Cezanne and Us 🍎 Grand Palais

 

Cezanne (1839 -1906)said,” With an apple 🍎 I will astonish Paris”

Last week was tomatoes 🍅 

This week: Cezanne’s apples 🍎 

At GRAND PALAIS.

A big new Cezanne retrospective 

Though it was more crowded than it looks above.Grand Palais & nearby museums were closed over the weekend for the Pope’s visit to Champs-Elysées.

Plus it was the first day opening.

What some were wearing…I was toute en noir comme d’habitude.

ANDY WARHOL

Plus 

PICASSO

Picasso said, ”Cezanne was the father of us all”

WESSELMAN

The artists he influenced is endless. 

An artist’s artist.

GIACOMETTI 

Giacometti’s pencil drawing

CEZANNE

One of many Cezanne self-portraits. He never painted from models. Only people he knew or himself.

180 paintings 🖼️ on view

Paul Cezanne came to Paris

 In 1862 from Aix-en-Provence.

A country bumpkin, he remained a rebel among the more refined Post-Impressionists Monet and Manet. 

Rejected by École de Beaux Arts, he spent his time copying masterpieces at the Louvre.

Both in appearance and painting style, his paintings were dark,

Consistently rejected by the official salons, he kept returning to Provence where he felt more comfortable.

 

While developing innovative painting techniques that defied the realistic, story-telling style of the day and the past.

 

He abandoned traditional 1-point perspective, tilting table tops like Japanese woodblock prints.

Building up his compositions through geometric shapes.

 

«If you can draw a cube, a sphere, a pyramid, you can draw anything» Cezanne wrote to painter Émile Bernard, in 1904.

 

A still life  by Émile Bernard in the exhibit. 

    This looks a lot like a Cezanne.

Are you still hanging in there? 

I thought it would be a snap to paint Cezanne’s apples 🍎  

It was not. Cezanne leaves air/empty space around his objects. They may look unfinished, but they are not.

Cezanne was up at the crack of dawn, going out to paint Mount Victoire in Provence. 

Père Tanguy BY VAN GOGH

Young painters in Paris discovered his work hanging at art supply merchant, ‘Père Tanguy’. He traded paintings 🖼️ for paint 🎨 So did Van Gogh. 

They came down to Aix to learn directly from the master. Me too. 

I visited Cezanne’s 

Atelier des Lauves in 2016. 

No original art works onsite. But pots and sculptures he painted over and over.

And plenty of apples 🍎 

Cezanne is not an easy artist to like or understand, but important to art history and artists. He broke the rules of realism and from that abstraction evolved.

 Thanks to Hans Hofmann, who saw a retrospective in Paris in 1909, one year after Cezanne died. He opened a painting school in New York and taught many great abstract expressionists, Cezanne’s lessons.

*footnote - Grand Palais decided to drop the accent over the E in Cezanne. 

It was Cezanne’s choice. 

The exhibit is on till 17, January 2027.

IN CEZANNE’S ATELIER DES LAUVES, AIX