Exhibition from Friday 9 June to Sunday 17 September 2006

The National Gallery in London is among forty galleries to collaborate with the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence in celebrating Paul Cézanne’s Provence. This exceptional exhibition, the largest of its kind, brings together 110 of the artist’s oils and water colours associated with locations in and near Aix. Cézanne, one of a handful of truly great painters, was inspired by the vivid light and atmosphere of his native Provence and it was here that most experts believe he achieved his greatest work. There are also opportunities to visit for the first time many of the locations used by Cézanne.

If Cézanne’s half-Italian father had had his way, Cézanne would have been either a hatter or a banker. The huge success of the family’s felt hat business in Aix led to his father establishing a bank, where Cézanne worked from 1859 to 1861 while studying law at Aix. It was only in April 1861 that his father reluctantly agreed to help him make a career in art and sent him to Paris. 

Cézanne’s time in Provence

1861-1871
Although Cézanne was an active painter in Paris during this period, closely associated with Manet and other artists who in time would be called Impressionists, he returned to the family home in Provence at regular intervals. The Jas (‘sheep barn’ in Provençal) de Bouffan, bought by Cézanne’s father in 1859, is a manor set in a glorious park with majestic avenues of chestnut and plane trees, fountains adorned with lions and dolphins, and a delightful orangery hidden behind a wall of greenery. Here Cézanne painted furiously, often failing to finish canvases, which gathered dust in the loft. He also worked directly on the wall of its main drawing room. His emphasis was on romantic scenes and imposing landscapes, reflecting the traditional style of the decorative compositions that had been extremely popular during the 18th century.

1871 – 1882
The Franco-Prussian War, and the arrival of the Prussians in Paris, brought a mass exodus from the capital. Cézanne discovered l’Estaque, a quiet port with striking views across Marseille and the Mediterranean, and stayed there from time to time over the next decade. The sea, trees and rocks encouraged structured compositions dominated by the vivid colours of his surroundings. Cézanne acknowledged the influence of Impressionism, especially of Pissaro, lightening his palette and experimenting with brushwork. 

1882–1888
Cézanne spent long periods at l’Estaque and le Jas de Bouffan but also discovered a striking new location for his landscape painting. During the winter of 1885-86 Cézanne stayed at Gardanne, a former mining town a few miles south of Aix, built on the slopes of the Captivel hill. Cézanne had no interest in the individual houses and shops or even its inhabitants. For him, Gardanne was an assembly of buildings clustered around the church tower, a geometrical composition created in monochromatic style with an emphasis on brick reds, a proto-Cubist structural concept of painting that Cézanne was beginning to develop.

Although Cézanne still preferred the Jas de Bouffan, and vividly recreated on canvas its avenue of chestnut trees, the frequent friction between him and his father drove the painter elsewhere. At such times Cézanne stayed with his sister Rose, who in 1886 with her husband bought a farm and dovecote at nearby Bellevue. As its name suggests, the farmhouse had a superb view of the viaduct stretching across the meadows surrounding the River Arc. Cézanne had an eye for the Italian tradition that permeated much of his work but the variety of Provençal landscapes contained all the classical elements and he had no need to visit Italy.


Le Pont de l'Arc

1888-1900
The painter travelled widely in eastern France and returned to Paris but also discovered exciting new locations close to Aix. Cézanne rented a room to be near the Château-Noir, built in the 18th century by an industrialist from Marseille, whose most innovative product was lampblack paint, derived from soot. He used it to decorate the interior and wooden furniture of the château, which soon became known by the superstitious local inhabitants as the ‘Black Castle’ and was rumoured to be the home of the Devil. Cézanne was captivated by this half-abandoned neo-Gothic building, surrounded by steep ridges, twisted pinewoods and dense undergrowth, so thick that the sky is barely glimpsed through the foliage.

Cézanne found fresh inspiration in the rocky plateau of Bibémus, quarried for stone for many hundreds of years and the source used for many of Aix’s finest buildings. In Cézanne’s day the quarries had been all but abandoned and he was able to rent a hut, previously used for storing explosives, where he could keep his canvases and stay overnight. The quarry had superb views of the Montagne-Sainte-Victoire, which appears in many of Cézanne’s paintings, but Cézanne returned time and time again to record the dramatic geometric shapes of the quarry’s rocks, a luminous yellow ochre with rich harmonic tints. His work here was full of abstract features, anticipating Cubism.


Montagne-Sainte-Victoire

1900-1906
In his declining years, Cézanne returned to Aix and took a studio in the Rue Boulegon. This was rather unsuitable for his latest idea, a series of large-scale paintings of bathing nudes, not altogether welcomed by the more staid elements of the city. So in 1901 Cézanne bought a small plot of land beside the Verdon canal, part of an olive grove on a hunting estate, above the town of Les Lauves. Cézanne had the existing hut pulled down and built a new, purpose-built studio. The painter received a large number of visits in this remote spot, perhaps stimulated by reports of abundant young ladies reclining naked beside the canal, seeking immortality on Cézanne’s canvases. Some of his finest work, an unparalleled synthesis of light, colour, figuration and composition, dates from this period.


Studio Les Lauves

In Cézanne’s footsteps

The ambience that stimulated Cézanne is of itself a unique experience, and two sites, the Jas de Bouffan and the quarries at Bibémus, are open to the public for the first time. At Jas de Bouffan, sold by the family in 1899 against the painter’s wishes, you can see a variety of images painted by Cézanne and the attic floor constructed to form his studio. The quarry site, perfectly preserved, has a fascinating, timeless air. Even the hut that Cézanne rented remains in good repair.

The studio above Les Lauves continues to attract visitors but perhaps most fascinating of all is Cézanne’s last studio in Aix. The spirit of the master lives on amidst his equipment and all the bric-a-brac of a painter uncaring of worldly clutter. You almost expect the old boy to come in from the garden, clutching a half finished bottle of wine or brandy, as though awakened abruptly from an afternoon snooze.

Cézanne in Provence
Musée Granet
Place Saint-Jean-de-Malte
F- 13100 Aix-en-Provence

Office de tourisme Aix-en-Provence
2, place du Général de Gaulle
F-13100 Aix-en-Provence
T. +33 4 42 161 091

cezanne2006@aixenprovencetourism.com
www.aixenprovencetourism.com

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