Paul Cézanne — 6 Provence, the Peasantry and Montagne Sainte-Victoire

1. 1. Cézanne's later years were marked by loss and struggle, a desire to reclaim the past and overcome the alienation of the modern world.
2. 2. Joachim Gasquet's biography, published in 1921, offered a unique perspective on Cézanne's later years as the first full-length book from a close Provençal source.
3. 3. Gasquet's friendship reawakened Cézanne's youthful memories of his friendship with Zola, including walks and reading Virgil in the Arc valley.
4. 4. Gasquet associated Cézanne with the Félibrige movement, which sought to revive Provençal culture and language against Parisian centralization.
5. 5. Gasquet's dialogues with Cézanne are dramatizations, not documents, designed to portray the artist's anguish and mental divisions.
6. 6. Cézanne's late paintings of Provençal peasants, like 'The Card Players', reflect his identification with the peasantry and nostalgia for traditional life.
7. 7. Cézanne cleansed his painting of industrialization from the mid-1880s, focusing on traditional Provençal landscapes like Montagne Sainte-Victoire.
8. 8. Montagne Sainte-Victoire was a traditional symbol of Provençal identity, and Cézanne's persistent painting of it inscribed him within that tradition.
9. 9. Cézanne's later landscapes, like those of Bibémus quarry and Château noir, evoke decay, ruin, and the imminence of death.
10. 10. Cézanne's late work pulls away from serene classical visions toward an unsettled confrontation with time and mortality.