"I Am a Timid Man"

"My father," said Paul Cezanne, "was a man of genius; he left me an income of 25,000 francs." Young Paul, who tried and soon abandoned the idea of working in his father's bank, was a genius of another kind. Having no money worries, he turned to art, and made his way into the company of history's great painters.

Few recognized the old recluse's mastery before his death in 1906--and the master himself was not among them. Today his reputation is still waxing. Next week Chicago's Art Institute will give it a further boost with an extensive exhibition of Cezanne's lifework.

Nothing but Color. In public, Cezanne was a granitic misanthrope who could snarl through his snarled beard: "Compared to me, my compatriots are asses. I detest them all." Privately, he was racked with self-doubt: "I am a timid man, a bohemian, and people laugh at me." Late in life, he confessed that his painting had "made some progress. Why so late and so painfully?"

Cezanne drew clumsily, and comforted himself with the thought that "pure drawing is an abstraction ... as everything in nature has color . . . When the color is rich, the form is at its height." For clarity of line he substituted complexity of tint, building his pictures with painted dabs that reflected the unending richness and surprise of colors in nature.

But if Cezanne dabbed, he did not dot (like Seurat) or dash (like Monet). The vibrations of light, which so fascinated his impressionist friends, left him cool. "I know nothing except color," he explained, and added: "Light is but one tone of a place; shadow is another." Mainly through color, Cezanne recreated the deep sunny space of L'Estaque, a canvas which combines the repose of a pyramid with the lightness of air. Through color he made Madame Cezanne look fixed and solid as a newel post (she was a patient poser but a flighty creature, seldom home), and made the ineptly drawn Bathers a warm evocation of leisurely summer bliss.

According to Nature. Cezanne liked to say that what he saw in nature was "the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone," though what he painted was hardly so chill or so simple. The cubists took their cue from his words, called him a father of modern art. Cezanne would not have appreciated the intended compliment; theories bored him, and his pictures were translations of what he saw, not demonstrations of what he thought.

Ruggedly objective, Cezanne insisted, finally, that "the painter must rely on his vision. He must do everything according to nature, with much reflection, because every color-touch must contain air, light, the object, the plan ... in a word, all that which constitutes a painting."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.