Description
Cézanne — the father of modern art, finally in full. Alex Danchev’s Cezanne: A Life is the definitive modern biography of Paul Cézanne: the difficult, doubting Provençal whose apples, bathers, and Mont Sainte-Victoire taught Picasso, Matisse, and Braque how to see — and thereby invented modernism itself.
Danchev traces the long obscurity — decades of Salon rejections and critical scorn, the poverty and the parental disapproval — the intense friendship and painful rupture with Émile Zola, the retreat to Aix-en-Provence, the slow, stubborn, almost monastic working method, painting the same mountain dozens of times — and the late triumph, when the solitary painter his neighbors thought a crank became the prophet both cubists and fauves claimed as their father.
Rich, authoritative, and deeply felt, this is the Cézanne biography to read — the life behind the still lifes that changed art forever, told with the patience its great subject always demanded and so richly deserved.
They called him the father of modern art — but in his own lifetime, Paul Cézanne was a stubborn, prickly outsider painting in the hills above Aix while the Paris art world mostly ignored him. Alex Danchev’s Cézanne: A Life (2012) is the biography that finally does this paradoxical genius justice.
Drawing on a vast range of primary sources, Danchev traces Cézanne’s journey from a banker’s son in Provence to the solitary master of Mont Sainte-Victoire, whose patient, searching brushstrokes — hundreds of sittings for a single portrait, dozens of canvases of one mountain — laid the groundwork for Cubism and modernism itself. Along the way we meet the young firebrand who befriended Zola as a schoolboy, brawled with the Impressionists, and endured decades of rejection before recognition arrived late and all at once.
Danchev, a gifted writer as well as a scholar, tells the story with warmth and insight. For anyone who has stood before a Cézanne and felt the stillness vibrate, this is the life behind the work — essential reading.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet