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Cezanne in three dimensions

A telling portrait of the prickly painter, more idolized over time than understood.

A telling portrait of the prickly painter, more idolized over time than understood (Pantheon Books. 488 pp. $40).
A telling portrait of the prickly painter, more idolized over time than understood (Pantheon Books. 488 pp. $40).Read more

Cezanne
A Life
By Alex Danchev
Pantheon Books. 488 pp. $40

Paul Cezanne is a wonderful enigma. Although he was revered by his contemporaries and has been idolized by the art world since his death in 1906, his art can be difficult for laymen to understand and appreciate.

Yet his importance in art history is unquestioned. Pablo Picasso famously remarked, "Cezanne is my one and only master . . . [he] was like the father of us all," meaning modern artists.

Henri Matisse bought a small Cezanne painting of "bathers" in 1899 and kept it as a cherished talisman for 37 years.

The public continues to respond to Cezanne as though he were a demigod. A retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1996 attracted 548,741 enthusiasts, still a record attendance for a special exhibition there.

Why is he so special?

British scholar Alex Danchev poses this question at the beginning of his new biography of the artist. In the prologue, he summarizes the paradox:

"Coming to terms with Cezanne was not easy," he writes. "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.

"Cezanne 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."

In the nearly 370 pages that follow, Danchev fleshes out this insightful precis with a host of details, anecdotes, and quotations from his subject and others that project a Cezanne as intricately dimensional as a cubist still life.

The story doesn't unfurl according to a strictly linear chronology, which can be exasperating at times, but ultimately Danchev delivers a splendidly nuanced portrait.

He doesn't reveal any startling new facts about Cezanne's career, whose major turning points have been discussed for decades. But he does bring to life his virtues and foibles in a way that makes his art, and its significance, more comprehensible.

A native of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, Cezanne received a solid primary and secondary education. His intellectual accomplishments included proficiency in Latin, a skill he shared with school chum Emile Zola, the future novelist.

Danchev develops the artist's relationship with Zola in considerable depth through the device of quoting extensively from Zola's novel L'Oeuvre, whose protagonist, failed artist Claude Lantier, is based on Cezanne. The novel was published in 1886; perhaps coincidentally, their long and close friendship ended in that year.

Not only did Cezanne not fail, he succeeded spectacularly. But the innovations that instigated his legend took time to emerge and be recognized.

His career as a painter began conventionally, with portraits, still lifes, and mythological subjects that were crudely worked, as though the pigments had been troweled on by a plasterer.

Slowly, incrementally, he refined his vision and technique. As we now can understand, he began to interpret "nature," which included people, as a distillation of what he described as "sensations."

Like the impressionists, Cezanne visualized "sensations" as stabs of pigment. But where impressionist brushstrokes simulated the interaction of light and color, his atomized form.

He constructed his pictures on canvas and paper (in his watercolors) not as description or narrative but as meticulously integrated chromatic structures in which white space often played a key compositional role.

This strategy is most apparent in his numerous renditions of Mont Sainte-Victoire near Aix. The mountain is fully integrated into the space around it, including the atmosphere above it, to the point where it nearly disappears as a discrete object.

Cezanne's breakthrough - the leap to modern art, if you will - was his belief that a painting could, and should, exist exclusively as a unique creation, as an epiphany of personal experience, not as a mere transcription of nature.

He sought always to remain true to himself. Matisse and the impressionist Camille Pissarro, perhaps Cezanne's closest artist friend, reportedly remarked that Cezanne's paintings all represented the essence of himself, regardless of ostensible subject.

It's this essential truth, linked to a forensic delineation of Cezanne's prickly character, that Danchev's fascinating biography communicates.