most significant influence on the work of his early maturity proved to be Camille Pissarro, an older but as yet unrecognized painter who lived with his large family in a rural area outside Paris. Pissarro not only provided the moral encouragement that the insecure Cézanne required, but he also introduced him to the new impressionist technique for rendering outdoor light.

Along with the painters Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and a few others, Pissarro had developed a painting style that involved working outdoors (en plein air) rapidly and on a reduced scale, employing small touches of pure color, generally without the use of preparatory sketches or linear outlines. In such a manner Pissarro and the others hoped to capture the most transient natural effects as well as their own passing emotional states as the artists stood before nature. Under Pissarro’s tutelage, and within a very short time during 1872-73, Cézanne shifted from dark tones to bright hues and began to concentrate on scenes of farmland and rural villages.

Although he seemed less technically accomplished than the other impressionists, Cézanne was accepted by the group and exhibited with them in 1874 and 1877. In general the impressionists did not have much commercial success, and Cézanne’s works received the harshest critical commentary. He drifted away from many of his Parisian contacts during the late 1870s and ’80s and spent much of his time in his native Aix. After 1882, he did not work closely again with Pissarro. In 1886, Cézanne became embittered over what he took to be thinly disguised references to his own failures in one of Zola’s novels. As a result he broke off relations with his oldest supporter. In the same year, he inherited his father’s wealth and finally, at the age of 47, became financially independent, but socially he remained quite isolated.

Cézanne’s goal was, in his own mind, never fully attained. He left most of his works unfinished and destroyed many others. He complained of his failure at rendering the human figure, and indeed the great figural works of his last years—such as the Large Bathers(circa 1899-1906, Museum of Art, Philadelphia)—reveal curious distortions that seem to have been dictated by the rigor of the system of color modulation he imposed on his own representations. The succeeding generation of painters, however, eventually came to be receptive to nearly all of Cézanne’s idiosyncrasies. Cézanne’s heirs felt that the naturalistic painting of impressionism had become formularized, and a new and original style, however difficult it might be, was needed to return a sense of sincerity and commitment to modern art.

 

For many years Cézanne was known only to his old impressionist colleagues and to a few younger radical postimpressionist artists, including the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and the French painter Paul Gauguin. In 1895, however, Ambroise Vollard, an ambitious Paris art dealer, arranged a show of Cézanne’s works and over the next few years promoted them successfully. By 1904, Cézanne was featured in a major official exhibition, and by the time of his death (in Aix on October 22, 1906) he had attained the status of a legendary figure. During his last years many younger artists traveled to Aix to observe him at work and to receive any words of wisdom he might offer. Both his style and his theory remained mysterious and cryptic; he seemed to some a naive primitive, while to others he was a sophisticated master of technical procedure. The intensity of his color, coupled with the apparent rigor of his compositional organization, signaled to most that, despite the artist’s own frequent despair, he had synthesized the basic expressive and representational elements of painting in a highly original manner.

Francis Schaeffer in the episode, “The Age of Fragmentation,” Episode 8 of HOW SHOULD WE THEN  LIVE? noted:

Published on Jul 24, 2012