\u201cHe didn\u2019t know what he was doing,\u201d his wife recalled. \u201cSo odd, so timid,\u201d was Claude Monet\u2019s judgment: \u201ca victim of too much self-doubt.\u201d \u201cA sphinx,\u201d his childhood best friend, \u00c9mile Zola, deemed him.<\/p>\n
In life, Paul C\u00e9zanne was tentative. (Though commanding, too: He spoke so loudly that he made dishes rattle, the painter Mary Cassatt observed.) His paintings followed suit, with such deliberate hesitancy in their brushstrokes that they seemed to destroy the possibility of objective representation. To Braque, Picasso, Duchamp and other 20th-century students of relativity, he was a prophet of doubt.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s funny, then, that he should be the subject of Europe\u2019s art pilgrimage of the summer. With the aim of knowing C\u00e9zanne better, thousands are heading to Aix-en-Provence, C\u00e9zanne\u2019s hometown in the South of France, for \u201cC\u00e9zanne 2025<\/a>,\u201d a regionwide tourist drive with programming running through the fall.<\/p>\n It centers on \u201cC\u00e9zanne at Jas de Bouffan<\/a>,\u201d a smartly chosen exhibition of some 130 C\u00e9zanne works, most of them on loan, at the Mus\u00e9e Granet, the former drawing school where he first studied art. The show coincides with a partial reopening of his family retreat west of town.<\/p>\n With its aggressive branding, its T.S.A.-style lines and crowds, and its endless commercial spinoffs in the town\u2019s shops and galleries, \u201cC\u00e9zanne 2025\u201d offers passing tourists the promise of a scavenger hunt between the works in the museum and the many haunts of Provence\u2019s biggest painter. For students of art, though, the question is whether paintings are enriched by an understanding of the environment in which they are made.<\/p>\n The first half of the Mus\u00e9e Granet exhibition says yes. In his 20s, C\u00e9zanne was allowed to decorate the grand salon of his father\u2019s new country retreat with murals: romantic landscapes and allegorical figures pulled from famous French engravings. In the early 1900s, the next owners of the house sliced these murals off the wall before redecorating, keeping many, but not all, intact. Many are on loan for the exhibition.<\/p>\n Today at that stately square home, when you step in from the deafening cicadas, the salon is churchlike, rounded by an alcove, bearing only traces of C\u00e9zanne\u2019s paint. Tall panels showing the four seasons as allegorical women once hung here \u2014 they\u2019re now on view at the Granet \u2014 in an early flattened folk-romantic style and each signed \u201cIngres,\u201d a wink at France\u2019s great academic-style painter and long thought by critics to be a joke against tradition.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Ingres\u2019 may not have been a joke,\u201d Bruno Ely, the Mus\u00e9e Granet\u2019s director, told me, clicking his tongue as we considered these four seasons, now reunited from other museums. \u201cWhen you see these homages to Ingres surrounding Monsieur C\u00e9zanne,\u201d he said, \u201cyou feel that the son is valorizing both his chosen art and the father whose house he is decorating.\u201d<\/p>\n What they\u2019re \u201csurrounding\u201d is the painting originally at the center of the alcove allegories, which is also present for the Mus\u00e9e Granet reunion: a portrait from about 1865 of C\u00e9zanne\u2019s father, Louis-Auguste C\u00e9zanne, looking grumpy but dignified while reading. C\u00e9zanne feared him, and for years kept a lover and child secret from his father, afraid that he would cut his allowance. But seeing this portrait in its original arrangement, amid embodiments of classical gravitas, calls into question the depth of paternal resentment that many writers have attributed to C\u00e9zanne.<\/p>\n So does the sight of his first studio in Aix, in the top floor of the mansion, which Louis-Auguste installed in 1881-85 after C\u00e9zanne\u2019s attempts in Paris. The studio boasts a tall bay of north-facing windows for ambient light. Seen from the outside, this huge dormer distorts the stately symmetry of the roofline: a visual reminder of a father\u2019s encouragement.<\/p>\n C\u00e9zanne called the dark and thick-stroked era of this portrait his \u201ccouillarde,\u201d or \u201cballsy,\u201d period. It got him rejected by the prestigious Salon show in Paris. And beneath this expressive haste in the mural fragments at the Granet, you can just make out the sunset tones and pretty brushwork of landscapes from his earlier years underneath \u2014 layers of his own stylistic evolution.<\/p>\n In the 1870s he evolved yet again, from this curmudgeonly brutality to an airier Impressionism, under the guidance of Camille Pissarro. Plein-air views of the mansion, hung side-by-side at the Mus\u00e9e Granet, make this evolution clear. And as you roam the estate\u2019s grounds west of town, you can fill your bingo card from the paintings: the reflecting pool, the lion and trout fountains, the buff wall of the house.<\/p>\n But what C\u00e9zanne painted mattered less than how. A glacial worker who would spend hundreds of hours on a portrait and sometimes took 15 minutes between brushstrokes, C\u00e9zanne abandoned the performed spontaneity of Impressionism and labored his way into maturity with deliberately abused perspectives. Gazing at his canvases of housewares and fruits, you feel these objects have been observed over time and throughout the space to the point of delirium. He preferred apples because they rotted slowest.<\/p>\n His anti-Impressionism owed much to the laboratory-like gray he spent weeks perfecting for the house\u2019s studio walls. In person, you realize that this warm-cool tone let him pull bruises of green and purple from the background of his still lifes, flattening the colors throughout the whole picture like blood under skin.<\/p>\n After his mother\u2019s death in 1897, C\u00e9zanne\u2019s family sold the house, in which the painter had been living and painting. He took an apartment and had a stand-alone studio building erected north of town, up the hill in the Lauves quarter, which he used until his death in 1906.<\/p>\n After a circuitous rescue from the property market last century, involving private American benefactors, the Lauves studio has just reopened after a period of renovation. The building\u2019s tall room, drenched in the same calculated gray and north-facing light, is where C\u00e9zanne\u2019s protagonists live: his ceramic ginger pot, glazed crockery, rum bottles netted by straw, human skulls (or replicas of those skulls, for legal reasons), and his Cupid figurine, which you can watch evolve over several paintings at the Mus\u00e9e Granet.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll learn that he exaggerated the size of his Cupid in his paintings, but if C\u00e9zanne taught us anything, it\u2019s that the height one sees is the height one feels. The closer you look in C\u00e9zanne\u2019s controlled environments, the more you realize there is something antithetical in his experiments to conclusive knowledge.<\/p>\n This has never stopped pilgrims in the past: Allen Ginsburg, who broke in when the building was in limbo, or Joel Meyerowitz<\/a> who in the 2010s photographed each bottle and dish against that gray. But a lot has changed since the Mus\u00e9e Granet\u2019s last C\u00e9zanne blockbuster, \u201cC\u00e9zanne en Provence,\u201d<\/a> in 2006: for starters, nearly 20 years of the internet plus an immersive art craze<\/a>.<\/p>\n An Instagrammable clarity seems all but assured in the promotional image that Aix has chosen for \u201cC\u00e9zanne 2025\u201d: a famous photograph<\/a> of the painter glowering at age 33. Except it\u2019s been yassified<\/a>, his face digitally smoothed<\/a> to look warmer, almost living. It\u2019s grotesque, and it chafes against the cerebral purity of C\u00e9zanne\u2019s work.<\/p>\n