Paul Cézanne (* 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence; † 22 October 1906 Aix-en-Provence) was a French painter. Cézanne's work is assigned to different styles: From an art-historical point of view, Cézanne's works make him one of the pioneers of Classical Modernism.
While his early works were still characterized by Romanticism - such as the murals in the Jas de Bouffan country house - and Realism, he arrived at a new pictorial language through intensive study of Impressionist forms of expression, which attempted to consolidate the deliquescent pictorial impression of Impressionist works. He abandoned the illusionistic distant effect, broke the rules established by the representatives of Academic Art, and strove for a renewal of traditional creative methods based on the Impressionist color space and color modulatory principles.
His painting provoked incomprehension and ridicule among contemporary art critics. Until the late 1890s, it was mainly fellow artists such as Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir, as well as art collectors and the gallery owner Ambroise Vollard, who became aware of Cézanne's work and were among the first buyers of his paintings. Vollard opened the first solo exhibition in his Paris gallery in 1895, which led to a broader examination of the artist's work.
Of the many artists who took their cue from Cézanne's work after his death, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and André Derain deserve special mention. The contrasting orientation of the painterly works of the aforementioned artists reveals the complexity of Cézanne's oeuvre. From an art historical point of view, Cézanne's works rank him among the pioneers of Classical Modernism.
Cézanne's pictorial subjects were often bathers, the landscape around the Montagne Sainte-Victoire mountains, still lifes, and portraits of his model, his lover and later wife, Hortense Fiquet.