Cézanne in Paris

Jan 27th, 2012 by apartmentblogger

Until the 26th of February, the exhibition ‘Cézanne et Paris’ will be open at the Musée du Luxembourg. The exhibition is organized with the collaboration of the Petit Palais and the Fine Arts Museum of the City of Paris. it gathers close to 80 works that come from different collections from around the world to explore the great subjects that Cézanne worked on, such as Paris, nudity, portraits and still life.

cezanne-paris

The exhibition, commissioned by Gilles Chazal, the director of the Petit Palais and Maryline Assante di Panzillo, curator of the Department of Paintings of the Petit Palais, tries to show a Cézanne that is actively looking to defy both tradition and modernity.

Paul Cézanne was born in Aix en Provence in 1839. Son of a bourgeois family, whose father was a wealthy banker, his studies took place in Bourbon College, where he established a close relation with Émile Zola. Despite his love for drawing and painting, he registered in the Law School to satisfy his father’s expectations. But his passion was stronger and he dropped out to fulfill his vocation.

His first studio was organized in his family’s country house and, by 1861, he moved to Paris, financially supported by his family. In Paris he met Zola again, and he signed up at the Swiss Academy to manage to pass the entry exam to the Fine Arts Academy. In his first incursion at the Louvre Museum, he was astounded by the works of Velázquez and Caravaggio, who marked his paintings.

He went back to Aix en Provence to work with his father for a short period of time and after he went back to Paris, set on continuing his studies in the Swiss Academy, where he met Pissarro and Guillaumin, who strongly influenced his work by liberating him from the aesthetic strictness of the academy.

In the Salon d’Automne of 1886, he presented his paintings for the first time, but was rejected. This would repeat itself on various occasions, without him ever abandoning painting, despite the deep frustration due to the rejection and the critique of his work, that obviously provoked this disappointment in him.

Annoyed with the art circle in Paris, he went to live with the model Hortense Fiquet to L’Estanque, where he developed prolific work, made up with landscapes and still life, made in natural sceneries just like impressionism demanded.

His return to Paris would be shaped by his landscape work at Louveciennes, but it would take until 1895 until he received recognition, when the art critic and merchant Ambroise Vollard organized a successful exhibition of his work, and Paris fell in love with him. In 1904, the Salon D’Automne was dedicated to his pictorial work. Two years later, Cézanne died, leaving behind an open wound in art avant-gardes.

His work opened the door to fauvists and cubists and it inspired surrealists such as Picasso, Dérain and Braque, among many others.

For more information: http://www.museeduluxembourg.fr/fr/expositions/p_exposition-4/

Nancy Guzman