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Who Was Michelangelo?

Michelangelo Buonarroti was a painter, sculptor, architect and poet widely considered one of the most brilliant artists of the Italian Renaissance. Michelangelo was an apprentice to a painter before studying in the sculpture gardens of the powerful Medici family.

What followed was a remarkable career as an artist, famed in his own time for his artistic virtuosity. Although he always considered himself a Florentine, Michelangelo lived most of his life in Rome, where he died at age 88.

Early Life

Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Italy, the second of five sons.

When Michelangelo was born, his father, Leonardo di Buonarrota Simoni, was briefly serving as a magistrate in the small village of Caprese. The family returned to Florence when Michelangelo was still an infant.

His mother, Francesca Neri, was ill, so Michelangelo was placed with a family of stonecutters, where he later jested, "With my wet-nurse's milk, I sucked in the hammer and chisels I use for my statues."

Education

Indeed, Michelangelo was less interested in schooling than watching the painters at nearby churches and drawing what he saw, according to his earliest biographers (Vasari, Condivi and Varchi). It may have been his grammar school friend, Francesco Granacci, six years his senior, who introduced Michelangelo to painter Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Michelangelo's father realized early on that his son had no interest in the family financial business, so he agreed to apprentice him, at the age of 13, to Ghirlandaio and the Florentine painter's fashionable workshop. There, Michelangelo was exposed to the technique of fresco (a mural painting technique where pigment is placed directly on fresh, or wet, lime plaster).

Medici Family

From 1489 to 1492, Michelangelo studied classical sculpture in the palace gardens of Florentine ruler Lorenzo de' Medici of the powerful Medici family. This extraordinary opportunity opened to him after spending only a year at Ghirlandaio's workshop, at his mentor's recommendation.

This was a fertile time for Michelangelo; his years with the family permitted him access to the social elite of Florence - allowing him to study under the respected sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni and exposing him to prominent poets, scholars and learned humanists.

He also obtained special permission from the Catholic Church to study cadavers for insight into anatomy, though exposure to corpses had an adverse effect on his health.

These combined influences laid the groundwork for what would become Michelangelo's distinctive style: a muscular precision and reality combined with an almost lyrical beauty. Two relief sculptures that survive, "Battle of the Centaurs" and "Madonna Seated on a Step," are testaments to his phenomenal talent at the tender age of 16.

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Move to Rome

Political strife in the aftermath of Lorenzo de' Medici's death led Michelangelo to flee to Bologna, where he continued his study. He returned to Florence in 1495 to begin work as a sculptor, modeling his style after masterpieces of classical antiquity.

There are several versions of an intriguing story about Michelangelo's famed "Cupid" sculpture, which was artificially "aged" to resemble a rare antique: One version claims that Michelangelo aged the statue to achieve a certain patina, and another version claims that his art dealer buried the sculpture (an "aging" method) before attempting to pass it off as an antique.

Cardinal Riario of San Giorgio bought the "Cupid" sculpture, believing it as such, and demanded his money back when he discovered he'd been duped. Strangely, in the end, Riario was so impressed with Michelangelo's work that he let the artist keep the money. The cardinal even invited the artist to Rome, where Michelangelo would live and work for the rest of his life.

Personality

Though Michelangelo's brilliant mind and copious talents earned him the regard and patronage of the wealthy and powerful men of Italy, he had his share of detractors.

He had a contentious personality and quick temper, which led to fractious relationships, often with his superiors. This not only got Michelangelo into trouble, it created a pervasive dissatisfaction for the painter, who constantly strived for perfection but was unable to compromise.

He sometimes fell into spells of melancholy, which were recorded in many of his literary works: "I am here in great distress and with great physical strain, and have no friends of any kind, nor do I want them; and I do not have enough time to eat as much as I need; my joy and my sorrow/my repose are these discomforts," he once wrote.

In his youth, Michelangelo had taunted a fellow student, and received a blow on the nose that disfigured him for life. Over the years, he suffered increasing infirmities from the rigors of his work; in one of his poems, he documented the tremendous physical strain that he endured by painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Political strife in his beloved Florence also gnawed at him, but his most notable enmity was with fellow Florentine artist Leonardo da Vinci, who was more than 20 years his senior.

Poetry and Personal Life

Michelangelo's poetic impulse, which had been expressed in his sculptures, paintings and architecture, began taking literary form in his later years.

Although he never married, Michelangelo was devoted to a pious and noble widow named Vittoria Colonna, the subject and recipient of many of his more than 300 poems and sonnets. Their friendship remained a great solace to Michelangelo until Colonna's death in 1547.

Sculptures

'Pieta'

Soon after Michelangelo's move to Rome in 1498, the cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, a representative of the French King Charles VIII to the pope, commissioned "Pieta," a sculpture of Mary holding the dead Jesus across her lap.

Michelangelo, who was just 25 years old at the time, finished his work in less than one year, and the statue was erected in the church of the cardinal's tomb. At 6 feet wide and nearly as tall, the statue has been moved five times since, to its present place of prominence at St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.

Carved from a single piece of Carrara marble, the fluidity of the fabric, positions of the subjects, and "movement" of the skin of the Piet - meaning "pity" or "compassion" - created awe for its early viewers, as it does even today.

It is the only work to bear Michelangelo's name: Legend has it that he overheard pilgrims attribute the work to another sculptor, so he boldly carved his signature in the sash across Mary's chest. Today, the "Pieta"remains a universally revered work.

'David'

Between 1501 and 1504, Michelangelo took over a commission for a statue of "David," which two prior sculptors had previously attempted and abandoned, and turned the 17-foot piece of marble into a dominating figure.

The strength of the statue's sinews, vulnerability of its nakedness, humanity of expression and overall courage made the "David" a highly prized representative of the city of Florence.

Originally commissioned for the cathedral of Florence, the Florentine government instead installed the statue in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. It now lives in Florence's Accademia Gallery.

Paintings

Sistine Chapel

Pope Julius II asked Michelangelo to switch from sculpting to painting to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which the artist revealed on October 31, 1512. The project fueled Michelangelo's imagination, and the original plan for 12 apostles morphed into more than 300 figures on the ceiling of the sacred space. (The work later had to be completely removed soon after due to an infectious fungus in the plaster, then recreated.)

Michelangelo fired all of his assistants, whom he deemed inept, and completed the 65-foot ceiling alone, spending endless hours on his back and guarding the project jealously until completion.

The resulting masterpiece is a transcendent example of High Renaissance art incorporating the symbology, prophecy and humanist principles of Christianity that Michelangelo had absorbed during his youth.

'Creation of Adam'

The vivid vignettes of Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling produce a kaleidoscope effect, with the most iconic image being the " Creation of Adam," a famous portrayal of God reaching down to touch the finger of man.

Rival Roman painter Raphael evidently altered his style after seeing the work.

'Last Judgment'

Michelangelo unveiled the soaring "Last Judgment" on the far wall of the Sistine Chapel in 1541. There was an immediate outcry that the nude figures were inappropriate for so holy a place, and a letter called for the destruction of the Renaissance's largest fresco.

The painter retaliated by inserting into the work new portrayals: his chief critic as a devil and himself as the flayed St. Bartholomew.

Architecture

Although Michelangelo continued to sculpt and paint throughout his life, following the physical rigor of painting the Sistine Chapel he turned his focus toward architecture.

He continued to work on the tomb of Julius II, which the pope had interrupted for his Sistine Chapel commission, for the next several decades. Michelangelo also designed the Medici Chapel and the Laurentian Library - located opposite the Basilica San Lorenzo in Florence - to house the Medici book collection. These buildings are considered a turning point in architectural history.

But Michelangelo's crowning glory in this field came when he was made chief architect of St. Peter's Basilica in 1546.

Was Michelangelo Gay?

In 1532, Michelangelo developed an attachment to a young nobleman, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and wrote dozens of romantic sonnets dedicated to Cavalieri.

Despite this, scholars dispute whether this was a platonic or a homosexual relationship.

Death

Michelangelo died on February 18, 1564 - just weeks before his 89th birthday - at his home in Macel de'Corvi, Rome, following a brief illness.

A nephew bore his body back to Florence, where he was revered by the public as the "father and master of all the arts." He was laid to rest at the Basilica di Santa Croce - his chosen place of burial.

Legacy

Unlike many artists, Michelangelo achieved fame and wealth during his lifetime. He also had the peculiar distinction of living to see the publication of two biographies about his life, written by Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi.

Appreciation of Michelangelo's artistic mastery has endured for centuries, and his name has become synonymous with the finest humanist tradition of the Renaissance.
Watch "Michelangelo: Artist and Man" on HISTORY Vault

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Michelangelo Buonarroti was a painter, sculptor, architect and poet widely considered one of the most brilliant artists of the Italian Renaissance. Michelangelo was an apprentice to a painter before studying in the sculpture gardens of the powerful Medici family. What followed was a remarkable career as an artist, famed in his own time for his artistic virtuosity.

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Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter, and the leading force behind the abstract expressionist movement in the art world. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. Jackson Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.

Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. His father, LeRoy Pollock was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government. Jackson Pollock grew up in Arizona and Chico, California. During his early life, Pollock experienced Native American culture while on surveying trips with his father. Although he never admitted an intentional imitation or following of Native American art, Jackson Pollock did concede that any similarities were probably a result of his "early memories and enthusiasm."

In 1929, Jackson Pollock studied at the Students' League in New York under regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton. During the early 1930s, he worked in the Regionalist style, and was also influenced by Mexican muralist painter such as Diego Rivera, as well as by certain aspects of Surrealism - a 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of the subject matter.

In November 1939, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted an important Picasso exhibition entitled: Picasso: 40 Years of His Art, which contained 344 works of Pablo Picasso and his famous anti-war mural, Guernica. The exhibit led Pollock to recognize the expressive power of European modernism, which he had previously rejected in favor of American art. He began to forge a new style of semi-abstract totemic compositions, refined through obsessive reworking.

In the decades following World War II, a new artistic vanguard emerged, particularly in New York, that introduced radical new directions in art. The war and its aftermath were at the underpinnings of the movement that became known as Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock, among other Abstract Expressionists, anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, expressed their concerns in abstract art that chronicled the ardor and exigencies of modern life. By the mid-1940s, Jackson Pollock introduced his famous 'drip paintings', which represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century, and forever altered the course of American art. At times the new art forms could suggest the life-force in nature itself, at others they could evoke man's entrapment - in the body, in the anxious mind, and in the newly frightening modern world. To produce in Jackson Pollock's 'action painting', most of his canvases were either set on the floor, or laid out against a wall, rather than being fixed to an easel. From there, Jackson Pollock used a style where he would allow the paint to drip from the paint can. Instead of using the traditional paintbrush, he would add depth to his images using knives, trowels, or sticks. This form of painting, had similar ties to the Surreal movement, in that it had a direct relation to the artist's emotions, expression, and mood, and showcased their feeling behind the pieces they designed.

There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was."

- Jackson Pollock

In addition to the 'drip and splash' style, the All-over method of painting, is also one which is tied to Jackson Pollock, and many of the artworks he created. This art form avoids any clear and distinct points of emphasis, or any identifiable parts within the canvas being used to create the piece. The designs and images which were created using this style of painting, really had no relation to the size of the canvas that was worked on; the lack of dimensions, and disregard for size of the drawings, were some unique features which this form of art captured. Many of the pieces which Jackson Pollock created following this style, required him to trim or crop the canvas, in order for the image to fit in, and to work with the overall features of the art.

Pollock's radical methods and growing reputation quickly caught the attention of the mass media. In August 1949, Life magazine ran a feature story posing the question: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The text was alternately mocking and respectful. In 1951, at the height of the artist's career, Vogue magazine published fashion photographs by Cecil Beaton of models posing in front of Pollock's drip paintings. Although this commercial recognition signaled public acceptance - and was symptomatic of mass culture's inevitable expropriation of the avant-garde - Pollock continuously questioned the direction and reception of his art. At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style. Pollock's work after 1951 was darker in color, including a collection painted in black on unprimed canvases. These paintings have been referred to as his 'Black pourings' and when he exhibited them at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, none of them sold. But later Pollock moved to a more commercial gallery by returning to using color and figurative elements. In 1960s, Jackson Pollock was viewed as one of the most important figures in the art world, and one of the innovators of the avant-garde styles that were beginning to emerge. Like many other famous figures, the issues which Jackson Pollock suffered from in his personal life, such as his strife with alcoholism, added to his "superstar" status. And, his premature death, which took place when he was killed in a car crash, also added to the legendary status which he is still known from in the art world today.

To this day Jackson Pollock is known as a leader in the most important 20th century American art movements. The risks and the creative approaches he took, led future artists to create with passion, as opposed to trying to follow set boundaries or guidelines. In addition, Pollock's radical paintings and dramatic persona helped draw attention to the broader group of Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is."

- Jackson Pollock

Just like Vincent van Gogh on Impressionism, Jackson Pollock's impact on American Abstract Expressionist movement is tremendous. Jackson Pollock made it possible for American painting to compete with European modernism by applying modernism's logic to new problem. He created a new scale, a new definition of surface and touch, a new syntax of relationships among space, pigment, edge, and drawing, displacing hierarchies with an unprecedented and powerful and fabulously intricate self-generating structure. Although actively engaged throughout his life in a serious dialogue with the history of world art which ranged from Paleolithic and Indian art to Renaissance art masters Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci; from Mexican muralists to the Surrealists Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, and Max Ernst - Pollock's aspirations always remained courageously and even chauvinistically of this continent. Pollock's defiant refusal to stay within traditional bounds, violence, exasperation and stridency, all were paradigmatically New World. At a time - and in a guise that absolutely nobody expected - these were the unlikely characteristics that finally came together to produce an American Prometheus.

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Jackson Pollock: 100 Famous Paintings Analysis and Biography

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Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter, and the leading force behind the abstract expressionist movement in the art world. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. Jackson Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.

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Paul Cézanne, (born January 19, 1839, Aix-en-Provence, France-died October 22, 1906, Aix-en-Provence), French painter, one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne's art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the conventional values of painting in the 19th century because of his insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself, regardless of subject matter. See also the Britannica Classic by Roger Fry: Cézanne.

Early life and work

Cézanne was the son of a well-to-do bourgeois family. He received a classical education at the Collège Bourbon in Aix. In 1858, under the direction of his father-a successful banker determined to have his son enter the same profession-Cézanne entered the law school of the University of Aix-en-Provence. He had no taste for the law, however, having decided at an early age to pursue some kind of artistic career, and after two years he persuaded his father, with the support of his mother's entreaties, to allow him to study painting in Paris.

Cézanne's first stay in Paris lasted only five months. The instability of his personality gave way to severe depression almost immediately when he found that he was not as proficient technically as some of the students at the Académie Suisse, the studio where he began his instruction. He stayed as long as he did only because of the encouragement of the writer Émile Zola, with whom he had formed a close friendship at the Collège Bourbon. Returning to Aix, Cézanne made a new attempt to content himself with working at his father's bank, but after a year he returned to Paris with strengthened resolution to stay. During his formative period, from about 1858 to 1872, Cézanne alternated between living in Paris and visiting Aix.

The early 1860s was a period of great vitality for Parisian literary and artistic activity. The conflict had reached its height between the Realist painters, led by Gustave Courbet, and the official Académie des Beaux-Arts, which rejected from its annual exhibition-and thus from public acceptance-all paintings not in the academic Neoclassical or Romantic styles. In 1863 the emperor Napoleon III decreed the opening of a Salon des Refusés to counter the growing agitation in artistic circles over painters refused by the Salon of the Académie. The works of the Refusés were almost universally denounced by critics-a reaction that consolidated the revolutionary spirit of these painters. Cézanne, whose tastes had soon shifted away from the academic, became associated with the most advanced members of this group, including Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas. Most of these artists were only in their 20s (as was Cézanne) and were just forming their styles; they were to become, with the exception of Manet, the Impressionist school. Cézanne's friend Zola was passionately devoted to their cause, but Cézanne's friendship with the other artists was at first inhibited by his touchiness and deliberate rudeness, born of extreme shyness and a moodiness that was offended by their convivial ways. Nevertheless, he was inspired by their revolutionary spirit as he sought to synthesize the influences of Courbet, who pioneered the unsentimental treatment of commonplace subjects, and of the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, whose compositions, emphasizing colour instead of line, greatly impressed Cézanne.

During this period Cézanne began to develop a style that was violent and dark; he painted scenes with harsh extremes of light and shadow and with a looseness and vigour that are remarkable for the time but that can be traced to the influence of Delacroix's swirling compositions. The sensitive dynamism of this youthful period, with the inner feverishness that it reveals, foreshadows the daring innovations of Fauvism and of modern Expressionism, particularly the works of Maurice de Vlaminck and Georges Rouault.

Impressionist years

In July 1870, with the outbreak of the Franco-German War, Cézanne left Paris for Provence, partly to avoid being drafted. He took with him Marie-Hortense Fiquet, a young woman who had become his mistress the previous year and whom he married in 1886. The Cézannes settled at Estaque, a small village on the coast of southern France, not far from Marseille. There he began to paint landscapes, exploring ways to depict nature faithfully and at the same time to express the feelings it inspired in him. He began to approach his subjects the way his Impressionist friends did; in two landscapes from this time, Snow at Estaque (1870-71) and The Wine Market (1872), the composition is that of his early style, but already more disciplined and more attentive to the atmospheric, rather than dramatic, quality of light.

In January 1872 Marie-Hortense gave birth to a son. Soon afterward, at the invitation of Camille Pissarro, Cézanne took his family to live at Pontoise in the valley of the Oise River. There and at the nearby town of Auvers he began seriously to learn the techniques and theories of Impressionism from Pissarro, who of his painter friends was the only one patient enough to teach him despite his difficult personality. The two artists painted together intermittently through 1874, taking their canvases all over the countryside and painting out-of-doors, a technique that was still considered radical. From this time on, Cézanne was to devote himself almost exclusively to landscapes, still lifes, and, later, portraits. Pissarro persuaded Cézanne to lighten his colours and showed him the advantages of using the broken bits of colour and short brushstrokes that were the trademark of the Impressionists and that Cézanne came to use regularly, although with a different effect, in his later work. Even while under Pissarro's guidance, however, Cézanne painted pictures clearly indicating that his vision was unique and that his purpose was quite different from that of the Impressionists. Although he used the techniques of these young artists, he did not share their concern with emphasizing the objective vision presented by the light emanating from an object; rather, his explorations emphasized the underlying structure of the objects he painted. Already he was composing with cubic masses and architectonic lines; his strokes, unlike those of the Impressionists, were not strewn with colour, but they complemented each other in a chromatic unity. His most famous painting of this period, The House of the Suicide (1873), illustrates these forces at work.

In 1874 Cézanne returned to Paris and participated in the first official show of the Impressionists. Although the paintings that Cézanne showed there and at the third show in 1877 were the most severely criticized of any works exhibited, he continued to work diligently, periodically going back to soak up the light of Provence. He made sojourns to Estaque in 1876, and in 1878 to Aix-en-Provence, where he had to endure the insults of his tyrannical father, whose financial help he needed to survive since his canvases were still not finding buyers. The single exception to this lack of patronage was the connoisseur Victor Chocquet, whose portrait he painted in 1877. After the second Impressionist show Cézanne broke professionally with Impressionism, although he continued to maintain friendly relations with "the humble and colossal Pissarro," with Monet, "the mightiest of us all," and with Renoir, whom he also admired. Dismayed by the public's reaction to his works, however, he isolated himself more and more in both Paris and Aix, and he effectively ended his long friendship with Zola, as much because of neurotic distrust and jealousy as from disappointment at Zola's "popular" writing, which his antisocial and single-minded disposition found incomprehensible.

Development of his mature style

During this period of isolation, from the late 1870s to the early '90s, Cézanne developed his mature style. His landscapes from this period, such as The Sea at L'Estaque (1878-79), are perhaps the first masterpieces of the mature Cézanne. These landscapes contain compositions of grand and calm horizontals in which the even up-and-down strokes create a clean prismatic effect and an implacable blue sea spreads wide across the canvases. Like all his mature landscapes, these paintings have the exciting and radically new quality of simultaneously representing deep space and flat design. Cézanne knew well how to portray solidity and depth; his method was that used by the Impressionists to indicate form. In his own words, "I seek to render perspective only through colour." The painter's intelligence and eye were able to strip away that which was diffuse and superimposed in the view of a given mass, in order to analyze its constituent elements. In works such as these, he chose to rediscover a more substantial reality of simple forms behind the glimmering veil of appearances: "Everything in Nature is modeled after the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. One must learn to paint from these simple figures." At the same time, such pictures present shimmering harmonies of colour that can be seen as totally flat designs, without depth. Other striking landscapes from this period are the prismatic landscapes of Gardanne ( The Mills of Gardanne, c. 1885) and the series of monumental compositions in which Mont Sainte-Victoire near Aix becomes a mythical presence.

A.J. Wyatt--Philadelphia Museum of Art, George W. Elkins Collection,

Cézanne was to use essentially the same approach in his portraits. Some of the best known are Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Armchair (1890-94), Woman with Coffee-Pot (1890-94), and The Card Players (1890-92). This last painting portrays a theme that Cézanne treated in five different versions. Except for the card-player paintings, in which the sober dignity of the men is well expressed, there is no attempt in Cézanne's portraits to hint at the sitter's character. In most cases he treats the background with the same care as the subject and often violently distorts facial colour to bring it in harmony with the total composition. Cézanne also applied his principles of representation to his extraordinary still lifes, of which he painted more than 200. He organized them as though they were architectural drawings, giving the most familiar objects significance and force through the intensity of the colour and the essential simplicity of the form.

Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.101

Full of the intensity of feeling aroused by his surroundings, Cézanne's art was also deeply cerebral, a conscious search for intellectual solutions to problems of representation. Although he had great admiration for many other painters, he disagreed with the objectives of all but himself; painters who narrated events, as did the Romantics and the Old Masters, and painters who only represented nature-as did the Impressionists-seemed to him to lack a standard of purpose that only his own art possessed. At the same time, he was not a truly abstract painter, for the ideas of structure that he wished to express were about reality, not design. In this, he was the major source of inspiration for the Cubist painters.

After his father's death in 1886, Cézanne became financially independent. He had married Marie-Hortense six months earlier, and, after a year in Paris in 1888, Marie-Hortense and their son moved there permanently. Cézanne himself then settled in Aix except for a few visits to the capital, to Fontainebleau, to Jura in Switzerland, and to the home of Monet in Giverny, where he met the sculptor Auguste Rodin. In 1895 the art dealer Ambroise Vollard set up the first one-man exhibition of Cézanne's work (more than 100 canvases), but, although young artists and some art lovers were beginning to show enthusiasm for his painting, the public remained unreceptive.

Final years

As the 19th century came to a close, Cézanne's art was increasing in depth, in concentrated richness of colour, and in skill of composition. He felt capable of creating a new vision. From 1890 to 1905 he produced masterpieces, one after another: 10 variations of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, 3 versions of the Boy in a Red Waist-Coat, countless still-life images, and the Bathers series, in which he attempted to return to the classic tradition of the nude and explore his concern for its sculptural effect in relation to the landscape. He was obsessed with his work, which was time-consuming since he painted slowly.

Cézanne had always found it difficult to get along with people, and, deeply upset by the death of his mother in 1897, he withdrew gradually from his wife and from the friends of his youth. By the turn of the century his fame had begun to spread, and, since he was rarely seen by anyone, he became something of a legendary figure. He exhibited at the widely attended annual Salon des Indépendants in 1899 and at the Universal Exposition held in Paris in 1900, and his works were finally sought after by galleries. The Caillebotte collection opened at the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris with two Cézannes. The National Gallery in Berlin purchased a landscape as early as 1900. Young artists esteemed him; in 1901, the young Symbolist Maurice Denis painted Homage à Cézanne, a picture of artists admiring one of his still lifes.

Cézanne's last period, the fruit of intense meditation in solitude, reached the heights of lyricism, achieving in its revelation of life in nature what only the greatest artists can attain in their lifetime. "The landscape," he said, "becomes human, becomes a thinking, living being within me. I become one with my picture....We merge in an iridescent chaos." In the apparent immobility of the Provençal countryside, he found geologic forces trapped in the rocks, powerful saps coursing through the trees. With a few light brushstrokes, this sick and misanthropic old man, shut up in his studio, was able to breathe life into the last Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings (1898-1902) and the views of Château-Noir. In the last of the great Bathers paintings (1900-05) he succeeded in integrating monumental nudes with a landscape in his structural vision of reality.

The diabetes from which Cézanne had been suffering for a long time became more serious, and in October 1906 he finally succumbed to a harsh chill caught while working in the fields. He died a few days later and was buried in Aix-en-Provence.

Legacy

Although critical sympathy and public acceptance came to Cézanne only in the last decade of his career, his quest to see through appearances to the logic of underlying formal structure always drew admiration among his colleagues. His hope that his paintings would serve as a form of education for other artists was achieved when a number of important painters purchased his work, including Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Kazimir Malevich, Henri Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp. A 1907 retrospective showing of his works (56 paintings) was held at the Salon d'Automne in Paris and won considerable acclaim. That same year Picasso created his seminal Demoiselles d'Avignon ("Women of Avignon"), clearly inspired by Cézanne's groundbreaking Bathers of 1900-05. Indeed, Cézanne's intellectual approach to formal issues-particularly his spatial explorations-laid the foundation for Picasso and other artists' subsequent explorations with Cubism, while his investigations of colour and brushstroke influenced Matisse and other Fauve artists in the first decade of the century.

Over the years the public has also embraced his work, although, as his first biographer, Julius Meier-Graef, observed in 1904, "Except for Van Gogh, no one in modern art has made stronger demands on aesthetic receptivity than Cézanne." Cézanne is now recognized as the most significant precursor of 20th-century formal abstraction in painting, as he developed a purely pictorial language that balanced analysis with emotion and structure with lyricism. Picasso offered the most succinct assessment of Cézanne's role for subsequent generations of artists, declaring that he was "the father of us all."
René Huyghe The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Paul Cézanne: Paul Cézanne, French painter, one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne's art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life,

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Landscape painter. Influenced by J.M.W. Turner, Moran is best remembered for his idealized views of the American West. In 1871 he accompanied a government surveying expedition to Yellowstone and was greatly inspired by the landscape; The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1893-1901) and The Chasm of the Colorado (1872) are two outstanding works.