“He didn’t know what he was doing,” his wife recalled. “So odd, so timid,” was Claude Monet’s judgment: “a victim of too much self-doubt.” “A sphinx,” his childhood best friend, Émile Zola, deemed him.
In life, Paul Cézanne 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.
It’s funny, then, that he should be the subject of Europe’s art pilgrimage of the summer. With the aim of knowing Cézanne better, thousands are heading to Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne’s hometown in the South of France, for “Cézanne 2025,” a regionwide tourist drive with programming running through the fall.
It centers on “Cézanne at Jas de Bouffan,” a smartly chosen exhibition of some 130 Cézanne works, most of them on loan, at the Musée Granet, the former drawing school where he first studied art. The show coincides with a partial reopening of his family retreat west of town.
With its aggressive branding, its T.S.A.-style lines and crowds, and its endless commercial spinoffs in the town’s shops and galleries, “Cézanne 2025” offers passing tourists the promise of a scavenger hunt between the works in the museum and the many haunts of Provence’s 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.
The first half of the Musée Granet exhibition says yes. In his 20s, Cézanne was allowed to decorate the grand salon of his father’s 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.
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 Cézanne’s paint. Tall panels showing the four seasons as allegorical women once hung here — they’re now on view at the Granet — in an early flattened folk-romantic style and each signed “Ingres,” a wink at France’s great academic-style painter and long thought by critics to be a joke against tradition.
“‘Ingres’ may not have been a joke,” Bruno Ely, the Musée Granet’s director, told me, clicking his tongue as we considered these four seasons, now reunited from other museums. “When you see these homages to Ingres surrounding Monsieur Cézanne,” he said, “you feel that the son is valorizing both his chosen art and the father whose house he is decorating.”
What they’re “surrounding” is the painting originally at the center of the alcove allegories, which is also present for the Musée Granet reunion: a portrait from about 1865 of Cézanne’s father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne, looking grumpy but dignified while reading. Cézanne 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 Cézanne.
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 Cézanne’s 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’s encouragement.
Cézanne called the dark and thick-stroked era of this portrait his “couillarde,” or “ballsy,” 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 — layers of his own stylistic evolution.
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 Musée Granet, make this evolution clear. And as you roam the estate’s 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.
But what Cézanne painted mattered less than how. A glacial worker who would spend hundreds of hours on a portrait and sometimes took 15 minutes between brushstrokes, Cézanne 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.
His anti-Impressionism owed much to the laboratory-like gray he spent weeks perfecting for the house’s 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.
After his mother’s death in 1897, Cézanne’s 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.
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’s tall room, drenched in the same calculated gray and north-facing light, is where Cézanne’s 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 Musée Granet.
You’ll learn that he exaggerated the size of his Cupid in his paintings, but if Cézanne taught us anything, it’s that the height one sees is the height one feels. The closer you look in Cézanne’s controlled environments, the more you realize there is something antithetical in his experiments to conclusive knowledge.
This has never stopped pilgrims in the past: Allen Ginsburg, who broke in when the building was in limbo, or Joel Meyerowitz who in the 2010s photographed each bottle and dish against that gray. But a lot has changed since the Musée Granet’s last Cézanne blockbuster, “Cézanne en Provence,” in 2006: for starters, nearly 20 years of the internet plus an immersive art craze.
An Instagrammable clarity seems all but assured in the promotional image that Aix has chosen for “Cézanne 2025”: a famous photograph of the painter glowering at age 33. Except it’s been yassified, his face digitally smoothed to look warmer, almost living. It’s grotesque, and it chafes against the cerebral purity of Cézanne’s work.
Worse still, as the newspaper Libération noted last month, the local authorities, for all their talk of a Cézanne homecoming, have just approved a development at the base of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the peak that Cézanne immortalized in dozens of influential landscapes. Some are on view at the Musée Granet. All are meditations on the eternal. But with the real thing wrapped in a vast peri-urban district, will these paintings become mere documents?
This week up on the Lauves hill, a short walk from the studio, you could almost feel the pre-emptive mourning as Germans and Japanese and Italians and Americans snapped their photos of Cézanne’s mountain. For now, the rock still looms over the town just as it did when the great tortoise of Aix collapsed, at 67, while painting it: oddly double-outlined, gray-blue by day and rose-gold at dusk, a sphinx.
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