Cezanne: a biography.

Cezanne: A Biography

by John Rewald(Abrams, 288 pp., $75)

THIS EXCEPTIONALLY handsome volumecontains 270 illustrations, including many photographs of the people and places painted by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). But the stale, sketchy, and pedestrian text does not match the superb design and color of this book.

Rewald attempts "to let the factsspeak for themselves, to rely chiefly on documents and witness accounts, to quote from the originals whenever possible, and thus bring the reader into direct contact with the historic evidence.' But he presents these dull documents without analysis or commentary. He describes the external events of the life, but offers no interpretation of motives, no penetration to the inner man. Rewald writes that the young Cezanne "began to feel vaguely that painting was his real vocation' and tells us that the painter said his wife (who usually lived apart from him) "likes only Switzerland and lemonade.' But Rewald does not explain what drew Cezanne to painting or attracted him to his wife--whom he hid from his father and married 14 years after their son was born. This revised edition of Rewald's Sorbonne thesis, Cezanne et Zola, originally published in 1936, puts too much emphasis on the relations of artist and author, and includes an awkward and repetitive chapter, first published in 1977, on the late motifs in the paintings. Rewald assumes Cezanne's greatness instead of revealing it through a detailed consideration of his major works.

Cezanne's father, a hat merchant andwealthy banker in Aix-en-Provence, married his wife five years after Paul's birth and left his son a great fortune in 1886. The father was characterized as "mocking, republican, bourgeois, cold, meticulous, stingy. He refuses to give his wife luxury, talks a lot, and doesn't care what others do or think.' He opposed Paul's artistic career and urged him to "think of the future, for one dies with genius, but eats with money.'

A friend described the young Cezanneas tall and thin, "bearded, with knotty joints and a strong head. A very delicate nose hidden in the mustache, eyes narrow and clear . . . deep in his eyes, great tenderness. His voice was loud.' Later in life, when Cezanne's "savage' disdain for convention had become intensified and he had retreated into isolation to avoid the "clutches' of priests and art dealers, the American painter Mary Cassatt "thought he looked like a cutthroat with large red eyeballs standing out from his head in a most ferocious manner.'

When Cezanne began his art trainingin Paris in 1861, the academic "tendency to prettify forms and colors, the choice of so-called noble subjects and picturesque scenery,' dominated the ateliers and salons, and destroyed most feeling for closely observed reality. Influenced by Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet, Cezanne's work expressed dramatic exuberance and violent chromatic contrasts. A weak draftsman who rejected linear painting, Cezanne tried to achieve form through blocks of color. He attempted to make the blurs of Impressionism--originally a mocking term that was defiantly accepted by the artists themselves-- into something solid and durable.

Emile Zola, who had met Cezannewhen they both were boys but did not fully understand him, portrayed the painter in his novel L'OEuvre (1886) as an abortive genius who ends in madness and suicide. Yet Zola seemed surprised when his touchy friend took offense at the portrait and ended their lifelong connection. Though Cezanne was universally condemned by the critics as "a sort of madman who paints in delirium tremens,' he was highly respected by the great contemporaries who knew him personally: Manet, Renoir, Gauguin. Camille Pissarro, who had been the first to recognize Cezanne, became his master and never lost confidence in his genius. And Monet admiringly observed: "He is nothing but an eye, yet what an eye!'

Although, as Rewald points out,there are neither cylinders nor cones in Cezanne's work, his famous injunction to "see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, putting everything in proper perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed toward a central point,' was adopted first by the Cubists and then by succeeding generations of abstract artists. In the 1920s, when Gertrude Stein made it fashionable to claim a visual rather than a verbal master, Hemingway pretentiously maintained that Cezanne's painting taught him to give more depth and dimension to his prose. It is highly ironic that the painter who was almost completely rejected in his own time became the "father of modern art' and that his current reputation rests as much on his influence as on his actual achievement.