Alina 2018-07-13 14:05:00 painters biographies
Born sometime between 1488 and 1490, Titian became an artist's apprentice in Venice as a teenager. He worked with Sebastiano Zuccato, Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione before branching out on his own. Titian became one of Venice's leading artists around 1518 with the completion of "Assumption of the Virgin." He was soon creating for works for leading members of royalty, including King Philip II of Spain and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Pope Paul III also hired Titian to paint portraits of himself and his grandsons. Titian died on August 27, 1576.
Born Tiziano Vecellio in what is now Pieve di Cadore, Italy, sometime between 1488 and 1490, Titian is considered one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance. The oldest of four children born to Gregorio and Lucia Vecellio, Titian spent his early years in the town of Pieve di Cadore, near the Dolomite mountains.
In his teens, Titian became an apprentice to the Venetian artist Sebastiano Zuccato. He soon went work with such leading artists as Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione. Giorgione proved to be especially influential to the young painter.
In 1516, Titian began work on his first major commission for a church called Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. He painted "Assumption of the Virgin" (1516-1518) for the church's high altar, a masterwork that helped establish Titian as one of the leading painters in the area. He was known for his deft use of color and for his appealing renderings of the human form.
A short time after completing the legendary altarpiece, Titian created "The Worship of Venus" (1518-1519). This mythology-inspired work was just one of several commissioned by Alfonso I d'Este, duke of Ferrara. Titian managed to cultivate a broad range of royal patrons during his career, including King Philip II of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
Titian's Venetian home was a mecca for many of the community's artistic types. He had an especially close friendship with writer Pietro Aretino. Aretino is said to have helped Titian get some of his commissions. Sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino was another frequent visitor.
Over the years, Titian created portraits of leading figures of the day. He painted two works featuring Pope Paul III between 1545 and '46, and spent six months living at the Vatican while making these paintings. In 1548, he traveled to the court of Charles V, where he painted his portrait as well.
In his later career, Titian focused more on religious and mythological works. For Spain's Philip II, he painted "Venus and Adonis" (c. 1554), a piece inspired by Ovid's "Metamorphoses" that shows the goddess Venus trying in vain to hold on to her beloved Adonis. Titian again explored his fascination with the Roman goddess of love in "Venus and the Lute Player" (1565-1570).
Titian continued to paint until his death, on August 27, 1576, in Venice. He reportedly died of the plague. The same illness had claimed the life of his son, Orazio, a few months later. His other son, Pomponio, sold his father's house and its contents in 1581. Some of the artwork there can now be found in museums around the world, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Through the wealth of works he left behind, Titian has inspired countless generations of artists. Rembrandt, Diego Velázquez, Antoon van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens are just a handful of painters who were influenced by the great Venetian artist.
Alina 2018-07-12 14:05:00 painters biographies
Tintoretto was born Jacopo Robusti in Venice, Italy, circa 1518. His career as a professional artist ran from the 1530s until his death in 1594. He became known as one of the 16th century's masters of Venetian painting. His style was dramatic and innovative, and his oeuvre includes many religious scenes commissioned by churches and civic buildings, as well as mythological scenes and portraits of Venice's elite. Some of Tintoretto's best-known works are "The Last Supper" of 1594, "Saint Mark Rescuing the Slave," "Susanna and the Elders," and his cycles for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and the Doge's Palace.
Little is known of Tintoretto's early life. He was born Jacopo Robusti in Venice, Italy, circa 1518. His father, Giovanni Battista Robusti, was a cloth-dyer, hence his nickname Tintoretto, which means "little dyer." According to some later accounts, Tintoretto apprenticed with master painter Titian. It may be more likely that he trained in the workshop of a lesser-known artist, however.
Despite the lack of information about Tintoretto's childhood and education, it is clear that he was aware of the work of Venice's prominent painters, as well as other Italian masters, by the time he was a young man. Throughout much of his career, Tintoretto sought to combine Michelangelo's drawing style with Titian's use of color while developing his own style.
Tintoretto was working as an independent professional artist by 1539. He remained in Venice throughout his career, becoming one of the city's most famous painters of the 16th century. Most of his work was oil painting, and he received many commissions for church altarpieces, large-scale paintings for civic buildings, and portraits of Venetian noblemen and statesmen.
One painting that helped make Tintoretto famous was "Saint Mark Rescuing the Slave" (also known as "The Miracle of the Slave"), which the artist painted in 1548, at the age of 30. As he became well-known throughout Venice, Tintoretto created dozens of large paintings of religious subjects, including "The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes" (1545-50) and "Susanna and the Elders" (1555-56). Throughout the 1550s, he worked on a cycle of biblical scenes for the church of Madonna dell'Orto, including "The Worship of the Golden Calf."
Tintoretto used loose brushwork and rich, glowing colors (especially reds, golds and greens) in his paintings, which were distinctive for their theatricality. His figures are usually shown in motion, and his compositions make use of opposing forces within a deep pictorial space. In order to plan his complex scenes of many figures, Tintoretto prepared by making small model stages, which he would set up with small wax or clay figures in order to plot his arrangements and observe the effects of light and shadow.
Tintoretto is often associated with Mannerism, an artistic style from the late Renaissance that makes use of strongly dramatic subjects and depicts human figures in exaggerated proportions and poses. Contrastly, however, Tintoretto's individualistic style also sets him apart from that movement.
Tintoretto was especially productive during the final two decades of his life. His paintings became darker and more mysterious: for example, in his masterpiece The Last Supper for the church of San Giorgio Maggiore (1594), Christ and the apostles gather around a table that recedes into a deep, shadowy interior space.
Tintoretto's other major commissions from the mid-1570s onward include a cycle of religious paintings for the confraternity building of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, on which he worked from 1575 through 1588, comprised of Old Testament scenes and episodes from the life of Christ, including a large "Crucifixion." He also executed a sequence of mythological paintings for the redecoration of the Doge's Palace.
Tintoretto died in Venice on May 31, 1594. He and his wife, Faustina Episcopi, had eight children; three of them had trained with their father and carried on his artistic legacy.
Alina 2018-07-11 14:05:00 painters biographies
Francis Bacon was born to English parents living in Dublin, Ireland, on October 28, 1909. After traveling to Germany and France as a young man, he settled in London and began a career as a self-taught artist. Most of his paintings from the 1940s to '60s depict the human figure in scenes that suggest alienation, violence and suffering. Bacon's provocative, expressive work is considered some of the most important art of the postwar era. He died in Madrid, Spain, on April 28, 1992.
Francis Bacon was born to English parents living in Dublin, Ireland, on October 28, 1909, and is the collateral descendant and namesake of the famed 16th-17th century philosopher. Bacon was raised in Ireland and England, and as a child, he suffered from asthma, which kept him from receiving a formal education. Instead, he was tutored at home.
Bacon left home in 1927 at just 17 years old, with his parents not accepting his sexuality. He traveled to Berlin, Germany, where he took part in the city's gay nightlife as well as its intellectual circles, and to Paris, France, where he became further interested in art through visits to galleries. When Bacon returned to London in the late 1920s, he began a short career as an interior decorator, also designing furniture and rugs in a modern, Art Deco-influenced style. Additionally, he began to paint, first in a Cubist style influenced by Pablo Picasso and later in a more Surrealist manner. Bacon's self-taught work attracted interest, and in 1937, he included in a London group exhibition entitled "Young British Painters."
Francis Bacon later dated the true beginning of his artistic career as 1944. It was around this time that he devoted himself to painting and began creating the works for which he is still remembered, with "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" seen as a major turning point. His large canvases depicted human figures—most often a single figure isolated in an empty room, in a cage or against a black background. For one series of paintings, Bacon was inspired by Diego Velázquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X (circa 1650), but he painted the subject in his own style, using dark colors and rough brushwork and distorting the sitter's face. These works came to be known as Bacon's "screaming pope" paintings.
In other works, a figure might stand beside a flayed carcass of meat. Still other paintings were derived from traditional religious subject matter. In all of his paintings, Bacon emphasized the universal experiences of suffering and alienation.
Even during a period in which modern art was dominated by abstraction, Bacon continued to paint the human face and figure. His emotional use of brushwork and color as well as his exaggeration of forms caused him to be labeled as an Expressionist artist, though he rejected the term.
Some of Bacon's works of the 1960s depict a lone male figure dressed in a business suit. Others showed nude figures, often with grotesquely altered proportions and features. Bacon used brighter colors at times, but themes of violence and mortality were still central to his art. He also frequently painted portraits of people he knew, including fellow artist Lucian Freud and George Dyer, who met Bacon upon attempting to rob the painter's home.
(Bacon and Dyer went on to become lovers in a relationship marked by great tumult. Dyer at one point framed Bacon for drug possession and later committed suicide. Their time together was depicted in the 1998 film Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, starring Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig and Tilda Swinton.)
Bacon, who was known for his carousing, maintained a home and a notoriously cluttered studio in London, and continued to paint until the end of his life. While on holiday, he died in Madrid, Spain, on April 28, 1992, at the age of 82.
Francis Bacon is considered one of Britain's major painters of the post-WWII generation, as well as an important influence on a new generation of figurative artists in the 1980s. His work is owned by major museums around the world, and he has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions. His studio was acquired by the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it has been recreated as a room for visitors to view. Bacon's "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" broke the record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction in 2013, when it was purchased for a final price of $142.4 million at Christie's in New York.
Alina 2018-07-10 14:05:00 painters biographies
Born November 23, 1883, Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco created impressive, realistic paintings. A product of the Mexican Revolution, he overcame poverty and eventually traveled to the U.S. and Europe to paint frescos for major institutions. A man of unparalleled vision, as well as striking contradiction, he died of heart failure at age 65.
The life of José Clemente Orozco is a tale of tragedy, adversity and outstanding achievement. Born in Mexico in 1883, he was raised in Zapotlán el Grande, a small city in Mexico’s southwestern region of Jalisco. When he was still a young boy, Orozco’s parents moved to Mexico City in hopes of making a better life for their three children. His father, Ireneo, was a businessman, and his mother, Maria Rosa, worked as a homemaker and sometimes sang for extra income. Despite his parents’ efforts, they often lived on the edge of poverty. The Mexican Revolution was heating up, and being a highly sensitive child, Orozco began noticing the many hardships people around him faced. While walking to school, he witnessed the Mexican cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada working in an open shop window. Posada’s politically engaged paintings not only intrigued Orozco, but they also awakened his first understanding of art as a powerful expression of political revolt.
At age 15, Orozco left the city and traveled to the countryside. His parents sent him away in order to study agricultural engineering, a profession he had very little interest in pursuing. While at school, he contracted rheumatic fever. His father died of typhus soon after he returned home. Perhaps Orozco finally felt free to pursue his true passion, because almost immediately he began taking art classes at San Carlos Academy. To support his mother, he also worked small jobs, first as a draftsman for an architectural firm, and then later as a post-mortem painter, hand-coloring portraits of the dead.
Just around the time Orozco became certain about pursuing a career in art, tragedy struck. While mixing chemicals to make fireworks to celebrate Mexico’s Independence Day in 1904, he created an accidental explosion that injured his left arm and wrist. Due to the national festivities, a doctor did not see him for several days. By the time he was seen, gangrene had taken over and it was necessary to amputate his entire left hand. As he healed, the Mexican Revolution was eminent in everyone’s minds, and the personal suffering Orozco experienced was mirrored in the growing political strife happening all around him.
For the next several years, Orozco scraped by, working for a time as a caricaturist for an independent, oppositional newspaper. Even after he finally landed his first solo exhibition, titled “The House of Tears,” a glimpse at the lives of the women working in the city’s red-light district, Orozco found himself painting Kewpie dolls to pay the rent. Given his own struggles, it's not surprising that his paintings teemed with social complexities. In 1922, Orozco began creating murals. The original impetus for this work was an innovative literacy campaign put in place by Mexico’s new revolutionary government. The idea was to paint murals on public buildings as a method for broadcasting their campaign messages. He did this for only a short time, but the medium of mural painting stuck. Orozco eventually became known as one of the three “Mexican Muralists.” The other two were his contemporaries, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Over time, Orozco’s work was uniquely recognized and set apart from Rivera’s and Siqueiros’ for its intensity and focus on human suffering. His vast scenes illustrated the lives and struggles of peasants and working-class folk.
Orozco married Margarita Valladares in 1923, and they had three children. In 1927, after years of working as an underappreciated artist in Mexico, Orozco left his family and moved to the United States. He spent a total of 10 years in America, during which time he witnessed the financial crash of 1929. His first mural in the United States was created for Pomona College in Claremont, California. He also devised massive works for the New School for Social Research, Dartmouth College and the Museum of Modern Art. One of his most famous murals is The Epic of American Civilization, housed in Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. It took two years to complete, is composed of 24 panels and is nearly 3,200 square feet.
In 1934, Orozco returned to his wife and country. Now established and highly respected, he was invited to paint in the Government Palace in Guadalajara. The main fresco found in its vaulted ceilings is titled The People and Its Leaders. Orozco, now in his mid-fifties, then painted what would become considered a masterpiece, the frescos found inside Guadalajara’s Hospicio Cabañas, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the oldest hospital complexes in Latin America. The work, which became known as the “Sistine Chapel of the Americas,” is a panorama of Mexico’s history, from pre-Hispanic times, including scenes of early Indian civilizations, through the Mexican Revolution, which he depicts as a society engulfed in flames. In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City commissioned him to create the centerpiece for its exhibition “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art.” His contributions included Dive Bomber and Tank, both commentaries on the impending Second World War.
Around this time, Orozco met Gloria Campobello, the prima ballerina for the Mexico City Ballet. Within three years, he left his wife Margarita to live with Gloria in New York City. The affair, however, ended almost as quickly as it started. In 1946, Campobello left him, and Orozco returned to Mexico to live alone. In 1947, the American author John Steinbeck asked Orozco to illustrate his book The Pearl. A year later, Orozco was asked to paint his only outdoor mural, Allegory of the Nation, at Mexico’s National Teachers College. The work was photographed and featured in Life magazine.
In the fall of 1949, Orozco completed his last fresco. On September 7, he died in his sleep of heart failure at the age of 65. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he was hailed as a master of the human condition, an artist bold enough to cut through the lies a nation tells its people. As Orozco insisted, “Painting…it persuades the heart.”
Alina 2018-07-09 14:05:00 painters biographies
Thomas H. Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, on April 15, 1889. He was known for his dazzling use of color in paintings that captured realistic depictions of people at work, play or in repose in various habitats, often in rural settings. Some of his famous works include “America Today,” “Persephone,” “Planting” and a mural for the Missouri State Capitol. He was also teacher to Jackson Pollock. He died on January 19, 1975 in Kansas City, Mo.
Alina 2018-07-07 14:05:00 painters biographies
Fernand Léger was born on February 4, 1881, in Argentan, France. In 1913, he started a series of abstract paintings called "Contrast of Forms." He ventured to make his first film in 1924. By the 1930s, he had increasingly incorporated elements of modernism in his work. During the 1940s, he produced a series of paintings called "Divers." Fernand Léger died on August 17, 1955, in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
Fernand Léger was born to a peasant family in the rural town of Argentan, France, on February 4, 1881. Léger's father was a cattle dealer who hoped his son would follow in his footsteps and choose what he deemed a practical trade. Although Léger was initially discouraged from becoming an artist, his father became supportive once he recognized Léger's gift for drawing.
With his father's approval, Léger enrolled in architecture school and accepted an apprenticeship under an architect in Caen. In 1901, upon completion of his two-year internship, Léger moved to Paris, France, where he worked as an architectural draftsman.
Wishing to further pursue his art education, Léger applied to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and was unfortunately rejected.In 1903 he stated attending the Paris School of Decorative Arts instead, while also being unofficially mentored by two École des Beaux-Arts professors who recognized his potential. Up until this point, Léger's painting style blended Impressionism with Fauvism. In 1907 he attended a retrospective of Paul Cézanne's work. From then on, Léger's work took on more elements of Cubism, but with his own unique style of slicing forms into tubular cylinders, casually referred to as "tubism."
In 1913, he started a series of abstract paintings called "Contrast of Forms." A year later, he put his art career on hold to serve in the French army during World War I. In 1916, he was gassed at Verdun. Having incurred a head injury, he was sent home and hospitalized until 1917.
After the war, Léger continued to paint but also tried his hand at other mediums, including book illustrations and set and costume designs for the theater. In 1924, Léger ventured to make his first film, Ballet Mécanique. That same year, he opened his own school of modern art.
As Léger's work matured in the 1920s and '30s, he increasingly incorporated elements of modernism—particularly representations of machinery and human figures expressing speed and movement. His notable paintings from this period include "The Mechanic," "Mona Lisa with Keys," "Adam and Eve," and "Composition with Two Parrots," among others.
With the arrival of World War II, in 1940, Léger temporarily relocated to America. During this time, he produced a series of paintings called "Divers," noted for its unique use of large patches of color that overlapped outlines to portrayed stylized figures of swimmers diving off docks in Marseille. This series was followed by two others also portraying human figures in motion: "Acrobats" and "Cyclists." In 1946, Léger went back to France, where he revitalized his art school and became active in the Communist Party. In the 1950s, Léger's work focused on the theme of the common man, and further expanded to include tapestry, pottery, stained glass and mosaics.
Léger died on August 17, 1955, in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
Alina 2018-07-06 14:05:00 painters biographies
Robert Baden-Powell was a lieutenant-general in the British Army. He is best known for founding the Boy Scouts when he learned that his military textbook Aids to Scouting was being used for training boys in woodcraft. He then wrote Scouting for Boys and retired from the army in 1910 to devote his time to the group. His sister, Agnes, helped to found the Girl Guides and worked with Juliette Gordon Low to bring Girl Scouts to the United States.
Alina 2018-07-05 14:05:00 painters biographies
The work of Post-Impressionist French painter Paul Cézanne, born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, can be said to have formed the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic inquiry, Cubism. The mastery of design, tone, composition and color that spans his life's work is highly characteristic and now recognizable around the world. Both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were greatly influenced by Cézanne.
Famed painter Paul Cézanne was born on January 19, 1839, in Aix-en-Provence (also known as Aix), France. His father, Philippe Auguste, was the co-founder of a banking firm that prospered throughout the artist's life, affording him financial security that was unavailable to most of his contemporaries and eventually resulting in a large inheritance. In 1852, Paul Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon, where he met and befriended Émile Zola. This friendship was decisive for both men: with youthful romanticism, they envisioned successful careers in Paris' booming art industry—Cézanne as a painter and Zola as a writer.
Consequently, Cézanne began to study painting and drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Design) in Aix in 1856. His father opposed the pursuit of an artistic career, and in 1858 he persuaded Cézanne to enter law school at the University of Aix-en-Provence. Though Cézanne continued his law studies for several years, he was simultaneously enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he remained until 1861.
In 1861, Cézanne finally convinced his father to allow him to go to Paris, where he planned to join Zola and enroll at the Académie des Beaux-Arts (now the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris). His application to the academy was rejected, however, so he began his artistic studies at the Académie Suisse instead. Though Cézanne had gained inspiration from visits to the Louvre—particularly from studying Diego Velázquez and Caravaggio—he found himself crippled by self-doubt after five months in Paris. Returning to Aix, he entered his father's banking house, but continued to study at the School of Design.
The remainder of the decade was a period of flux and uncertainty for Paul Cézanne. His attempt to work in his father's business was abortive, so in 1862 he returned to Paris, where he stayed for the next year and a half. During this period, Cézanne met Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro and became acquainted with the revolutionary work of Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. The budding artist also admired the fiery romanticism of Eugène Delacroix's paintings. But Cézanne, never entirely comfortable with Parisian life, periodically returned to Aix, where he could work in relative isolation. He retreated there, for instance, during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871).
Paul Cézanne's paintings from the 1860s are peculiar, bearing little overt resemblance to the artist's mature and more important style. The subject matter is brooding and melancholy and includes fantasies, dreams, religious images and a general preoccupation with the macabre. His technique in these early paintings is similarly romantic, often impassioned. For his "Man in a Blue Cap" (also called "Uncle Dominique," 1865-1866), he applied pigments with a palette knife, creating a surface everywhere dense with impasto. The same qualities characterize Cézanne's unique "Washing of a Corpse" (1867-1869), which seems to both portray events in a morgue and be a pietà—a representation of the biblical Virgin Mary.
A fascinating aspect of Cézanne's style in the 1860s is the sense of energy in his work. Though these early works seem groping and uncertain in comparison to the artist's later expressions, they nevertheless reveal a profound depth of feeling. Each painting seems ready to explode beyond its limits and surface. Moreover, each seems to be the conception of an artist who could either be a madman or a genius—the world will likely never know, as Cézanne's true character was unknown to many, if not all, of his contemporaries.
Though Cézanne received encouragement from Pissarro and some of the other Impressionists during the 1860s and enjoyed the occasional critical backing of his friend Zola, his pictures were consistently rejected by the annual Salons and frequently inspired more ridicule than did the early efforts of other experimenters in the same generation.
In 1872, Cézanne moved to Pontoise, France, where he spent two years working very closely with Pissarro. Also during this period, Cézanne became convinced that one must paint directly from nature. One result of this change in artistic philosophy was that romantic and religious subjects began to disappear from Cézanne's canvases. Additionally, the somber, murky range of his palette began to give way to fresher, more vibrant colors.
A direct result of his stay in Pontoise, Cézanne decided to participate in the first exhibition of the "Société Anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc." in 1874. This historic exhibition, which was organized by radical artists who'd been persistently rejected by the official Salons, inspired the term "Impressionism"—originally a derogatory expression coined by a newspaper critic—marking the start of the now-iconic 19th century artistic movement. The exhibit would be the first of eight similar shows between 1874 and 1886. After 1874, however, Cézanne exhibited in only one other Impressionist show—the third, held in 1877—to which he submitted 16 paintings.
After 1877, Cézanne gradually withdrew from his Impressionist colleagues and worked in increasing isolation at his home in southern France. Scholars have linked this withdrawal to two factors: 1) The more personal direction his work began to take was not well-aligned with that of other Impressionists, and 2) his art continued to generate disappointing responses from the public at large. In fact, after the third Impressionist show, Cézanne did not exhibit publicly for nearly 20 years.
Cézanne's paintings from the 1870s are a testament to the influence that the Impressionist movement had on the artist. In "House of the Hanged Man" (1873-1874) and "Portrait of Victor Choque" (1875-1877), he painted directly from the subject and employed short, loaded brushstrokes—characteristic of the Impressionist style as well as the works of Monet, Renoir and Pissarro. But unlike the way the movement's originators interpreted the Impressionist style, Cézanne's Impressionism never took on a delicate asthetic or sensuous feel; his Impressionism has been deemeed strained and discomforting, as if he were fiercely trying to coalesce color, brushstroke, surface and volume into a more tautly unified entity. For instance, Cézanne created the surface of "Portrait of Victor Choque" through an obvious struggle, giving each brushstroke parity with its adjacent strokes, thereby calling attention to the unity and flatness of the canvas ground, and presenting a convincing impression of the volume and substantiality of the object.
Mature Impressionism tended to forsake the Cézanne's and other deviating interpretations of the classic style. The artist spent most of the 1880s developing a pictorial "language" that would reconcile both the original and progressive forms of the style—for which there was no precedent.
During the 1880s, Cézanne saw less and less of his friends, and several personal events affected him deeply. He married Hortense Fiquet, a model with whom he'd been living for 17 years, in 1886, and his father died that same year. Probably the most significant event of this year, however, was the publication of the novel L'Oeuvre by Cézanne's friend Zola. The hero of the story is a painter (generally acknowledged to be a composite of Cézanne and Manet) who is presented as an artistic failure. Cézanne took this presentation as a critical denunciation of his own career, which hurt him deeply, and he never spoke to Zola again.
Cézanne's isolation in Aix began to lessen during the 1890s. In 1895, largely due to the urging of Pissarro, Monet and Renoir, art dealer Ambroise Vollard showed several of Cézanne's paintings. As a result, public interest in Cézanne's work slowly began to develop. The artist sent pictures to the annual Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1899, 1901 and 1902, and he was given an entire room at the Salon d'Automne in 1904.
While painting outdoors in the fall of 1906, Cézanne was overtaken by a storm and became ill. The artist died in the city of his birth, Aix, on October 22, 1906. At the Salon d'Automne of 1907, Cézanne's artistic achievements were honored with a large retrospective exhibition.
Cézanne's paintings from the last three decades of his life established new paradigms for the development of modern art. Working slowly and patiently, the painter transformed the restless power of his earlier years into the structuring of a pictorial language that would go on to impact nearly every radical phase of 20th century art.
This new language is apparent in many of Cézanne's works, including "Bay of Marseilles from L'Estaque" (1883-1885); "Mont Sainte-Victoire" (1885-1887); "The Cardplayers" (1890-1892); "Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup" (1866); and "The Large Bathers" (1895-1905). Each of these works seems to confront the viewer with its identity as a work of art; landscapes, still lifes and portraits seem to spread out in all directions across the surface of the canvas, demanding the viewer's full attention.
Cézanne used short, hatched brushstrokes to help ensure surface unity in his work as well as to model individual masses and spaces as if they themselves were carved out of paint. These brushstrokes have been credited with employing 20th century Cubism's analysis of form. Furthermore, Cézanne simultaneously achieved flatness and spatiality through his use of color, as color, while unifying and establishing surface, also tends to affect interpretations of space and volume; by calling primary attention to a painting's flatness, the artist was able to abstract space and volume—which are subject to their medium (the material used to create the work)—for the viewer. This characteristic of Cézanne's work is viewed as a pivotal step leading up to the abstract art of the 20th century.
