The Secrets of Cezanne: Are Artists as Influential as Great Thinkers?
ézanne had his first one-man show in 1895, at the age of fifty-six. His dealer, Ambroise Vollard, put the “Bathers at Rest” of 1876-7 in the window of his shop, safely knowing that it would cause offence. He also suggested that his client make a lithograph of the painting. Cézanne produced a sizeable work, known as “Large Bathers”, and heightened some of the impressions with watercolour. In 1905, Picasso bought one and took it off to his studio. Two years later, its secrets fed into “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. Cézanne’s influence on Georges Braque was just as clear, and openly admitted. “The discovery of his work overturned everything”, Braque said in old age. “I had to rethink everything. There was a battle to be fought against much of what we knew, what we had tended to respect, admire, or love. In Cézanne’s works we should see not only a new pictorial construction but also - too often forgotten - a new moral suggestion of space.”
Cézanne was an obscure figure even when famous; he was secretive, frugal, unacquisitive; he would often go missing for weeks on end
Artists are greedy to learn and art is self-devouring; the handover from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was swiftly done. As was the handover from one kind of artist to another. Cézanne was an obscure figure even when famous; he was secretive, frugal, unacquisitive; he would often go missing for weeks on end; his emotional life, such as it was, remained deeply private and protected; and he had no interest in what the world called success. Braque was a dandy with a chauffeur; while Picasso single-handedly embodied the twentieth century’s ideal of an artist - public, political, rich, successful in all the meanings of the word, camera-loving and concupiscent. And if Cézanne might have thought Picasso’s life vulgar - in the sense that it detracted from the time, and the human integrity, required to make art - how austere and high-minded Picasso would come to seem compared to the most “successful” artists of the twenty-first century, flogging their endless versions of the same idea to know-nothing billionaires.