“I won’t offer you my hand, Monsieur Manet. I haven’t washed for eight days.” With such calculated incivilities, Cézanne invented himself as Impressionism’s bit of rough – the uncouth provincial who disdained Paris and retreated as solitary genius to commune with the Montagne St Victoire in his native Aix-en-Provence. A legend was born and sustained; refined and made scholarly, it reached its apotheosis in Aix’s landmark exhibition Cézanne in Provence in 2006.
But the greatest artists have multiple, contradictory facets and inevitably that show demanded an answer. The impressive new Cézanne et Paris at the Musée du Luxembourg relates how Cézanne spent more than half his working life in the French capital, studied there – his clumsy, agonised copies of Rembrandt and Delacroix in the Louvre are illuminating – and made the difficult trip to and from the Midi at least 20 times. This Cézanne set out not to work alone but to change the course of modern art, trump his peers and “astonish Paris with an apple”.
He followed his childhood friend Emile Zola north in 1861, met Renoir and Pissarro, but stood apart from the Impressionists immediately. In “La Rue des Saules, Montmartre”, painted when he was 28, the houses on a semi-rural street already suggest geometric cubes, colour is muted, the composition dominated by a broad grey pavement and echoing grey clouds. A decade later, in “Les Toits de Paris”, Cézanne drew the view from his fifth-floor Montparnasse studio in three stark horizontal bands to give the impression of depth of space: a massive zinc roof close up; then an expanse of red roofs touched with white, beige and chestnut; finally a heavy low sky – a sombre interpretation of the 19th-century City of Light that has little in common with Monet’s or Pissarro’s glittery, bustling Parisian society on bridges and boulevards.
Privately owned and rarely seen, Cézanne’s quiet, unpeopled visions of Paris introduce a show of surprises and iconic pieces, where almost every work is a masterpiece, with provenances – the Havemeyers, the Russian Morozov, early French collectors Théodore Duret and Victor Chocquet – to match.
Most were originally bought from Ambroise Vollard, whose towering likeness dominates a range of portraits – Zola, Pissarro, an unusually colourful portrait of Chocquet melting into a tapestry of rugs, paintings and marquetry – that bears witness to Cézanne’s close relationship with the Parisian avant-garde.
Vollard posed 115 times for a portrait Cézanne never conceded as finished. Everything about its restless surface marks – the suit folding in on itself, tight lips, shadowy downcast eyes – make this a depiction of interiority and intellectual enquiry, suggesting the intensity of the encounter between dealer and artist, with subtle highlights – on the knuckles, on Vollard’s massive brow – emphasising concentration and tension.
