About the Book
Today we view Cezanne as a monumental figure, but during his lifetime (1839-1906), many did not understand him or his work. With brilliant insight, drawing on a vast range of primary sources, Alex Danchev tells the story of an artist who was never accepted into the official Salon: he was considered a revolutionary at best and a barbarian at worst, whose paintings were unfinished, distorted and strange. His work sold to no one outside his immediate circle until his late thirties, and he maintained that 'to paint from nature is not to copy an object; it is to represent its sensations' - a belief way ahead of his time, with stunning implications that became the obsession of many other artists and writers, from Matisse and Braque to Rilke and Gertrude Stein. Beginning with the restless teenager from Aix who was best friends with Emile Zola at school, Danchev carries us through the trials of a painter tormented by self-doubt, who always remained an outsider, both of society and the bustle of the art world. Cezanne: A Life delivers not only the fascinating days and years of the visionary who would 'astonish Paris with an apple', with interludes analysing his self-portraits - but also a complete assessment of Cezanne's ongoing influence through artistic imaginations in our own time. He is, as this life shows, a cultural icon comparable to Marx or Freud.
About the Author :
Alex Danchev is Professor of International Relations at Nottingham University. His biographies have been shortlisted for awards including the Whitbread and Samuel Johnson prizes, and his recent books include On Art and War and Terror and 100 Artists' Manifestos. He is a literary reviewer for the THES and TLS.
Review :
This is the best account of [Cézanne's] astonishing career and Danchev responds to the challenge with great sensitivity and genuine brio. This is a book which will survive the test of time.
A brave new life of Cézanne. . . Danchev's masterstroke is to use literature rather than art as his point of entry . . . Adds an important tranche of material to the Cezanne biography . . . much of this new material successfully illuminates Cezanne's inner life. An important book.
This is a great book - possibly the best - on one of the most respected impressionists.
Alex Danchev compellingly guides us through Paul Cezanne's much mythologized life from his over-bearing father and early days in the South, as a school friend of Emile Zola, to his position as one of the revered creators of modern painting. The development of Cezanne's thinking and the construction of his paintings are explored alongside his complex relationship with other painters and the Parisian art establishment. Danchev has a great ability to weave his research and analysis into a compelling narrative: understanding what was required for Cezanne to make art modern.
A fantastically multidimensional Cézanne. . . . reads much like . . . one of Paul Cézanne's paintings . . . Mr. Danchev's portrait of Cezanne's life is heavy, thick with deceptively simple detail, and unendingly rich in offering context and detail for the reader to make sense of what contexts surrounded Cézanne, how Cezanne understood himself, and how the surrounding artistic milieu and climate informed Cezanne's paintings . . . Cezanne, A Life is a compelling and well-written biography of an enduring, enigmatic and complex figure in the changing world of turn-of-the-20th-century modernist art.
Original, engaging and highly persuasive . . . his prose is witty, mobile and sensitive
Danchev introduces a fresh tone into the debates about this artist . . . a stimulating tapestry of ideas . . . More ambitious, more brilliant and more discursive, it has a lively, consistently interrogative authorial voice; it draws upon a rich hinterland of cultural knowledge; it makes interventions into the massive historiography on Cézanne, challenging some scholars, affirming others. It repeatedly dazzles . . . the reach of this book is unlikely ever be surpassed in the search for Cézanne. Danchev is not only a formidable historian; he is also closely attentive to the dynamics in any relationship . . . This book, which makes a major contribution to our understanding of this haunting figure, is enhanced by three fat wads of colour reproductions and made more seductive by the photographs of artists that infiltrate the text.
Richly documented. . . its rewards are many . . . 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.
Mr Danchev's exhaustive research, not least of Zola's novels, provides a much fuller explanation of the man, which helps elucidate the art . . . many will be enthralled, inspired and perhaps even comforted by this book
Enlightening . . . Accomplished and subtle
It would be virtually impossible for anyone now to get back behind the wrong eyes, and the great strength of Alex Danchev's book is that it doesn't try. This is a biography for an age that takes Cézanne's supreme clarity, balance and pictorial logic for granted. Far from putting him back in the context he came from, it explores his relations with a world he shaped. Its cultural references range from Socrates to Wallace Stevens, Kafka to Beckett, Chaplin to Woody Allen . . . moving
A perceptive judge of pictures as well as a skilled narrator, Mr. Danchev excels at dissecting Cézanne's idiosyncratic, analytical approach to the depiction of nature, which eventually paved the way for the innovations of Cubism and modernist abstraction. Abundant color plates and exhaustive documentation round out this magisterial biography.
Triumphant
FT Art Books of the Year: The most engrossing biography of an artist that I have read for years. With lightness of touch, depth of thought, a vast cultural hinterland and an assured understanding of painting, Danchev marvellously brings to life Cézanne the man, as well as the pioneering artist called "the father of us all" by Picasso.
Marvellous
Art Books of Year: Notable among recent studies of arists
A new view of an old subject ... an impressive achievement
Danchev's parameters are the work, the principles, the life, the art, the viewer, the reader. He writes as if he doesn't really need the century of critics, academics and theorists who have previously explained the painter ... Danchev's self-confidence is evident, and fully justified
An enchanting literary exercise... exquisite in style... romantic, intense, affectionate and occasionally wry... a masterpiece.
Superb
Danchev's Cézanne has... virtues of imaginative sympathy, independence of mind, and wide scholarship. He writes as if Cézanne's life and character are as immediately present before him as is the art
Engaging and well-researched
Magisterial ... Thanks to this wholly engrossing - and liberating - new life of the artist, we are made to feel closer to him than ever before.
...serious, learned, and far-ranging
