Painting a landscape is almost impossible. In any vision, life accumulation is diverse. Painting a tree is the restoration of moving creatures, changing with the light, and the wind emanates instantly on the branches. The painter must stop all of this and transform this vitality into a flat canvas, a fictional fact that the natural world still exists.
Bonnard painted the landscape indoors, and Matisse and Picasso rarely tried through the windows. Van Gogh went out to paint in the fields, trying to capture the discolored colors and vibrations, as if he heard the sound of lights. “The landscape is thinking within me, and I am its consciousness.” Indeed, his landscape doesn’t look like observation, like the Hudson River School painters who work hard to capture the epic qualities of mountains and sky. It is not; Cézanne painted it, as if he jumped into a quarry or an apple, swallowed their essence and repaved it like that. No wonder he is considered antisocial.
His childhood friend and painter Emile Bernard said Cézanne had “no concept of beauty.” How could he possibly be if he was painting in every case, not looking outside, but absorbing him from the inside? The Mont Saint-Victoires he portrayed over and over again were never realistic, even if they were visible to that mountain. They are the cluster of impressions received, weight and imports. On the day he passed away, he painted through painting, painting every day, and painting every day. In his life, he made about 900 paintings.
Monet considered Cezanne “the greatest of all of us.” Mattis called him “a kind of god of painting.” Picasso said that Sezan was “I am the only master again… the father of all of us… the mother wandered in the past.” He influenced the Cubism – Picasso bought the painting L’Estaque’s sea Its appearance is cubist house. Cézanne is a Morandi idol, and Hemingway says Cézanne’s landscape has greatly influenced his work. “Is anyone going to divide colors and feelings again with such a peculiar and almost incredible teacher and make logical sense of them?” Contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall wrote, “No one sees nature or self as the source of artistic revelation like Cézanne;” Luc Tuymans said after his first encounter with Cézanne, “I was immediately shocked by the feeling of total austerity and uneasiness, as if something was superimposed on the image to suppress and contain it. The work depicts a lububious, boring, tedious euphoria pursuing perfection in a narrow range. In other ranges, it is a huge violence.
The painters show us through their paintings how the world touches them, and Cézanne’s inner and uneasiness with the world is clear. He is not a happy person, he strives to find “harmony” in the essence that he has not experienced in his life. He has never been recognized by critics. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s famous essay “Cézanne’s suspicion”, he wrote: “…Nine out of ten, all he saw around him was the pain of his experience of life, his experience of unsuccessfulness, his attempts were unsuccessful, and this was a fragment of an unknown celebration.”
Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839 and died in 1906 at the age of 67. In Aix, the large, grey walls of Sainte-Victoire Mountain form his world, and he painted countless times, leaving behind thirty mountains of oil and watercolor. The stately cypress trees that the Etruscans brought to Italy 2000 years ago are still on the road, in sharp contrast to the orange roof of the stone house. Cézanne lives in Paris and always returns to his beloved hometown and the famous light of Provence.
This year, AIX City is respecting Le DadAIX Masters hosted a series of events, exhibitions, restoration and reopening, collectively known as “Cézanne 2025”. The artist family owns a newly restored country villa of 40 years, Jas de Bouffan, now permanently open to the public and uses his studio on the second floor. “Cézanne Au Jas de Bouffan” on display on Granet Musée Granet in Aix is an exhibition with 130 kinds of paints, watercolors and drawings from institutions around the world. Cézanne’s first geometric landscape and twelve newly discovered and restored murals were painted directly on the wall when he was in his twenties. Fragments of a mural show an elegant woman with fruits and bouquets. La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1897) was once part of the Nazi era series, first displayed. Visitors can also explore the gardens of the estate, the avenue of chestnut woods and the adjacent farmhouses. A new public trail leads to the Bibémus quarry often drawn by Cézanne, the mountains themselves. Visitors can explore his first studio as well as his last studio, the recently restored studio.
The museum’s performance offers his highlights: The tall trees of Jas de Bouffan1883, The Artist’s Father Reads L’Entement1866, Still life with cherries and peaches1885-87, Bather and Rocks1867-69 years. His studio has photos of Cézanne and paints in the air in plein. But even better, just walking in an environment that is so charming and obsessed with him. (The Provence region in southern France also inspired Van Gogh and poets Wallace Stevens, Rilke and William Carlos Williams.) It is not difficult to merge with blind white sunshine, ancient houses, tall cypress trees and famous mountains, which is the backdrop of the city.
As French writer Jean Giono wrote: “There is so much light that the world is seen as in fact: no longer naked as it is during the day, but color with shadows and rare qualities. It delights the eyes. The aspects of things are no longer cruel, but everything tells a story, all of which speaks to the senses.” He could have described a painting by Cézanne.
“Cézanne Au Jas de Bouffan“Until October 12, 2025, part of the celebration of the “Cézanne 2025” held in Aix-en-Provence, France.
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