"A native of Aix-en-Provence by birth, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) went to Paris for the first time in 1861, at the insistence of his childhood friend Émile Zola. Cézanne decided to become a painter, against his family's advice, determined to make his mark on the Parisian scene that was then intrinsic to any successful artistic career. Paradoxically, Cézanne did not use Paris as a theme for his paintings: he did not represent its streets, its monuments, life in the area, or the great urban transformations taking place, unlike many of his contemporaries, including Caillebotte, Guillaumin, and Pissarro. So was the painter indifferent to this city? Throughout his life, he would make over twenty return trips to Paris from Aix, without ever setting down in the capital, even though some of his stays there were lengthy. So what was Cézanne looking for in Paris? What kind of influence did the capital have on his painting? He had contacts with artistic and intellectual circles that were liberal in both thought and lifestyle, and was he determined at all costs to resist their temptation? Was he drawn by the city's vibrant creative buzz, seeing it as something essential to the development of his art? From a range of viewpoints and using extensive illustrations, this book explores these questions by following the painter's career in Paris and the surrounding area, as well as the motifs he used and pictorial choices he made."--Book jacket.

Published in a limited edition of 25 copies, this elegant boxed volume presents Joel Meyerowitz' masterful color photographs of C�zanne's Atelier and the objects, and includes a photograph signed and numbered by the artist. Some years ago, Meyerowitz visited C�zanne's studio in Provence, and experienced a flash of understanding about his art. C�zanne had painted the walls a dark gray, mixing the color himself. Consequently, every object in the studio seemed to be absorbed into the gray of the background. Meyerowitz saw how C�zanne thus flattened perspective. He decided to take each of the objects in the studio and view them against the gray wall. He then arranged them in rows, and made a photographic grid of five rows with five objects on each row. These photographs are at once marvelous photographic still lifes and an incredible revelation of C�zanne's methods

Published in 2017 in Great Britain by National Portrait Gallery Publications, London.

A major biography--the first comprehensive new assessment to be published in decades--of the brilliant work and restless life of Paul Cezanne, the most influential painter of his time, whose vision revolutionized the role of the painter.

This book gathers the commentary of people who knew the painter Paul Cezanne, especially in his later years. Now seen as one of the most influential of modern painters, in his 40s he returned to his village of Aix-en-Provence where, he worked in near obscurity and with great dedication until his death in 1906.

A monumental volume devoted to one of the world’s largest and most spectacular collections of Cézannes. The Barnes Foundation’s holdings of works by the renowned Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)—sixty-one oils on canvas and eight works on paper—are among the most significant in the world. The Barnes Foundation was established in 1922 by scientist, entrepreneur, and educator Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a passionate supporter of European modernism. His virtually unrivaled collection, which can only be viewed at the Barnes Foundation, also includes exceptional paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and many others. Beginning in 1912, Barnes acquired works by Cézanne from major Paris dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and soon ranked among the artist’s most prominent collectors. At the time, this expressed a pioneering taste that Barnes shared with only a small group of enthusiasts, even though Cézanne had been posthumously hailed as a father of modern art at the turn of the twentieth century. The foundation’s impressive holdings of Cézannes—never before published in a single study in their entirety—span every period of the artist’s career and include his largest rendition of The Card Players and one of the three versions of The Large Bathers, one of his signal testaments. This lavishly illustrated landmark volume is both a work on Cézanne and his time, and an impetus for further study of an artist whose oeuvre is at once luminous, austere, challenging, and deeply confounding.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, June 26-Sept. 12, 2005, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oct. 20, 2005-Jan. 16, 2006, and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Feb. 27-May 28, 2006.

Although he is most often celebrated as a painter, Paul Cézanne's extraordinary vision was fuelled by his experiments on paper. In pencil and watercolour, on individual sheets and across the pages of sketchbooks, the artist described form through multiple probing lines; realized compositions through repetitions and transformations; and conjured kaleidoscopic colour through laborious layering of watercolour. It is in these material realities of drawing where we see Cézanne at his most modern: embracing the unfinished, making process visible, and actively inviting the viewer to participate in the act of perception. To date, exhibitions devoted to Cézanne have tended to focus on a single genre, a specific theme, or an isolated moment within the artist's oeuvre. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this is the first major effort to unite drawings from across Cézanne's entire career, tracing the development of his practice on paper, exploring working methods that transcend subject, and devoting research to conservation as well as curatorial fronts.

Another fascinating book by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade leading to the birth of Impressionism. If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the “Father of Impressionism” and is today a household name, the latter has sunk into obscurity. It is difficult now to believe that in 1864, when this story begins, it was Meissonier who was considered the greatest French artist alive and who received astronomical sums for his work, while Manet was derided for his messy paintings of ordinary people and had great difficulty getting any of his work accepted at the all-important annual Paris Salon. Manet and Meissonier were the Mozart and Salieri of their day, one a dangerous challenge to the establishment, the other beloved by rulers and the public alike for his painstakingly meticulous oil paintings of historical subjects. Out of the fascinating story of their parallel careers, Ross King creates a lens through which to view the political tensions that dogged Louis-Napoleon during the Second Empire, his ignominious downfall, and the bloody Paris Commune of 1871. At the same time, King paints a wonderfully detailed and vivid portrait of life in an era of radical social change. When Manet painted Dejeuner sur l’herbe or Olympia, he shocked not only with his casual brushstrokes but with his subject matter: top-hatted white-collar workers (and their mistresses) were not considered suitable subjects for ‘Art.’ Ross King shows how, benign as they might seem today, these paintings changed the course of history. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to see their paintings achieve pride of place at the Salon was not just about artistic competitiveness, it was about how to see the world. Full of fantastic tidbits of information and a colourful cast of characters that includes Baudelaire, Courbet and Zola, with walk-on parts for Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cezanne, The Judgment of Paris casts new light on the birth of Impressionism and takes us to the heart of a time in which the modern French identity was being forged.