Cezanne in Provence

In his brief text, Denis Coutagne considers Cezanne for the enigma he and his art may always remain, but within the most elucidating of all possible contexts: Provence, especially around Aix, where Cezanne was born in 1839 and where he died in 1906, virtually "with brush in hand." This was the richly colored, sun-drenched environment in which Cezanne grew up with his closest friend, the novelist Emile Zola, conceived his passion for painting, developed his unique aesthetic, and painted his late and greatest masterpieces - the paintings devoted to such local motifs as the Jas de Bouffan, the Chateau-Noir, the Bibemus quarry, the nude bathers, L'Estaque, and Mont Sainte-Victoire.

No other place could provide the dramatic contrasts of light and dark, color and chiaroscuro that were so at one with the brooding soul and luminous vision of Paul Cezanne, or so consistent with his attempts to produce an art of clarity and calm by bringing into dynamic equilibrium a host of warring opposites: wild nature and orderly form, the momentary and the immutable, color and line, surface and depth, density and transparency, awkwardness and grace, and, not least, his own personal conflicts, among them a conservative, Provencal background and unruly, bohemian tendencies.

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