Paul Cézanne — 2 An Artist of Tempérament

1. 1. Cézanne failed the entry exam for the École des beaux-arts twice and regarded formal training as stifling originality.
2. 2. At the Académie Suisse, Cézanne met influential artists like Monet, Pissarro, and Guillaumin, which shaped his artistic path.
3. 3. After only six months in Paris, Cézanne returned to Aix dejected, but a brief stint at his father's bank led him to recommit to art.
4. 4. Delacroix was Cézanne's most important influence, providing a link between contemporary art and the old masters.
5. 5. Cézanne dismissed Ingres as 'only a very minor painter' and felt antagonism toward the contemporary Parisian art scene.
6. 6. The concept of 'tempérament'—the artist's unique sensibility—was central to Cézanne's artistic philosophy.
7. 7. Cézanne's early style, which he called 'cuillarde' (ballsy), featured coarse impasto and palette knife work, indebted to Courbet and Provençal artists.
8. 8. Cézanne cultivated a bohemian, provocative persona as a provincial outsider, echoing Courbet's strategy of using otherness to challenge Parisian art norms.
9. 9. Cézanne was rejected from the Salon thirteen times, and his annual submissions became a spectacle of defiance.
10. 10. Cézanne's 'Une Moderne Olympia' (1872-74) was a critical reworking of Manet's Olympia, inserting the artist himself as the client and transforming the cool objectivity into a fervid, dreamlike fantasy.
11. 11. Cézanne's dialogue with Manet's Olympia was part of a broader contestation between Baudelaire's Wagnerian modernism and Manet's cool objectivism.
12. 12. Cézanne's early works drew on lowbrow imagery from sensationalist 'canards' to depict violence, sex, and intoxication, challenging bourgeois morality.