Cezanne

August 27, 2012
Danchev's (On War and Art and Terror) biography of painter Paul Cézanne is both exhaustive and occasionally exhausting. The author tries to rein in his elusive subject with details ranging from Cézanne's childhood friendship with writer Emile Zola to descriptions of the artist's late-career workdays. The result reveals how difficult it is to sum up an artist whose work has drawn the accolades of everyone from Sir Kenneth Clark to Allen Ginsburg. Cézanne was both "a sensitive brute" as an Aix en Provence schoolboy and an aging madman. The art of his most productive years, observed sculptor Alberto Giacometti, "revolutionized the representation of the exterior world," undoing and expanding the perspective that painting had celebrated since the Renaissance. Cézanne in some respects was a forerunner of a modern artistic celebrity, whose persona, while tied to his extraordinary productivity, also assumed a life of its own, both in literature and the public imagination. Danchev is deeply versed in Cézanne as legend, man, and artist, and this account encompasses all of these. 32p full-color insert. Illus. Agent: Inkwell Management.

September 1, 2012
A formidable biography of the Father of Modern Art bound for the annals of academia. Danchev (International Relations/Univ. of Nottingham; On Art and War and Terror, 2009, etc.) has researched every facet and nuance of Paul Cezanne's life (1839-1906). His comfortable childhood in Provence, his years in Paris, where he was influenced by the Impressionists, and his dependence on the allowance from his father created the artist some suggested was "not all there." There is a wealth of information in the correspondence between the artist and his childhood friend, emile Zola, in which they parodied Virgil, joked in Latin and discussed Stendhal. Zola knew that Cezanne's art was a corner of nature seen through his own curious temmperammennte. The artist didn't paint things; he painted the effect they had on him. He saw colors as he read a book or looked at a person, understood the inner life of an object and let his brain rework that object, sometimes illuminating it, sometimes distorting it. Danchev rightly subscribes to the theory that understanding the man is important to understanding his work, and he attempts to parse Cezanne's psyche, digging into the background of nearly every author he discussed in his letters, quoting every writer who based a character on the man. Cezanne's work will influence artists and confuse patrons for decades to come, especially those who have the patience to study Danchev's comprehensive, occasionally ponderous tome. A fairly impressive achievement of a Sisyphean task--definitely a book to keep in your library.

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Starred review from October 15, 2012
In the first comprehensive twenty-first-century biography of Cezanne, a painter of profound and enduring influence, Danchev, biographer, too, of Georges Braque, vividly chronicles the artist's life by assiduously scrutinizing every imaginable source of illumination, from Cezanne's self-portraits to letters, diaries, newspapers, fiction, poems, photographs, and oft-told tales. We meet a young man from Aix who excelled in school; loved to read (Balzac and Flaubert, in particular); and forged a crucial friendship with classmate and future writer Emile Zola. A secret artist who tried to obey his father by attending law school, Cezanne fled to Paris instead and found a mentor in the equally uncompromising Pissarro. Quirky and brooding, proud and humble, solitary and relentless, appalled by pretense and fascinated by geology, Cezanne was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in everything. Danchev is the first to portray Cezanne's wife, Hortense Fiquet, as the complex and significant individual she was. He also articulates with extraordinary clarity and feeling the technical, aesthetic, and moral qualities that made Cezanne a world-altering master, whose work was initially mocked as barbaric and who was 56 before he had his first one-man show. For the prodigious and visionary Cezanne, Danchev observes, Painting was truth telling or it was nothing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)