Cézanne, a life. By Alex Danchev. 488 pp. incl. 86 col. + 47 b. & w. ills. (Profile Books, London, 2012), £30. ISBN 978–1–84668–165–3.

Reviewed by RICHARD VERDI

Considering his stature and significance, it is surprising that Cézanne has not been the subject of a major biography for more than forty years. Admittedly, he was well served with these in the middle years of the last century, when Gerstle Mack, John Rewald, Henri Perruchot and Jack Lindsay provided comprehensive accounts of the artist’s life based on Cézanne’s correspondence, the historical evidence, and the many eulogies and testimonies written by his acolytes and followers, especially during the last decade of his career. Predictably, all these concluded with the artist’s death in 1906. But, as the exhibition Cézanne and Beyond (Philadelphia Mus­eum of Art, 2009) reminded us, Cézanne also enjoyed a rich and varied afterlife; and, as Alex Danchev’s magisterial new biography of him demonstrates, it is one by no means confined to the visual arts. On the contrary, from Rilke and D.H. Lawrence to Boulez and Heidigger, artists and intellectuals from the most diverse spheres have drawn inspiration from the legendary recluse of Aix. ‘Countless people have had a Cézanne epiphany’, asserts Danchev at the end of his cornucopian study. Written by a non-specialist, and embracing an overall view of its subject, it effectively unshackles Cézanne from his traditional tethers, seeing him not merely as the father of modern art but as a seminal figure in our wider cultural landscape.

This is not to suggest that the book does not abide by the rules of a critical biography: it is scrupulous in its attention to the primary sources and at once more exacting and exhaustive in its recourse to them than any previous study. Here alone, for example, may one discover what prizes the teenage Cézanne won at school and what books he was awarded for them; learn of the bonfire he staged in 1899 after selling the Jas de Bouffan, destroying many of his early canvases; or encounter Van Gogh’s scurrilous remarks to Emile Bernard on Cézanne’s belated marriage to Hortense Fiquet in 1886. And hitherto all-but-invisible in the literature on the artist have been the replies to a questionnaire posed by the Mercure de France in 1905 asking a cross section of contemporary artists for their opinions on Cézanne. Minutiae these may seem; but it is exactly such a forensic attention to detail that brings Danchev’s study compellingly to life and enables him to reappraise other, more fundamental assumptions regarding the artist’s career.

By far the most important of these are Cézanne’s relationships with his wife and his boyhood friend Emile Zola. The latter, as Danchev acknowledges, was, along with Pissarro, one of the twin pillars of Cézanne’s creative life. But their relationship is believed to have ended with the artist’s receipt of Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre in 1886, whose hero, Claude Lantier, is a failed painter modelled in part on Manet and Cézanne. Although their cor­respondence apparently ceased then, as the present study reveals there is good evidence that they remained in touch and met at least once in the 1890s and still enjoyed a relationship of ‘remote intimacy’. Danchev concedes that ‘they had grown apart’ and admits to difficulty in disentangling the fictional Lantier from Cézanne; but his redressing of the facts helps to explain why the artist locked himself in his studio and wept all day when hearing of Zola’s death in 1902.

More drastic still is the makeover to which the author subjects Hortense Fiquet, who has traditionally been seen as indifferent (if not openly hostile) to her husband’s art and given to pursuing a life of pleasure apart from him. Such assumptions have never sat comfortably with the evidence, above all of the two dozen painted portraits and many more drawings and watercolours Cézanne made of her (Fig.35). Delving into the archives to read Hortense’s letters to others, however, Danchev discovers an articulate, kind-hearted and business-like woman very much concerned with her husband’s interests. And, revisiting the artist’s life, the author also deduces that it was Cézanne’s own concern for his wife’s health that led him to spend the summer with her at Talloires, where he fought off boredom by painting one of his most miraculous landscapes, the Lac d’Annecy (Courtauld Gallery, London).

Although Cézanne’s paintings do not figure prominently in Danchev’s biography – despite the fact that, at the deepest level, they were the artist’s life – his account is interlaced with short and penetrating discussions of five self-portraits marking different stages in Cézanne’s career. Like others before him, Danchev is inevitably led here to make comparisons with Rembrandt, not merely because the two artists shared the theme of self-portraiture but for their comparable – and colossal – creative concerns. As the author astutely observes, introducing an account of Cézanne’s final decade: ‘He was just beginning the greatest period of late painting since Rembrandt’.

Other, even more startling interjections await any reader expecting this study to conform to the constraints of a straight­forward biography. Although chronologically ordered, it is kaleidoscopically conceived, with the course of Cézanne’s life constantly summoning forth parallels from the distant past and future. Here the author’s greatest strength is his astonishing erudition, and his chief justification Cézanne’s own cultural centrality – and legacy. To a greater extent than any previous biographer, Danchev has steeped himself in the artist’s intellectual world, and refreshingly less so in the visual arts than in those of literature and philosophy. Like Cézanne himself, he is well versed in the classics and the great works of French literature, including much more of Zola than the obligatory L’Oeuvre. Thus, at any point in his study, a passage in Cézanne’s letters may conjure up a reference to Cicero or Xenophon, or the artist’s creative struggles awaken comparisons with those of one of his favourite modern writers, Flaubert.

Such precedents and analogies are relatively easily assimilated, drawing as they do upon Cézanne’s own cultural context. But where Danchev’s book breaks wholly new ground is when it moves forward from Cézanne into a creative world he was never to know but had helped to forge. By far the least absorbing aspect of this for this reviewer is the familiar trajectory that leads from Matisse and the Cubists to Mondrian and, eventually, Giacometti; and when Danchev does venture beyond this to the Cézannism of Elizabeth Murray or Michael Snow, he reveals a lapse of judgment wholly out of keeping with the rest of his book. However, when he ventures beyond the well-worn path of Cézanne’s artistic legacy and explores his literary and philosophical aftermath, the author is at his most ingenious and innovatory. Quotations from Rilke are inevitable and justified, but parallels with Proust are more unexpected, if also apt. And how many of even the most seasoned specialists will be aware of the impact of Cézanne on Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney or Allen Ginsberg? Or that he is the subject of a chamber opera by Daniel Rothman and has even touched the realm of cinematography?

In short, Danchev’s volume is much more than an authoritative and up-to-date biography. Rather it is effectively a cultural companion to Cézanne masquerading as an ordinary ‘life’. And its culmination is an epilogue, innocently entitled ‘Cézanne by Numbers’, in which the author’s exuberance and resourcefulness outdo themselves, unleashing a tour de force of statistics which encompass seemingly everything from the number of sittings the artist required for a portrait to the menus for his daily meals. Yet more latter-day disciples are summoned to pay their respects to him – Max Ernst, Ernest Hemingway, e.e. cummings, even Woody Allen. ‘His creations have colonized our consciousness’, declares Danchev, in conclusion, ‘we shall never have done with Cézanne’. Thanks to this wholly engrossing – and liberating – new life of the artist, we are also made to feel closer to him than ever before.

35. Portrait of Madame Cézanne, by Paul Cézanne. 1887–90. Graphite on paper, 48.5 by 33.2 cm. (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam).

35. Portrait of Madame Cézanne, by Paul Cézanne. 1887–90. Graphite on paper, 48.5 by 33.2 cm. (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam).