'Cézanne,' by Alex Danchev
The solitary brooder from Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, transformed the way that the portrait, the still life and the landscape were painted. Yet Cézanne's biography - strong on opinions and short on witnesses - has been a field of gaps, silences and assumptions. Danchev roams the vast territory of literary biography, with voluminous quotes from writers and poets who looked hard at Cézanne (from Rainer Maria Rilke to Marcel Proust to Martin Heidegger to Samuel Beckett) and found an extraordinary muse. Cézanne was the son of a self-made man - not a badge of honor in France - who got rich breeding rabbits for their hides (used for felt hats) and richer lending money to other rabbit breeders. Cézanne himself, whose imposing bald forehead conveyed impenetrability, is called couillard by Danchev - ballsy or determined - yet he clearly saved that edge or that fervor for his painting. There was no dramatic feud with Zola, nor, Danchev says, was it that fear of women that sidetracked Cézanne toward painting apples, as so many psycho-centric Cézanne observers insist. [...] whereas Rembrandt fixed your eye on a subject, Cézanne's vision in his late landscapes became expansive. "Cézanne: A Life" leaves you wanting more in its scrutiny of Cézanne's ambitious late paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a peaked hill near his home, although Danchev's probing inquiry puts you well on the road to looking at them. Danchev's biography has a lightness as it avoids academic jargon and journeys into Cézanne's work with admirers who devoted serious thought to it. Reported by SFGate 4 hours ago.
The solitary brooder from Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, transformed the way that the portrait, the still life and the landscape were painted. Yet Cézanne's biography - strong on opinions and short on witnesses - has been a field of gaps, silences and assumptions. Danchev roams the vast territory of literary biography, with voluminous quotes from writers and poets who looked hard at Cézanne (from Rainer Maria Rilke to Marcel Proust to Martin Heidegger to Samuel Beckett) and found an extraordinary muse. Cézanne was the son of a self-made man - not a badge of honor in France - who got rich breeding rabbits for their hides (used for felt hats) and richer lending money to other rabbit breeders. Cézanne himself, whose imposing bald forehead conveyed impenetrability, is called couillard by Danchev - ballsy or determined - yet he clearly saved that edge or that fervor for his painting. There was no dramatic feud with Zola, nor, Danchev says, was it that fear of women that sidetracked Cézanne toward painting apples, as so many psycho-centric Cézanne observers insist. [...] whereas Rembrandt fixed your eye on a subject, Cézanne's vision in his late landscapes became expansive. "Cézanne: A Life" leaves you wanting more in its scrutiny of Cézanne's ambitious late paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a peaked hill near his home, although Danchev's probing inquiry puts you well on the road to looking at them. Danchev's biography has a lightness as it avoids academic jargon and journeys into Cézanne's work with admirers who devoted serious thought to it. Reported by SFGate 4 hours ago.