93 Facts About Paul Cezanne

1.

Paul Cezanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century.

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2.

Paul Cezanne gave up the use of perspective and broke with the established rules of Academic Art and strived for a renewal of traditional design methods on the basis of the impressionistic color space and color modulation principles.

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3.

Paul Cezanne used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields.

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4.

Paul Cezanne's painting provoked incomprehension and ridicule in contemporary art criticism.

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5.

Paul Cezanne's parents only married after the birth of Paul and his sister Marie was born on 1841 and on 29 January 1844.

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6.

Paul Cezanne's youngest sister Rose was born in June 1854.

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7.

Paul Cezanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence.

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8.

Paul Cezanne had two younger sisters, Marie and Rose, with whom he went to a primary school every day.

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9.

In 1852 Paul Cezanne entered the College Bourbon in Aix, where he became friends with Emile Zola, who was in a less advanced class, as well as Baptistin Baille—three friends who came to be known as "Les Trois Inseparables".

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10.

Paul Cezanne stayed there for six years, though in the last two years he was a day scholar.

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11.

Paul Cezanne spent two years with his unloved studies, but increasingly neglected them and preferred to devote himself to drawing exercises and writing poems.

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12.

From 1859, Paul Cezanne took evening courses at the Ecole de dessin d'Aix-en-Provence, which was housed in the art museum of Aix, the Musee Granet.

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13.

Paul Cezanne's father bought the Jas de Bouffan estate that same year.

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14.

In 1860, Paul Cezanne obtained permission to paint the walls of the drawing room, and created the large-format murals of the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter, which Paul Cezanne ironically signed as Ingres, whose works he did not appreciate.

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15.

Paul Cezanne was strongly encouraged to make this decision by Zola, who was already living in the capital at the time and urged Cezanne to abandon his hesitancy and follow him there.

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16.

Paul Cezanne later received an inheritance of 400,000 francs from his father, which rid him of all financial worries.

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17.

Paul Cezanne attended the free Academie Suisse, where he was able to devote himself to life drawing.

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18.

Paul Cezanne often copied at the Louvre from works by old masters such as Michelangelo, Rubens and Titian.

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19.

In September 1861, disappointed by his rejection at the Ecole, Paul Cezanne returned to Aix-en-Provence and worked again in his father's bank.

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20.

Paul Cezanne's father secured his subsistence level with a monthly bill of over 150 francs.

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21.

Paul Cezanne therefore attended the Academie Suisse again, which promoted Realism.

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22.

In contrast to the official artistic life of France, Paul Cezanne was under the influence of Gustave Courbet and Eugene Delacroix, who strove for a renewal of art and demanded the depiction of unembellished reality.

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23.

Paul Cezanne's paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refuses in 1863.

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24.

Paul Cezanne exhibited Portrait de M L A, probably Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cezanne, The Artist's Father, Reading "L'Evenement", 1866, although the painting was hung in a poorly lit spot in the top row of a secluded hall and received no attention.

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25.

Paul Cezanne spent most of 1867 in Paris and the second half of 1868 in Aix.

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26.

Paul fils, the son of Paul Cezanne and Hortense Fiquet was born on 4 January 1872.

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27.

Paul Cezanne's mother was kept a party to family events, but his father was not informed of Hortense for fear of risking his wrath and so as not to lose the financial allowances that his father gave him to live as an artist.

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28.

In 1872, Paul Cezanne accepted an invitation from his friend Pissarro to work in Pontoise in the Oise Valley.

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29.

Paul Cezanne felt that the Impressionist technique was bringing him closer to his goal and heeded his friend's advice.

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30.

Paul Cezanne was influenced by their style but his social relations with them were inept—he seemed rude, shy, angry, and given to depression.

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31.

Manet declined participation, for him Paul Cezanne was "a mason who paints with a trowel".

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32.

Paul Cezanne's The Hanged Man's House was one of the few pictures that could be sold.

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33.

In 1875, Paul Cezanne met the customs inspector and art collector Victor Chocquet, who, mediated by Renoir, bought three of his works and became his most loyal collector and whose commissions provided some financial relief.

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34.

Paul Cezanne did not take part in the group's second exhibition, but instead presented 16 of his works in the third exhibition in 1877, which in turn drew considerable criticism.

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35.

Paul Cezanne then cut the monthly bill in half, and Cezanne entered a financially tense period in which he had to ask Zola for help.

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36.

Paul Cezanne continued to migrate between the Paris region and Provence until Louis-Auguste had a studio built for him at his home, Bastide du Jas de Bouffan, in the early 1880s.

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37.

Paul Cezanne painted with Renoir there in 1882 and visited Renoir and Monet in 1883.

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38.

Paul Cezanne later accused Gauguin of having stolen his "little sensation" from him and that Gauguin, on the other hand only painted chinoiseries.

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39.

In 1878 the urbane, successful writer had set up a luxurious summer house in Medan near Auvers, where Paul Cezanne had visited him repeatedly in the years 1879 to 1882 and in 1885; but his friend's lavish lifestyle made Paul Cezanne, who lived an unassuming life, aware of his own inadequacy and caused him to doubt himself.

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40.

Paul Cezanne formally thanked him for sending the work supposedly related to him.

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41.

Paul Cezanne was shy of women and terrified of being touched, a trauma that stemmed from his childhood when, by his own admission, a classmate had kicked him from behind on the stairs.

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42.

Paul Cezanne lived in Paris and increasingly in Aix without his family.

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43.

In 1890, Paul Cezanne contracted diabetes; the illness made it even more difficult for him to deal with his fellow human beings.

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44.

Paul Cezanne was enthusiastic but later, significantly, identified 1868 as Monet's strongest period, when he was even more influenced by Courbet.

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45.

Paul Cezanne often took the mountains as a theme in his paintings.

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46.

Paul Cezanne rented a hut at the nearby Bibemus quarry; Bibemus became another motif for his paintings.

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47.

The first buyer of a Paul Cezanne painting was Monet, followed by colleagues like Degas, Renoir, Pissarro and later art collectors.

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48.

Prices for works by Paul Cezanne rose a hundredfold and Vollard, as always, profited from his stocks.

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49.

In 1897, a Paul Cezanne painting was purchased by a museum for the first time.

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50.

Hugo von Tschudi acquired Paul Cezanne's landscape painting The Mill on the Couleuvre near Pontoise in the Durand-Ruel Gallery for the Berlin National Gallery.

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51.

Paul Cezanne hired a housekeeper, Mme Bremond, to look after him until his death.

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52.

In 1901, Paul Cezanne acquired a piece of land north of the city of Aix-en-Provence along the Chemin des Lauves, an isolated road on some high ground, where he had his studio built on the Chemin des Lauves in 1902 according to his needs.

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53.

Paul Cezanne's paintings were not well received among the petty bourgeoisie of Aix.

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54.

Paul Cezanne was then working on a vanitas still life with three skulls on an oriental carpet.

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55.

Paul Cezanne was taken home by a passing driver of a laundry cart.

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56.

The next day, Paul Cezanne went out into the garden to work on his last painting, Portrait of the Gardener Vallier, and wrote an impatient letter to his paint dealer, bemoaning the delay in the delivery of paint, but later on he fainted.

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57.

Paul Cezanne died a few days later, on 22 October 1906 of pneumonia at the age of 67, and was buried at the Saint-Pierre Cemetery in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence.

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58.

Paul Cezanne's paintings are characterized by a thick application of paint, high-contrast, dark tones with pronounced shadows, the use of pure black and other tones mixed with black, brown, gray and Prussian blue; occasionally a few white dots or green and red brushstrokes are added to brighten up, enlivening the monochrome monotony.

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59.

Paul Cezanne later called these works, mostly portraits, une couillarde.

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60.

Paul Cezanne subsequently created landscape paintings in which the illusionistic deep space was canceled more and more clearly.

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61.

Paul Cezanne solidified the forms by applying paint diagonally across the surface, eliminated the perspective representation to create the depth of the picture and directed his attention to the balance of the composition.

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62.

Still lifes that Paul Cezanne painted from the late 1880s are another focus of his work.

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63.

Paul Cezanne refrained from rendering the motifs in linear perspective and instead depicted them in the dimensions that made sense to him in terms of composition; a pear, for example, can be oversized in order to achieve inner balance and an exciting composition.

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64.

Paul Cezanne developed the composition from individual dabs of paint spread across the canvas, from which the form and volume of the object gradually build up.

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65.

Many of his later works, the so-called "lyrical period", such as the cycle of the bathers, are characterized by a turn to freely invented figures in the landscape; Paul Cezanne created about 140 paintings and sketches on the theme of the bathing scenes.

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66.

Paul Cezanne was concerned with the composition and the interplay of shapes and colors, of nature and figures.

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67.

Paul Cezanne painted five versions of The Card Players in 1890 and 1895, in which the same person is represented in different variants.

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68.

Paul Cezanne was primarily concerned with watercolor painting in his late work, as he realized that the specific application of his method could be particularly evident in this medium.

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69.

Paul Cezanne was the first artist to begin breaking down objects into simple geometric shapes.

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70.

Paul Cezanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials: he wanted to "treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone".

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71.

Paul Cezanne's innovations have prompted critics to suggest such varied explanations as sick retinas, pure vision, and the influence of the steam railway.

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72.

Paul Cezanne preferred to use these terms when describing his painting process.

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73.

Paul Cezanne used the third term realisation to describe the actual painterly activity, which he feared would fail to the end.

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74.

Sometimes longer dates for creation in the catalogues of Paul Cezanne's works do not always indicate that the exact dating cannot be clarified, even if Paul Cezanne rarely dated his pictures, especially since he worked on some pictures for months if not years before he was satisfied with the result.

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75.

Paul Cezanne therefore set about developing an entirely new catalogue raisonne.

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76.

Paul Cezanne continued his list by following the various whereabouts of Cezanne that could be verified by documents.

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77.

Paul Cezanne's works were rejected numerous times by the official Salon in Paris and ridiculed by art critics when exhibited with the Impressionists.

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78.

Yet during his lifetime Paul Cezanne was considered a master by younger artists who visited his studio in Aix.

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79.

In 1910 some of Paul Cezanne's paintings were shown in the Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition in London.

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80.

Fry recognized the extraordinary value of the path that artists such as van Gogh and Paul Cezanne had taken in expressing their personal feelings and worldview through their paintings, even if visitors at the time could not yet understand this.

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81.

Many "productive" misunderstandings lie hidden in the reception of the works and the supposed intentions of Paul Cezanne, which had a considerable influence on the further course and development of modern art.

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82.

Immediately after Paul Cezanne's death in 1906, stimulated by a comprehensive exhibition of his watercolors in the spring of 1907 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and a retrospective in October 1907 at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, a lively examination of his work began.

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83.

For example, in his quote, Paul Cezanne did not intend to reinterpret the experience of nature in the sense of orienting himself towards cubic form elements; he was more concerned with corresponding to the object forms and their coloring under the various aspects in the picture.

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84.

Paul Cezanne was an important authority for artists of the newer generation.

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85.

Paul Cezanne is one of the greatest of those who changed the course of art history.

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86.

Paul Cezanne's work proves without doubt that painting is not—or not any longer—the art of imitating an object by lines and colors, but of giving plastic [solid, but alterable] form to our nature.

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87.

Paul Cezanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.

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88.

Paul Cezanne's painting The Boy in the Red Vest was stolen from a Swiss museum in 2008.

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89.

Paul Cezanne encountered rejection and incomprehension before he was allowed to rise to the Olympus of art history and the international art market.

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90.

French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard argues in his work Misere de la philosophie, that Paul Cezanne has, so to speak, the sixth sense: he senses the reality in the making before it is completed in normal perception.

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91.

Paul Cezanne wanted to see and sense the objects he was painting, rather than think about them.

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92.

Paul Cezanne would take hours sometimes to put down a single stroke because each stroke needed to contain "the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style".

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93.

Paul Cezanne believed that while he was painting, he was capturing a moment in time, that once passed, could not come back.

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