A Life

By Alex Danchev

(Pantheon; 512 pages; $40)

The more you look at art, the more likely it is that you'll get closer to paintings by Paul Cézanne.

The solitary brooder from Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, transformed the way that the portrait, the still life and the landscape were painted. Seemingly ordinary apples and card players became transcendent - and, ultimately, expensive. A version of Cézanne's "Card Players" is said to have sold privately last year to the Emir of Qatar for $250 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting.

Cézanne (1839-1906) led Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque to Cubism, a redefining moment in 20th century art. Abstract sections in his paintings emboldened artists to move away from anything representational.

Yet Cézanne's biography - strong on opinions and short on witnesses - has been a field of gaps, silences and assumptions. He hasn't had a new biographer in decades.

When Cézanne traveled, which was rare, it was between Provence and Paris. He married only once, fought in no wars (although he dodged one), and didn't feed any dramatic martyrology. He spoke no foreign language, except the peculiar Provençal of his region - and in French, he had a strong accent of the Midi, laughable to Parisians.

After decades of anonymity among all but his artist peers, he was able to live off his paintings and a substantial inheritance. This artist didn't starve, although he paid his models next to nothing - his stinginess may help explain why his favorite subjects were apples, mountains and relatives.

Alex Danchev's discursive "Cézanne: A Life," while richly documented, is not stacked with secrets or statistics. 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. Danchev finds the roots for Cézanne's soul-searching farther back, in Virgil and in Rousseau (a solitary walker, like Cézanne), among an army of others.


Not least for busting apart some myths. 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. Louis-Auguste Cézanne, wealthy but unmarried when Paul was born, disapproved of his son's decision to become a painter.

So did the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which would not accept him. Cézanne studied instead at the Academie Suisse, a haven for mold breakers (Courbet, Manet, Pissarro). Yet lack of success, sales (or even scandal) in Paris discouraged him, and he retreated south. His first one-man show would be in 1895, when he was 56.

It was Cézanne's dogged work ethic, rather than his fabled fear of women, that precluded adventures. His wife, Hortense (the name bespeaks domestic torpor), stern in his portraits, was shunned by the Cézanne family, but her letters reveal a more clever woman than the conventional wisdom assumes. 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.

He was happiest when, as he called it, "sur le motif" - "at work" or "in the field." It took years for Cézanne to propose to Hortense, and Danchev believes that an affair on the side triggered the marriage. We don't know much more, except that she enjoyed the comforts of being married to a successful artist more than she liked his art. The family sold much of Cézanne's work soon after his death.

Cézanne's friendship with his boyhood friend Emile Zola soured when Zola got rich and too grand for the painter, who despised extravagance. 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. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Freud cautioned, but in a Cézanne still life, apples hold the vastness of the history and art that preceded them.

Danchev compares Cézanne to Rembrandt, the ultimate tribute. Rembrandt painted himself even more than Cézanne did, and his best of those likenesses emerge from something at the core of the subject, as if Rembrandt were constructing a picture atop previous pictures. (Danchev shows Alberto Giacometti attempting something similar in drawings that Giacometti made of Cézanne's paintings. It's a rare glimpse into one artist's direct influence on another.)

But whereas Rembrandt fixed your eye on a subject, Cézanne's vision in his late landscapes became expansive. You find your eye ranging everywhere inside the frame. It's no surprise that so many of Cézanne's paintings seem unfinished, since he was reaching for so much.

"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 may also annoy those accustomed to American biographies that tie loose ends together definitively.

We don't know much about Cézanne's disappearance when he was called up for the Franco-Prussian War, except that he fled to paint in remote l'Estaque, and there's surely more to know about how his diabetes limited his mobility and eyesight late in life. Sometimes Danchev's translations of what great minds wrote about Cézanne are so colloquial that you want to know what those observers really said.

At other times, bluntness says it all, as when Robert Bresson tells why he abandoned painting and turned to film: "Painting is over. There is nowhere to go. I don't mean after Picasso, but after Cézanne. He went to the brink of what could not be done."

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. As many voices as there are in "Cézanne: A Life," you feel that there could be many more. The harder you look at the paintings, the more they seem inexhaustible.
