Cezanne’s timeless paintings eclipse the contradictions

Visitors to The EY Exhibition: Cezanne at the Tate Modern are greeted by an enigmatic vision of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) in Self-Portrait with Pink Background (1875). It's his attempt to show himself as a “self-assured and sophisticated modern man,” but it appears he failed, at least from where this writer was standing. His shy, suspicious gaze – pupils wedged into the corners of his eyes – is far from confident, and his unkempt beard and messy hair defy his effort to look cosmopolitan. His brushwork and palette, on the other hand, are incredibly assured.

Despite his brilliant command of paint, it's well documented that Cezanne’s self-belief was often in tatters. He may have been ahead of his time as a pioneer of Post-Impressionism but this didn’t translate into commercial success for the majority of his life, and it wasn’t until he was 35 that he sold a painting to someone he didn’t already know. “I find I am lacking in canvases that might be submitted for the delectation of art lovers,” he wrote in 1887, aged 48. “Wanting to offer for critical appraisal only those studies that might pass muster, I cannot take part in any exhibition.” 

He was always an outsider in Paris after he moved there from the south of France in 1861. He cultivated a reputation for himself as a maverick artist from Provence who rejected voguish tastes and he broke with tradition to paint “modern scenes of violence and degradation. The sexualised imagery he often included alludes to society’s discrimination against women as well as a preoccupation with their changing roles in public life,” as the Tate puts it. But his life and art were rooted in uncertainty. Cezanne’s childhood friend, the writer Émile Zola, summed up the artist’s existential crisis in correspondence to one of their mutual pals: “Paul may have the genius of a great painter but he’ll never have the genius to become one. The slightest obstacle sends him into despair.” 

Zola’s proclamation was justified but ultimately false. One way or another, Cezanne’s faltering confidence and refusal to conform stoked his interrogation of what it meant to be a modern artist, an endeavour that spanned his entire career, and today he is widely regarded as one of the greatest post-Impressionists. He reinvented painting and – alongside Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin – abandoned his contemporaries’ concern with the naturalistic and spontaneous rendering of light and colour in favour of more symbolism, order, and structure, paving the way for avant-garde movements like Cubism. As Henri Matisse once said, Cezanne was a “sort of god of painting.”