The sage of Aix

Like Mont St-Victoire itself, looming over the country to the north of Aix-en-Provence — seen unexpectedly, then just as suddenly hidden, now clear-cut against the sky, at other times a presence in the corner of the eye— the work of Paul Cézanne has been a landmark in the art of the century and more since his death in Aix in 1906. Unlike Monet, Matisse or Picasso, his influence in his own lifetime was restricted to a small circle of admirers — mostly in the last decade of his life. It is an unusual occurrence for so crucial a figure in the history of painting to have gained a reputation that was almost entirely posthumous.

Before 1906, Cézanne was frequently regarded as a curious minor contributor to the Impressionist movement, in early accounts of which he is referred to only briefly or disparagingly. If Camille Pissarro, in the 1870s, had seen Cézanne as the ‘genius of the future’, it was  only in the wake of Cézanne’s death and in subsequent decades that the truth of the phrase became abundantly apparent. Innumerable artists looked to his achievement for guidance and inspiration, some scaling its heights with confidence, others content to nestle in its shade. Cézanne became all things to all artists and, whatever the prevalent aesthetic climate, he remained exemplary in his single-minded integrity, ‘a comfort and support, such as a board provides for the bather’, as Cézanne himself wrote of his reliance on the art of the past that he admired.

When we turn to the literature on Cézanne — to which Alex Danchev’s book is an exceptional contribution — almost from the start the field is remarkable for its diversity and interpretative breadth. It moves from early personal memoirs to exacting formalist analysis, from the vivid responses of artists to the niceties of the catalogue raisonné, from the photographing of Provençal motifs to the limitless shores of psycho-biographic speculation (the apples=breasts school).