On Monday 15 October 1906, Paul Cézanne was painting on the hillside above his Les Lauves studio on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence when he was caught in a violent rainstorm. Having sacked his coachman the week before in a row over money, the 67-year-old painter was on foot, and by the time he was picked up by a passing laundry cart and driven home to his house in Aix he was soaked to the skin. On the Tuesday, after rising at dawn to continue work on a portrait of his gardener Vallier, he collapsed into bed, and on the following Monday his wife and son were summoned from Paris. They arrived too late — according to local gossip, Mme Cézanne hadn’t wanted to miss a fitting with her dressmaker. Within five weeks of his death from pneumonia on 23 October, Hortense Cézanne and young Paul had cleared out the artist’s studio; within five months they had sold off the contents to the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard for the substantial sum of 275,000 francs.
Why the unseemly haste? Hortense was a high-maintenance woman, and she may have felt that the surprise success her painter husband had achieved in the last decade of his life couldn’t last. Certainly, it made no sense to keep the works in Provence. For despite his growing reputation in avant-garde Paris, the local image of Cézanne as a holy fool who had sacrificed his considerable advantages in life to artistic ambitions he couldn’t fulfil was firmly rooted in the soil of his native Aix. Henry Pontier, director of the local museum where the young Cézanne had conceived his passion for art and in whose school he had first studied drawing, had even sworn in public that the painter’s work would only enter the collection over his dead body.
Pontier died in 1926, but it was not until 1984 that the first oil painting by Aix’s most famous son entered its museum. Now finally, in the centenary year of his death, the man remembered locally in a Hotel Cézanne, a Cinéma Cézanne, a Parking Cézanne and, most improbably, a Coiffure Cézanne is getting recognition where it counts. In June, Aix’s Musée Granet reopened after four years’ renovation work with Cézanne in Provence, a major exhibition (previously shown in Washington DC) of 170 works from international collections tracing the full course of the artist’s career, from juvenile murals painted on the walls of his first studio to that final portrait of ‘Le Jardinier Vallier’.
This year also sees the opening to the public of two new sites outside Aix connected with the artist. One is the Jas de Bouffan, the big square country house and garden with the distant view of Mont Sainte-Victoire which was acquired by Cézanne’s father in 1859 and remained the artist’s family home even after he started a family of his own. The other is the old Bibémus quarry, whose disused geometric workings of red sandstone were the inspiration for his late proto-Cubist works. His last studio at Les Lauves — preserved almost exactly as he left it, with the familiar still-life crocks gathering dust on a shelf and the ‘Charlot’-style bowler hanging on a peg — has been open to the public since 1954. It’s an unlikely place of pilgrimage: under the occupancy of the ‘hermit of Aix’ it saw 60 visitors in four years.
For an exhibition consisting mainly of landscapes, the title Cézanne in Provence is a bit of a tautology, since — apart from periods in Pontoise and Auvers in the 1870s — he rarely painted anywhere else. All his familiar landscape subjects — the tree-shaded gardens of Jas de Bouffan, the distant views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the rocks of Bibémus, the huddled roofs of Gardanne or the Bay of Marseille seen from L’Estaque — were either on his Aix doorstep or a short distance away. More of a homebody even than Constable, Cézanne was bound to the landscape of his youth by ties which were both emotional and economic. Rejected annually by the Paris Salon — an experience he called ‘undergoing the dry guillotine’ — he remained dependent on an allowance from his banker father, a self-made man who never tired of reminding his son that ‘one dies with genius but eats with money’.
Cézanne père was 87 before the artist dared to admit to the existence of 14-year-old Paul, and to marry Hortense. But even after his father’s death in 1886 he went on living with his mother at Jas de Bouffan, keeping Hortense in style — and out of his way — in Paris. An early portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne with his nose in L’Evénement shows sympathy as well as filial respect: ‘My father was a genius,’ Cézanne re-marked only half-jokingly after the old man’s death. ‘He left me an income of 25,000 francs.’
If not exactly a chip off the old block, Cézanne seems to have inherited the chip on his father’s shoulder. As a young artist in Paris he played the country bumpkin, greeting the fashionably dressed Manet in the Café Guerbois: ‘I do not shake your hand, Mr Manet; I have not washed for a week,’ and delivering submissions to the 1866 Salon in a wheelbarrow. No wonder a juror described one — the portrait of Antony Valabrègue in this exhibition — as ‘not only painted with a knife but a pistol as well’. To the Salon, Cézanne’s lack of painterly polish must have seemed as rude as his lack of manners. But like Mary Cassatt, who later observed at Giverny that Cézanne’s ‘total disregard of the dictionary of manners’ disguised a deeper sort of courtesy, the Paris art world slowly came to see that this provincial ‘carpenter of colour’ was dispensing with the artistic formalities out of respect for form.
By the 1990s, Gauguin could exclaim before a Cézanne at Père Tanguy’s: ‘Nothing looks more like a daub than a masterpiece!’; by 1903, at the sale of his childhood friend Zola’s art collection, private buyers were paying more for Cézanne than Monet. But public galleries lagged behind. As late as 1964, when our own National Gallery acquired its version of ‘Les Grandes Baigneuses’ — the climax of the Musée Granet show — it caused an outcry, prompting a letter to the Telegraph from one T.H. Brain asking why it was necessary to spend £500,000 on ‘a picture of fat washerwomen’, only to prove the painter’s inability to master the nude. In October the picture will be coming home for the National Gallery’s own centenary exhibition of works in British collections, Cézanne in Britain.
Funny to think that an image painted in the artist’s old age — for which he used an old invalid as a model to avoid tittle-tattle — still had the power to shock the British public a year after the scandal of the ‘petites baigneuses’ at Cliveden. What the T.H. Brains of this world probably couldn’t forgive the old Provençal was his objectification of women, not as sex objects, but as embodiments of his love for the contours of his country.
Cézanne in Provence is at the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence until 17 September (www.cezanne-2006.com). Cézanne in Britain opens at the National Gallery on 4 October.
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