The quiet revolutionary of art: Cezanne: A Life, by Alex Danchev

Cezanne: A Life, by Alex Danchev. Profile £30  £23 inc p&p

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I will astonish Paris with an apple’, said the young Paul Cezanne of his still-life paintings. His apple, however, was a long time ripening: he didn’t sell a single picture outside his circle of friends until he was 35 and didn’t hold a one-man exhibition until he was 56.

Before that, however, there was astonishment of the wrong sort. Fellow artists understood his paintings but few others did: a reviewer of the 1874 Impressionist Exhibition was  not alone in noting that ‘M. Cezanne appears to be nothing more than a kind of lunatic, painting under the effects of delirium tremens’.

Another critic, with a shudder, invited his readers to ‘imagine waking up at night and discovering one of his females on the pillow next to you!’.

REALITY CHECK: A Cezanne  self-portrait, painted around 1895

REALITY CHECK: A Cezanne self-portrait, painted around 1895

By the end of his life, though, Cezanne was a source of wonder to young artists and became an inspiration to painters from Picasso to Lucian Freud. As the ‘father of modern art’  he was namechecked by every writer and cultural commentator worth  their salt.

Cezanne’s role as a cultural symbol is as much the theme of Alex Danchev’s imaginative book as the details of his life. He is enlightening about both.

Cezanne was an oddity even among his impressionist friends: he was never a fully-fledged member of the group. Despite the fact that his father owned a bank, he had coarse table manners and the thick tongue-rolling accent of his native Provence.

He was both immensely proud and deeply humble. He was timid with women (‘I don’t know what they’re for, and I’ve always been afraid to find out’), and he was prone to mood swings.

Cezanne’s best friend was his schoolmate, the future author Emile Zola. The two grew up together, wandering the countryside round Aix-en-Provence in time-honoured adolescent fashion, reciting poetry and swimming.

Paul Cezanne's Nature Morte au Melon Vert, which is a late work dating from 1902-06 and depicts shades of green in a melon


When Zola moved to Paris, Cezanne managed to persuade his father to subsidise his own sortie to the capital where the two ‘inseparables’, as they were known, planned to conquer their respective disciplines. Things worked out rather better for the writer than for the painter, and partly to shake  the dust of non-achievement from his hair, Cezanne established a routine of seasonal migration between Paris and Provence.

Despite his misgivings about women he set up home with Hortense Fiquet, a seamstress 11 years his junior and his social inferior, and after a long, hidden relationship and the birth of a son, they eventually married.

Although Cezanne painted her many times, the pair were not close; his friends called her La Boule – the Dumpling – and the painter complained that his newly genteel wife liked ‘only Switzerland and lemonade’.

The course of his art did not run smoothly either. His early paintings were dark and thickly encrusted pieces, the paint slathered on with a palette knife, and often with a strand of sexual violence in them.

To be a painter, thought Cezanne, one needed temperament, or ‘temmperammennte’ as he pronounced it in his broad accent, and he tried a bit too hard to let it show.

'The Boy in the Red Waistcoat', painted in 1894 by Cezanne


Under the influence of Pissarro, however, his colours lightened and he began to develop the system of taches, or patches of colour carefully laid on in parallel, that were to be the building blocks of his pictures.

What fascinated Cezanne, and differentiated him from the impressionists, was that he wanted to capture not the transitory effects of light on a scene but the reality of an object. Whether he was painting an apple, a mountain or a person he sought to  portray its physical presence: the very air it displaced.

 ‘He made a living thing out of a teacup. . .’

It means that his portraits, for example, can’t be read as psychological interpretations of the sitter but as ‘things’. The poet Rilke said of Cezanne’s self-portraits that they were painted with the ‘matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks, “There’s another dog” .’

Danchev recounts the painter’s struggles through a remarkable number of voices.

Among the writers who were fascinated by Cezanne were D. H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway and, of course, Zola, who based his recurring character Claude Lantier on his schoolboy friend. He liberally quotes admiring artists, too: Kandinsky, for example, who thought ‘Cezanne made a living thing out of a teacup,’ and Renoir, who said: ‘He can’t put two strokes of colour on a canvas without it already being very good.’

Cezanne himself was rarely satisfied. He would throw troublesome pictures out of the window where they would hang in the trees for a year or two. Renoir acquired a piece by Cezanne when he was walking in the countryside with a friend who was suddenly caught short. Searching for leaves to use as improvised loo roll, he picked up a piece of stray paper which turned out to be a watercolour of the Bathers that Cezanne had tossed away ‘after having slaved over it for 20 sittings’.

What Danchev’s accomplished and subtle biography shows is that although Cezanne lived a quiet life he nevertheless astonished with more than just an apple.