Cézanne, painting as an ideal

Giuseppe Frangi - There are great artists who deserve to be celebrated without waiting for special anniversaries. Paul Cézanne is undoubtedly one of them. France has dedicated the year 2025 to him with a series of exhibitions and many other initiatives centered in the city where the artist was born and died, Aix-en-Provence. This choice was somewhat inevitable, given Cézanne's distrust of Paris. When he was called to live there, he generally kept to himself—or rather, hid.

“Unknown, and famous,” as Gustave Geffroy, a journalist and art critic who sat for dozens of portrait sessions in 1895, described him. He was famous in his own way, as “influential for the restless and for experimenters in painting.”

For Cézanne, painting was a vocation, and thus he could not coexist with the bourgeois, mercantile, and salon-going conception of art that was so fashionable in Paris. “Here I am, back in the South, from which I should never have left, to pursue the chimerical pursuit of art,” he wrote to Claude Monet.

Many, starting with Monet himself, were aware of his remarkable talent. But he shunned any path that would lead to public recognition: when Maurice Denis wanted to paint a Homage to Cézanne in 1901, an iconic work now on display at the Musée d'Orsay, he was forced to depict the artist through one of his Still Lifes surrounded by gallery owners, critics, and artists, because he did not know what the painter looked like.

In Paris, critics and collectors perceived Cézanne's works as those of a “barbarian.” “Nothing was more disconcerting than those canvases that combined the most extraordinary talent with child wireless naivety,” wrote Emile Bernard, an artist who had traveled to Aix to meet him. “Young people sensed genius, older people sensed madness; the jealous sensed only impotence.”

His great friend from youth and fellow citizen, the writer Émile Zola, accused him of impotence. In a novel, L'Oeuvre, which would cause a painful rift in their relationship, he told the story of a painter who, in pursuit of something unattainable, eventually committed suicide.

Zola did not understand or accept what for Cézanne was a fact of consciousness that translated into a fact of experience. For Cézanne, art was a journey towards a Promised Land (his words). It leads to a glimpse of the Promised Land, to a pact not to presume to possess it. This is why art for Cézanne was an open-ended process, by virtue of a “method that emerges in contact with nature and develops through circumstances.”

Therefore, every work is a journey and not an end in itself. It is not a goal but a passage that, from time to time, marks some progress, provided there is total dedication and relentless work. “I have so much work to do,” he wrote shortly before his death. “Isn't art a priesthood that requires people who are totally devoted to it?” he asked in one of his last letters, sent to his dealer Ambroise Vollard (it is no coincidence that it was a dealer and not a critic who first recognized the greatness of the artist from Aix).

For Cézanne, painting was an exercise in exploring the depths of reality; it sprang from patient observation and thought. Something very close to prayer. As Morton Feldman, a great American composer, wrote, for Cézanne, the medium, i.e., painting, became an ideal. A pilgrimage to Aix is truly worthwhile.