Post-Impressionism. Nathalia Brodskaya

      In the middle of the 1860s, Cézanne did a great deal of portraits in Aix. He attempted to paint outdoors the friends of his youth, Antoine Marion and Antonin Valabrègue – who later became an art critic. Dominic, his grandfather sat for Cézanne many times. Playing on his name, Paul portrayed Dominic as a Dominican monk, in a white monk’s habit. He painted forcefully, often applying colour with a palette knife, dividing colours with a black outline, exploring different means of expression.

      At the same time, the portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, the artist’s father, was painted reading the newspaper L’Évènement. The figure of his father possesses those characteristic features which make him meaningful. However, reproducing the volume, which mattered to him very much, was provided by a style of painting he had discovered.

      The portrait of Achille Emperaire was also painted in the 1860s. This strange character was also one of Cézanne’s close friends. Emperaire was fascinated with art and loved painting. In Paris he and Cézanne walked around the Louvre, admiring Rubens and the Venetians. Cézanne painted Achille’s portrait in Aix. He depicted his model in a dressing gown and sat him in the same armchair in which he had painted his father.

      At the end of the 1860s, Cézanne was in a state of agonising quests. On the one hand, he was full of respect for the masters of the past, for the classics. At the same time, he was convinced that their way was not suitable for him; outdoors, and only the outdoors, is exactly what an artist of his time needs. His conversation with Pissarro convinced him to a great extent. He states in a letter to Zola, “But, you see! All indoors, studio painting will never match those done outdoors”.[9] He painted views of the Aix vicinity, the valley with the aqueduct and Mont Sainte-Victoire, usually from a height, from which they had viewed the landscape during their childhood outings. He once more offered his landscapes, portraits and nudes for the Salon jury’s verdict, and once more they did not accept them.

      The events of the Paris Commune and the Franco-Prussian War did not find any appreciable reflection in Cézanne’s works and life.

      Many meaningful events occurred for him during these years of his life. He had very likely met Marie-Hortense Fiquet as early as 1869. The beautiful brunette with a classical face had shown up at Cézanne’s studio as a model.

      Life with Hortense brought Paul new difficulties; he had to conceal her existence from his father because he was able to deprive Paul of his cash allowance.

      Simultaneously, he painted a picture with bathers, Pastoral (Idyll), and a harsh, violent composition under the name of The Murder. Magdalene or Grief, suffering, full of passion and painted in a sharp expressive stroke, belongs to this same series of pictures. These pictures can be called narrative only in relation to the others. They were most likely his reflection on life, an outlet for his own passions and in a way a tribute to Symbolism. A Modern Olympia was the conclusion of this cycle.

      29. Paul Cézanne, Bathers, c. 1890–1892.

      Oil on canvas, 60 × 82 cm.

      Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

      It is well known that, while discussing Manet’s Olympia, with a friend of the Impressionists, Doctor Gachet, Cézanne declared, “I can also do something similar to Olympia.” Gachet replied: “Well, do it.” So his canvas could be perceived as a kind of parody of Manet’s painting; there are many common components: the black-skinned servant as well as the flowers. It is, however, a protest aimed at the respected master; yet another of Cézanne’s arguments in his constant battle against Impressionism and against Manet. In comparison to Manet’s cold, elegant, model Victorine Meurent, Cézanne’s Olympia, curled into a ball in a ray of dazzling light, embodies a bundle of passions and, very likely, his personal drama. And the artist himself, enveloped in the smoke of a water pipe, contemplates her, like a spectator would the actress on the stage. Nevertheless, it was through the scandal caused by A Modern Olympia during the first exhibition of the Impressionists that Cézanne first became famous.

      30. Paul Cézanne, The Bather, c. 1885.

      Oil on canvas, 127 × 96.8 cm.

      The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

      31. Paul Cézanne, The Smoker, 1890–1892.

      Oil on canvas, 92.5 × 73.5 cm.

      The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

      32. Paul Cézanne, The Card Players, c. 1890–1895.

      Oil on canvas, 47.5 × 57 cm.

      Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

      He displayed there a number of canvases, but one of the most important critics of that time wrote that it was impossible to imagine a jury that would agree to accept Cézanne’s works. A comparatively liberal female journalist, hiding behind the pseudonym Marc de Montifaud, called A Modern Olympia the work of a mad man suffering from delirium tremens; a picture in which “a nightmare is represented as a sensual vision.” The opinions on Cézanne’s painting did not seem so awful against the overall background of criticism. The exhibition brought gratification, too; the collector Count Doria bought a landscape entitled The House of the Hanged Man, which was called an “appalling daub” in Leroy’s celebrated article.

      However, after all these insults and derision, Cézanne retreated to Aix leaving Hortense and her son, the young Paul, who was born in 1872, in Paris.

      During the third exhibition of the Impressionists in 1877, Cézanne was honoured with special attention of the Charivari critic Louis Leroy, who singled him out as the target of his most subtle insults. Paul exhibited canvases typical of the genres he preferred at that time: landscapes, portraits, some still lifes and bathers. Toward the end of the 1870s, bathers became the symbol of his figurative compositions. Cézanne’s work featured less and less narrative pictures, preferring more and more objects and motifs.

      At the end of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s, Cézanne lived much of the time in Paris and worked in the area, in Melun or Médan-sur-Seine, at Zola’s. Thus he sometimes painted the banks of the Oise, the Auvers or the Pontoise where Pissarro lived. He could be sometimes seen in Normandy. Needless to say Cézanne regularly returned to his native Provence, as he was too attached to his roots. His principal difficulty at this time was his relationship with his family and the need to hide from his father the existence of his son and Hortense whom he could not resolve to marry. Despite all his contrivances, his father eventually found out about the grandchild’s existence.

      The year 1886 was an extraordinary one in Cézanne’s life. The publication

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