Paul Cezanne was a post-impressionist painter who focused on form and influenced movements such as Cubism. He used controlled brushstrokes and subtle color tones to create depth in his still life and landscape paintings. His works, including The Card Players, are highly acclaimed. He died in 1906.
Paul Cezanne is known as one of the most talented post-impressionist painters. While Impressionism focused on light and color, Post-Impressionists wanted more depth in their art with much more focus on form. Cézanne was also instrumental in art movements such as Cubism and influenced Pablo Picasso.
Cezanne’s work presents an innovative way of representing nature, color and form using an ordered method of artistic application. His approach has inspired cubists and avant-garde artists. Cezanne said that “Everything in nature takes shape from the sphere, the cone and the cylinder” and Cubism was based on these principles of form. Pablo Picasso, along with Georges Braque, was a leader in the Cubist modern art movement.
Post-Impressionist artists experimented with meanings outside of what the surface of the painting represented, but were still influenced by Impressionism’s use of light to add dimension to objects. Paul Cezanne and other Post-Impressionists experimented with brighter colors and sharper edges than those exhibited by Impressionist works. Cezanne is considered a master of creating forms with color in both planes and brushstrokes.
Born on January 19, 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, France, Cézanne was the son of a banker and grew up in a wealthy environment. His family wanted him to be a lawyer and Cezanne studied law while also studying art. Eventually, however, he gave up law for art and went to the Académie Suisse in Paris to learn all he could and develop his talents. His early artistic influences included the works of Claude Monet and Gustave Courbet. It was Courbet who inspired the layering of Cezanne’s paint on his paintings using a palette knife.
In the mid-1870s Paul Cezanne created color and form with controlled brushstrokes to add the appearance of fullness and dimension to objects. His still life paintings went beyond capturing light in a purely impressionistic way. For example, in Still Life with Apples and a Vase of Primroses, he uses many subtle color tones to flesh out the shapes of the fruit and flowers.
In the early 1880s, Cézanne began painting landscapes of Provence. His works of houses and boats used planes of color to create depth. He married in 1886 and had one son, Paul Cezanne, Jr.
Cezanne’s set of five paintings from 1890, The Card Players, features figures of Provençal peasants playing cards. The works are highly acclaimed for their subtle color variations that create lifelike human forms. On October 22, 1906, Paul Cezanne died of pneumonia and complications from diabetes in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence.
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