title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne moved to Paris in April 1861. The high hopes he had set in Paris were not fulfilled, as he had applied to the École des Beaux-Arts, but was turned down there. He attended the free Académie Suisse, where he was able to devote himself to life drawing. There he met Camille Pissarro, ten years his senior, and Achille Emperaire from his hometown of Aix. He often copied at the Louvre from works by old masters such as Michelangelo, Rubens and Titian. But the city remained alien to him, and he soon thought of returning to Aix-en-Provence. Initially, the friendship formed in the mid-1860s between Pissarro and Cézanne was that of master and disciple, in which Pissarro exerted a formative influence on the younger artist. Over the course of the following decade, their landscape painting excursions together, in Louveciennes and Pontoise, led to a collaborative working relationship between equals.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Zola's faith in Cézanne's future was shaken, so in June he wrote to their childhood friend Baille: "Paul is still the excellent and strange fellow I knew at school. To prove that he hasn't lost any of his originality, I have only to tell you that as soon as he got here he talked about returning.' Cézanne painted a portrait of Zola that Zola had asked him to paint to encourage his friend; but Cézanne was unsatisfied with the result and destroyed the picture. In September 1861, disappointed by his rejection at the École, Cézanne returned to Aix-en-Provence and worked again in his father's bank.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: But already in the late autumn of 1862 he moved to Paris again. His father secured his subsistence level with a monthly bill of over 150 francs. The traditional École des Beaux-Arts rejected him again. He therefore attended the Académie Suisse again, which promoted Realism. During this time he got to know many young artists, after Pissarro also Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In contrast to the official artistic life of France, Cézanne was under the influence of Gustave Courbet and Eugène Delacroix, who strove for a renewal of art and demanded the depiction of unembellished reality. Courbet's followers called themselves "realists" and followed his principle "Il faut encanailler l'art" ("One must throw art into the gutter"), formulated as early as 1849, which means that art must be brought down from its ideal height and become a matter of everyday life be made. Édouard Manet made the definitive break with historical painting, who was not concerned with analytical observation, but with the reproduction of his subjective perception and the liberation of the pictorial object from symbolic burdens.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The exclusion of the works of Manet, Pissarro and Monet from the official salon, the Salon de Paris, in 1863 provoked such outrage among artists that Napoleon III had a “Salon des Refusés” (salon of the rejected) set up next to the official salon. Cézanne's paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés in 1863. The Salon rejected Cézanne's submissions every year from 1864 to 1869. He continued to submit works to the Salon until 1882. In that year artist Antoine Guillemet, a friend of Cézanne's, became a member of the Salon jury. Since each jury member had the privilege of showing a picture of one of his students, he passed off Cézanne as his student and secured his first participation at the Salon. He exhibited "Portrait de M. L. A.", probably "Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, The Artist's Father, Reading "L'Événement"", 1866 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), although the painting was hung in a poorly lit spot in the top row of a secluded hall and received no attention. This was to be his first and last successful submission to the Salon.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In the summer of 1865, Cézanne returned to Aix. Zola's debut novel "La Confession de Claude" was published, it was dedicated to his childhood friends Cézanne and Baille. In the autumn of 1866, Cézanne executed a whole series of paintings using the palette knife technique, mainly still lifes and portraits. He spent most of 1867 in Paris and the second half of 1868 in Aix. At the beginning of 1869 he returned to Paris and met the bookbinder's assistant Marie-Hortense Fiquet, eleven years his junior, at the Académie Suisse


title: Paul Cézanne

text: On 31 May 1870, Cézanne was best man at Zola's wedding in Paris. During the Franco-Prussian War, Cézanne and Hortense Fiquet lived in the fishing village of L'Estaque near Marseille, which Cézanne would later visit and paint frequently, as the place's Mediterranean atmosphere fascinated him. He avoided conscription for military service. Although Cézanne had been denounced as a deserter in January 1871, he managed to hide. No further details are known as documents from this period are missing.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: After the Paris Commune was crushed the couple returned to Paris in May 1871. Paul "fils", the son of Paul Cézanne and Hortense Fiquet was born on 4 January 1872. Cézanne's mother was kept a party to family events, but his father was not informed of Hortense for fear of risking his wrath and so as not to lose the financial allowances that his father gave him to live as an artist. The artist received from his father a monthly allowance of 100 francs.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: When Cézanne's friend, the crippled painter Achille Emperaire, sought refuge with the family in Paris in 1872 due to financial hardship, he soon left his friend however "[...] it was necessary, otherwise I would not have escaped the fate of the others. I found him here abandoned by everyone. […] Zola, Solari and all the others are no longer mentioned. He's the strangest guy imaginable."


title: Paul Cézanne

text: From late 1872 to 1874, Cézanne lived with his wife and child in Auvers-sur-Oise, where he met the doctor and art lover Paul Gachet, later the painter Vincent van Gogh's doctor. Gachet was also an ambitious hobby painter and made his studio available to Cézanne.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 1872, Cézanne accepted an invitation from his friend Pissarro to work in Pontoise in the Oise Valley. Pissarro, as a sensitive artist became a mentor to the shy, irritable Cézanne; he was able to persuade him to turn away from the darker colours on his colour palette and gave him the advice: "Always only paint with the three primary colours (red, yellow, blue) and their immediate deviations." In addition, he should refrain from linear contouring, the shape of things results from the gradation of the colour tonal values. Cézanne felt that the Impressionist technique was bringing him closer to his goal and heeded his friend's advice. Pissarro later reported: "We were always together, but still each of us kept what counts alone: our own feelings."


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The young painters in Paris did not see any support for their works in the Salon de Paris and therefore took up Claude Monet's plan for their own exhibition, which had been made in 1867. From 15 April to 15 May 1874, the first group exhibition of the "Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, engravers", later known as the Impressionists, took place. This name derives from the title of the exhibited painting "Impression soleil levant" by Monet. In the satirical magazine Le Charivari, the critic Louis Leroy described the group as "Impressionists" and thus created the term for this new art movement. The place of exhibition was the studio of the photographer Nadar on Boulevard des Capucines.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Pissarro pushed through Cézanne's participation despite concerns from some members who feared Cézanne's bold paintings would harm the exhibition. Cézanne was influenced by their style but his social relations with them were inept—he seemed rude, shy, angry, and given to depression. In addition to Cézanne, Renoir, Monet, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas and Pissarro, among others exhibited. Manet declined participation, for him Cézanne was "a mason who paints with a trowel". Cézanne in particular caused a sensation, arousing indignation and derision from the critics with his paintings such as the "Landscape near Auvers" and the "Modern Olympia". In "A Modern Olympia", created as a quote from Manet's 1863 painting Olympia, which was often reviled, Cézanne sought an even more drastic depiction and in addition to the prostitute and servant, also showed the suitor, whose figure is believed to be a self-portrait.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The exhibition proved a financial failure; the final accounts showed a deficit of over 180 francs for each of the participating artists. Cézanne's The Hanged Man's House was one of the few pictures that could be sold. The collector Count Doria bought it for 300 francs.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 1875, Cézanne met the customs inspector and art collector Victor Chocquet, who, mediated by Renoir, bought three of his works and became his most loyal collector and whose commissions provided some financial relief. Cézanne did not take part in the group's second exhibition, but instead presented 16 of his works in the third exhibition in 1877, which in turn drew considerable criticism. Reviewer Louis Leroy said of Cézanne's portrait of Chocquet: "This peculiar looking head, the colour of an old boot might give [a pregnant woman] a shock and cause yellow fever in the fruit of her womb before its entry into the world." It was the last time he exhibited with the Impressionists. Another patron was the paint merchant Julien "Père" Tanguy, who supported the young painters by supplying them with paint and canvas in exchange for paintings.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In March 1878, Cézanne's father found out about the long-hidden relationship with Hortense and their illegitimate son Paul through a thoughtless letter by Victor Chocquet. He then cut the monthly bill in half, and Cézanne entered a financially tense period in which he had to ask Zola for help. But in September he relented and decided to give him 400 francs for his family. Cézanne continued to migrate between the Paris region and Provence until Louis-Auguste had a studio built for him at his home, Bastide du Jas de Bouffan, in the early 1880s. This was on the upper floor, and an enlarged window was provided, allowing in the northern light but interrupting the line of the eaves; this feature remains. Cézanne stabilized his residence in L'Estaque. He painted with Renoir there in 1882 and visited Renoir and Monet in 1883.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 1881 Cézanne worked in Pontoise with Paul Gauguin and Pissarro; Cézanne returned to Aix at the end of the year. He later accused Gauguin of having stolen his "little sensation" from him and that Gauguin, on the other hand only painted chinoiseries. In the spring of 1882, Cézanne worked with Renoir in Aix and – for the first time – in L'Estaque, a small fishing village near Marseille, which he also visited in 1883 and 1888. One of the first two stays was "The Bay of Marseille seen from L'Estaque". During the autumn of 1885 and the months that followed, Cézanne stayed in Gardanne, a small hilltop town near Aix-en-Provence, where he produced several paintings whose faceted forms were already anticipating the cubist style.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne's long friendly relationship with Émile Zola had by now become more distant. In 1878 the urbane, successful writer had set up a luxurious summer house in Médan near Auvers, where Cézanne had visited him repeatedly in the years 1879 to 1882 and in 1885; but his friend's lavish lifestyle made Cézanne, who lived an unassuming life, aware of his own inadequacy and caused him to doubt himself.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Zola, who meanwhile regarded the childhood friend as a failure, published his roman à clef "L'Œuvre" from the novel cycle of "Rougon-Macquart" in March 1886, whose protagonist, the painter Claude Lantier, did not achieve the realization of his goals and committed suicide. In order to further emphasize the parallels between fiction and biography, Zola placed the successful writer Sandoz alongside the painter Lantier in his work. Monet and Edmond de Goncourt tended to see Édouard Manet in the fictional painter described, but Cézanne found himself reflected in many details. He formally thanked him for sending the work supposedly related to him. For a long time it was thought that contact between the two childhood friends then broke off forever. Recently letters have been discovered that refute this. A letter from 1887 demonstrates that their friendship did endure for at least some time after.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: On April 28, 1886, Paul Cézanne and Hortense Fiquet were married in Aix in the presence of his parents. The connection to Hortense was not legalized out of love, as their relationship had long since broken down. Cézanne was shy of women and terrified of being touched, a trauma that stemmed from his childhood when, by his own admission, a classmate had kicked him from behind on the stairs. Rather, the marriage was intended to secure the rights of the now fourteen-year-old son Paul, whom Cézanne loved very much, as a legitimate son. In the early 1880s the Cézanne family stabilized their residence in Provence where they remained, except for brief sojourns abroad, from then on. The move reflects a new independence from the Paris-centered impressionists and a marked preference for the south, Cézanne's native soil. Hortense's brother had a house within view of Montagne Sainte-Victoire at L'Estaque. A run of paintings of this mountain from 1880 to 1883 and others of Gardanne from 1885 to 1888 are sometimes known as "the Constructive Period".


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Despite the strained relationship, Hortense was the person who was most often portrayed by Cézanne. From the early 1870s to the early 1890s, 26 paintings of Hortense are known. She endured the strenuous sessions motionless and patiently. In October 1886, after the death of his father, Cézanne, his mother and sisters inherited his estate, which included the Jas de Bouffan estate, so that Cézanne's financial situation became much easier. "My father was a brilliant man," he said in retrospect, "he left me an income of 25,000 francs." By 1888 the family was in the former manor, Jas de Bouffan, a substantial house and grounds with outbuildings, which afforded a new-found comfort. , this house, with much-reduced grounds, is now owned by the city and was open to the public on a restricted basis.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne lived in Paris and increasingly in Aix without his family. Renoir visited him there in January 1888 and they worked together in Jas de Bouffan's studio. In 1890, Cézanne contracted diabetes; the illness made it even more difficult for him to deal with his fellow human beings. Cézanne spent a few months in Switzerland with her and his son Paul in the hope that the troubled relationship with Hortense could be stabilized. The attempt failed, so he returned to Provence, with Hortense and Paul "fils" going to Paris. Financial need prompted Hortense's return to Provence but in separate living quarters. Cézanne moved in with his mother and sister. In 1891 he turned to Catholicism.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In the same year he exhibited three of his works at the group "Les XX" in Brussels. The Société des Vingt, short Les XX or Les Vingt, was an association founded around 1883 by Belgian artists or artists living in Belgium, including Fernand Khnopff, Théo van Rysselberghe, James Ensor and the siblings Anna and Eugène Boch.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In May 1895 he attended Monet's exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery with Pissarro. He was enthusiastic but later, significantly, identified 1868 as Monet's strongest period, when he was even more influenced by Courbet. With his fellow student from the Académie Suisse, Achille Emperaire, Cézanne went to the area around the village of Le Tholonet, where he lived in the "Château Noir", which is located on the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. He often took the mountains as a theme in his paintings. He rented a hut at the nearby Bibémus quarry; Bibémus became another motif for his paintings.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Ambroise Vollard, an aspiring gallery owner, opened Cézanne's first one-man show in November 1895. In his gallery, he showed a selection of 50 of around 150 works that Cézanne had sent him as a package. Vollard met Degas and Renoir in 1894 when he was exhibiting a bundle of Manet in his small shop, and they exchanged Manet works for their own works with him. Vollard also established relationships with Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, and in the same year the well-known paint dealer Père Tanguy. When Tanguy died, Vollard was able to buy works by three artists who were still unknown at the time: Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh. The first buyer of a Cézanne painting was Monet, followed by colleagues like Degas, Renoir, Pissarro and later art collectors. Prices for works by Cézanne rose a hundredfold and Vollard, as always, profited from his stocks.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 1897, a Cézanne painting was purchased by a museum for the first time. Hugo von Tschudi acquired Cézanne's landscape painting "The Mill on the Couleuvre near Pontoise" in the Durand-Ruel Gallery for the Berlin National Gallery.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne's mother died on 25 October 1897. In November 1899, at the insistence of his sister, he sold the now practically deserted property "Jas de Bouffan" and moved into a small city apartment at 23, Rue Boulegon in Aix-en-Provence; the planned purchase of the “Château Noir” property could not be realized. He hired a housekeeper, Mme Bremond, to look after him until his death.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The art market, meanwhile continued to react positively to Cézanne's works; Pissarro wrote from Paris in June 1899 about the auction of the Chocquet collection from his estate: “These include thirty-two Cézannes of the first rank [...]. The Cézannes will fetch very high prices and are already estimated at four to five thousand francs.” In this auction, market prices for Cézanne paintings were achieved for the first time, but they were still “far below those for paintings by Manet, Monet or Renoir.”


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 1901 Maurice Denis exhibited his 1900 large painting "Hommage à Cézanne" in Paris and Brussels. The subject of the picture is Ambroise Vollard's gallery, which presents a picture – Cézanne's painting "Still Life with Bowl of Fruit" – formerly owned by Paul Gauguin. The writer André Gide acquired "Hommage à Cézanne" and gave it to the Musée du Luxembourg in 1928. It is currently in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Among the people portrayed: Odilon Redon is in the foreground on the left, listening to Paul Sérusier opposite him. Also depicted from left to right are Édouard Vuillard, the critic André Mellerio with a top hat, Vollard behind the easel, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Pierre Bonnard with a pipe, and on the far right Marthe Denis, the painter's wife.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 1901, Cézanne acquired a piece of land north of the city of Aix-en-Provence along the Chemin des Lauves, an isolated road on some high ground, where he had his studio built on the Chemin des Lauves in 1902 according to his needs (Atelier de Cézanne, now open to the public). He moved there in 1903. For large-format paintings such as "The Bathers", which he created in the Les Lauves studio, he had a long, narrow gap in the wall built through which natural light could flow. That year Zola died, leaving Cézanne in mourning despite the estrangement. His health deteriorated with age; In addition to his diabetes, he suffered from depression in old age, which manifested itself in growing distrust of his fellow human beings to the point of delusions of persecution.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Despite the artist's increasing recognition, hateful press releases appeared and he received numerous threatening letters.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne's paintings were not well received among the petty bourgeoisie of Aix. In 1903 Henri Rochefort visited the auction of paintings that had been in Zola's possession and published on 9 March 1903 in "L'Intransigeant" a highly critical article entitled "Love for the Ugly". Rochefort describes how spectators had supposedly experienced laughing fits, when seeing the paintings of "an ultra-impressionist named Cézanne". The public in Aix was outraged, and for many days, copies of "L'Intransigeant" appeared on Cézanne's door-mat with messages asking him to leave the town "he was dishonouring".


title: Paul Cézanne

text: "I don't understand the world and the world doesn't understand me, so I withdrew from the world," said old Cézanne to his coachman. When Cézanne deposited his will with a notary in September 1902, he excluded his wife Hortense from the inheritance and declared his son Paul to be the sole heir. Hortense is said to have burned the mementos of his mother.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 1903 he exhibited for the first time at the newly established Salon d'Automne (Paris Autumn Salon). The painter and art theorist Émile Bernard first visited him for a month in February 1904 and published an article about the painter in "L'Occident" magazine in July. Cézanne was then working on a vanitas still life with three skulls on an oriental carpet. Bernard reported that this painting changed color and form every day during his stay, although it appeared complete from day one. He later regarded this work as Cézanne's legacy and summed it up: "Truly, his way of working was a reflection with a brush in his hand." In the memento mori still lifes that he created several times, Cézanne's increasing depression of old age was evident, which in his letters since 1896 with comments such as "life is beginning to be deadly monotonous for me" were echoed. An exchange of letters with Bernard continued until Cézanne's death; he first published his memoirs Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne in the Mercure de France in 1907, and in 1912 they appeared in book form.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: From 15 October to 15 November 1904, an entire room of the Salon d'Automne was furnished with the works of Cézanne. In 1905 an exhibition was held in London, in which his work was also shown; the Galerie Vollard exhibited his works in June, and the Salon d'Automne followed in turn from 19 October to 25 November with 10 paintings.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The art historian and patron Karl Ernst Osthaus, who had founded the Museum Folkwang in 1902, visited Cézanne on 13 April 1906 in the hope of being able to purchase a painting by the artist. His wife Gertrud probably took the last photograph of Cézanne. Osthaus described his visit in his work "A Visit to Cézanne", published in the same year.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Despite the later successes, Cézanne was only ever able to approach his goals. On 5 September 1906, he wrote to his son Paul: "Finally, I want to tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clairvoyant to nature, but that it is always very difficult for me to realize my feelings. I cannot reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses, I do not possess that wonderful richness of color that animates nature."


title: Paul Cézanne

text: On 15 October 1906, Cézanne was caught in a storm while working in the field. After working for two hours he decided to go home; but on the way he collapsed and lost consciousness. He was taken home by a passing driver of a laundry cart. Due to hypothermia, he contracted severe pneumonia. His old housekeeper rubbed his arms and legs to restore the circulation; as a result, he regained consciousness. The next day, Cézanne went out into the garden to work on his last painting, "Portrait of the Gardener Vallier", and wrote an impatient letter to his paint dealer, bemoaning the delay in the delivery of paint, but later on he fainted. Vallier with whom he was working called for help; he was put to bed, and he never left it. His wife Hortense and son Paul received a telegram from the housekeeper, but they were too late. He died a few days later, on 22 October 1906 of pneumonia at the age of 67, and was buried at the Saint-Pierre Cemetery in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne's early "dark" period was influenced by the works of French Romanticism and early Realism. Models were Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet. His paintings are characterized by a thick application of paint, high-contrast, dark tones with pronounced shadows, the use of pure black and other tones mixed with black, brown, gray and Prussian blue; occasionally a few white dots or green and red brushstrokes are added to brighten up, enlivening the monochrome monotony. The themes of his pictures from this period are portraits of family members or demonic-erotic content, in which his own traumatic experiences are reminiscent.They differ sharply from his earlier watercolours and sketches at the École Spéciale de dessin at Aix-en-Provence in 1859, and their violence of expression is in contrast to his subsequent works.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 1866–67, inspired by the example of Courbet, Cézanne painted a series of paintings with a palette knife. He later called these works, mostly portraits, "une couillarde" ("a coarse word for ostentatious virility"). Lawrence Gowing has written that Cézanne's palette knife phase "was not only the invention of modern expressionism, although it was incidentally that; the idea of art as emotional ejaculation made its first appearance at this moment".


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Among the "couillarde" paintings are a series of portraits of his uncle Dominique in which Cézanne achieved a style that "was as unified as Impressionism was fragmentary". Later works of the dark period include several erotic or violent subjects, such as "Women Dressing" (), "The Abduction" (), and "The Murder" (), which depicts a man stabbing a woman who is held down by his female accomplice.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Camille Pissarro lived in Pontoise. There and in Auvers he and Cézanne painted landscapes together. For a long time afterwards, Cézanne described himself as Pissarro's pupil, referring to him as "God the Father", as well as saying: "We all stem from Pissarro." Under Pissarro's influence Cézanne began to abandon dark colours and his canvases grew much brighter, and he now used a color palette based purely on the basic tones, yellow, red and blue. In doing so, he broke away from his technique of heavy, often overloaded-looking application of paint and adopted the loose painting technique of his role models, consisting of brushstrokes placed side by side.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Portraits and figurative compositions receded in these years. Cézanne subsequently created landscape paintings in which the illusionistic deep space was canceled more and more clearly. The “objects” continue to be understood as volumes and reduced to their basic geometric shapes. This design method is transferred to the entire picture area. The painterly gesture now treats the “distance” in a similar way to the “objects” themselves, giving the impression of a long-distance effect. In this way, Cézanne left the traditional pictorial space on the one hand, but on the other hand counteracted the dissolving impression of Impressionist pictorial works.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The "period of synthesis" followed, in which Cézanne completely broke away from the Impressionist style of painting. He solidified the forms by applying paint diagonally across the surface, eliminated the perspective representation to create the depth of the picture and directed his attention to the balance of the composition. During this period he increasingly created landscape and figure paintings. In a letter to his friend Joachim Gasquet he wrote: "The colored surfaces, always the surfaces! The colorful place where the soul of the surfaces trembles, the prismatic warmth, the encounter of the surfaces in the sunlight. I design my surfaces with my shades on the palette, understand me! […] The areas must be clearly visible. Definitely [...] but they have to be distributed correctly, they have to flow into one another. Everything has to play together and yet create contrasts. It's all about the volume!"


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The still lifes that Cézanne painted from the late 1880s are another focus of his work. He refrained from rendering the motifs in linear perspective and instead depicted them in the dimensions that made sense to him in terms of composition; a pear, for example, can be oversized in order to achieve inner balance and an exciting composition. He built his arrangements in the studio. In addition to the fruit, there are jugs, pots and plates, and occasionally a putto, often surrounded by a white, puffy tablecloth that lends the subject a baroque opulence. It is not the objects that should attract attention, but the arrangement of the shapes and colors on the surface.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne developed the composition from individual dabs of paint spread across the canvas, from which the form and volume of the object gradually build up. Achieving the balance of these patches of color on the canvas required a slow process, so Cézanne often worked on a painting for a long time. Initially only portraying family members or friends, Cézanne's better financial position allowed him to hire a professional model, a young Italian named Michelangelo di Rosa, for "The Boy in the Red Vest" (1888–1890), one of his best-known paintings. Di Rosa was represented in four paintings and two watercolors.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Many of his later works, the so-called "lyrical period", such as the cycle of the bathers, are characterized by a turn to freely invented figures in the landscape; Cézanne created about 140 paintings and sketches on the theme of the bathing scenes. Here you can find his admiration for classical painting, which seeks to unite man and nature in harmony in Arcadian idylls. In the last seven years he created three large-format versions of "The Great Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses)", with the 208 × 249 cm work on display in Philadelphia being the largest. Cézanne was concerned with the composition and the interplay of shapes and colors, of nature and figures. For his paintings at this time he used sketches and photographs as templates, since he did not like the presence of naked models.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne painted five versions of "The Card Players" (Les Joueurs de cartes) in 1890 and 1895, in which the same person is represented in different variants. For "The Card Players", he used farmers and day laborers who worked in the fields near the Jas de Bouffan as models. They are not genre pictures, even if they show scenes from everyday life; the motif is constructed according to strict laws of color and form.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The area around the Montagne Sainte-Victoire was one of the most important themes of his later years. From a vantage point above his studio, later called Terrain des Paintres, he painted several views of the mountain. A precise observation of nature was a prerequisite for Cézanne's painting: "In order to paint a landscape correctly, I first have to recognize the geological stratification." In total he painted more than 30 oil paintings and 45 watercolors of the mountains, and he wrote to a friend in the 1890s "art is a harmony parallel to nature".


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne was primarily concerned with watercolor painting in his late work, as he realized that the specific application of his method could be particularly evident in this medium. The late watercolors also had an effect on his oil paintings, for example in the study with bathers (1902–1906), in which a depiction full of “empty spaces” flanked by color appears to be complete. The painter and art critic Roger Fry emphasized this in his seminal Cézanne publication "Cézanne: A Study of His Development" from 1927 that after 1885 the watercolor technique had a strong influence on his painting with oil paints. The watercolors in Vollard's Cézanne monograph of 1914 and in Julius Meier-Graefe's picture portfolio edited in 1918 with ten facsimiles based on the watercolors became known to a larger group of interested parties. Only lightly colored pencil studies, which occasionally appeared in sketch albums, stand next to carefully colored works. Many watercolors are equal to the realizations on canvas and form an autonomous group of works. In terms of subject matter, landscape watercolors dominate, followed by figure paintings and still lifes, while portraits, in contrast to paintings and drawings, are rarer.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne's early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and includes many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted. Later in his career, he became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style. Nevertheless, in Cézanne's mature work there is the development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting. Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes. His statement "I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums", and his contention that he was recreating Poussin "after nature" underscored his desire to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: As with the old masters, for Cézanne the basis of painting was drawing, but the prerequisite for all work was subordination to the object, or the eye or pure looking: “All the painter’s intentions must be silent. He should silence all voices of prejudice. Forget! Forget! create silence! Be a perfect echo. […] The landscape is reflected, becomes human, thinks in me. […] I climb with her to the roots of the world. we germinate A tender excitement seizes me and from the roots of this excitement then rises the juice, the color. I was born in the real world. I see! […] In order to paint that, then, the craft must be used, but a humble craft that obeys and is ready to transmit unconsciously.”


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In addition to oil paintings and watercolors, Cézanne left behind an extensive oeuvre of more than 1200 drawings, which, hidden in the cupboards and folders of the studio during his lifetime only began to interest collectors in the 1930s. They form the working material for his works and show detailed sketches, observation notes and traces of Cézanne's sometimes difficult to decipher stages on the way to the realization of the picture. Their task, linked to the process of creating the respective work, was to give the overall structure and the object designations within the pictorial organism. Even in old age, portraits and figure drawings were made based on models from antique sculptures and baroque paintings from the Louvre, which gave him clarity about the isolation of plastic phenomena. Therefore, the black and white of the drawings was an essential prerequisite for Cézanne's color designs.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Paul Cézanne was the first artist to begin breaking down objects into simple geometric shapes. In his much-quoted letter of 15 April 1904 to the painter and art theorist Émile Bernard, who had met Cézanne in his last years, he wrote: "Treat nature according to cylinder, sphere, and cone and put the whole in perspective, like this that each side of an object, of a surface, leads to a central point […]" Cézanne realized his painting ideas in the paintings of Montagne Sainte-Victoire and the his Still-Lifes. In his pictorial conception, even a mountain is understood as a superimposition of forms, spaces and structures that rise above the ground.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Émile Bernard wrote of Cézanne's unusual way of working: "He began with the shadow parts and with one spot, on which he put a second, larger one, then a third, until all these shades, covering each other, modeled the object with their coloring. It was then that I realized that a law of harmony was guiding his work and that these modulations had a direction preordained in his mind.” In this preordained direction, for Cézanne, lay the real secret of painting in the context of harmony and the illusion of depth. To the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus Cézanne emphasized on 13 April 1906 during his visit to Aix that the main thing in a picture is the meeting of the distance. The color must express every leap into the depths.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials: he wanted to "treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone" (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, an apple or orange a sphere, for example). Additionally, Cézanne's desire to capture the truth of perception led him to explore binocular vision graphically, rendering slightly different, yet simultaneous visual perceptions of the same phenomena to provide the viewer with an aesthetic experience of depth different from those of earlier ideals of perspective, in particular single-point perspective. His interest in new ways of modelling space and volume derived from the stereoscopy obsession of his era and from reading Hippolyte Taine’s Berkelean theory of spatial perception. Cézanne's innovations have prompted critics to suggest such varied explanations as sick retinas, pure vision, and the influence of the steam railway.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne preferred to use these terms when describing his painting process. First of all, there is the “motif”, by which he not only meant the representational concept of the picture, but also the motivation for his tireless work of observing and painting. "Aller sur le motif", as he called his approach to work, therefore meant entering into a relationship with an external object that moved the artist inwardly and that had to be translated into a picture.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Sensation is another key term in Cézanne's vocabulary. First of all, he meant visual perception in the sense of “impression”, i.e. an optical sensory stimulus emanating from the object. At the same time, it includes the emotion as a psychological reaction to what is perceived. Cézanne expressly did not place the object to be depicted at the center of his painterly efforts, but rather the sensation: "Painting from nature does not mean copying the object, it means realizing its sensations." The medium that mediated between things and sensations was the colour, although Cézanne left it open to what extent it arises from things or is an abstraction of his vision.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne used the third term réalisation to describe the actual painterly activity, which he feared would fail to the end. Several things had to be “realized” at the same time: first the motif in all its diversity, then the feelings that the motif triggered in him, and finally the painting itself, the realization of which could bring the other “realizations” to light. "Painting" therefore meant letting those opposing movements of taking in and giving, of "impression" and "expression" merge into one another in a single gesture. The "realization in art" became a key concept in Cézanne's thinking and acting.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The sometimes longer dates for creation in the catalogues of Cézanne's works do not always indicate that the exact dating cannot be clarified, even if Cézanne rarely dated his pictures, especially since he worked on some pictures for months if not years before he was satisfied with the result. The artist himself regarded many of his paintings as unfinished, for painting was a never-ending process for him.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cataloging Cézanne's works turned out to be a difficult task. Ambroise Vollard made the first attempt, a multi-volume photo album, similar to his catalogue of Renoir. Vollard's catalogue never materialized however. Georges Rivière, the father-in-law of Cézanne's son published a biography of the artist in 1923 ("Le Maître Paul Cézanne") that included a chronological and annotated list of many of the painter’s works. Conceived by the art dealer Paul Rosenberg, the first complete catalogue raisonné was published by Lionello Venturi in 1936. The two volume "Cézanne: Son Art, Son Oeuvre" became the definitive catalogue of the artist's work for over five decades, although requiring a supplement as additional works were discovered and new scholarship and documentation introduced. Adrien Chappuis' "The Drawings of Paul Cézanne – A Catalog Raisonné" was published by Thames and Hudson in London in 1973 and has remained the classic source for the artist's graphic work.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: John Rewald continued Venturi's work after his death. Rewald was tasked with combining Venturi’s planned supplement with his own research, an agreement that did not work out as intended. After years of studying Cezanne’s works, Rewald found that he not only disagreed with many of his predecessor’s dates but a number of his attributions as well. He therefore set about developing an entirely new catalogue raisonné. Rewald's "Paul Cézanne – The Watercolours: A Catalog Raisonné" was published by Thames and Hudson, London with 645 illustrations in 1983. The missing dating of the paintings (Rewald only found one) and imprecise formulations of the pictorial motif such as "Paysage" or "Quelques pommes" caused confusion. In his early treatment of the "Venturi" Rewald made a list of all the works that could be dated without a stylistic analysis, because Rewald rejected such an analysis as unscientific. He continued his list by following the various whereabouts of Cézanne that could be verified by documents. Another scheme of his approach was to rely on the memories of the people portrayed, especially if they were Cézanne's contemporaries. Based on his own interviews, he made chronological assignments. Among the works that could be dated with certainty were Cézanne's "Portrait of the Critic Gustave Geffroy", which the sitter confirmed as 1895, and "Lake Annecy", which the artist visited only once, in 1896.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Rewald died in 1994, he was not able to fully complete his work. When in doubt, Rewald's tendency was to include rather than exclude. This method was adopted by his closest associates, Walter Feilchenfeldt Jr., son of the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, and Jayne Warman, who completed the catalog and provided it with introductions. The catalog was published in 1996 under the title "The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalog Raisonne – Review". It includes the 954 works that Rewald wanted to record. Feilchenfeldt, Warman and David Nash went on to produce the first complete catalogue of the artist work since with "The Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings of Paul Cezanne, an online catalogue raisonné".


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne's childhood friend, the writer Émile Zola, was skeptical about Cézanne's human and artistic qualities, saying as early as 1861 that "Paul may have the genius of a great painter, but he will never have the genius to actually become one. The slightest obstacle drives him to despair." In fact, it was Cézanne's self-doubt and refusal to make artistic compromises, as well as his rejection of social concessions, that led his contemporaries to regard him as an oddball.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne's works were rejected numerous times by the official Salon in Paris and ridiculed by art critics when exhibited with the Impressionists. Yet during his lifetime Cézanne was considered a master by younger artists who visited his studio in Aix. In the circle of the Impressionists, however, Cézanne's work was given special recognition; Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Edgar Degas spoke enthusiastically about his work, and Pissarro said: "I think it will be centuries before we get an account of it."


title: Paul Cézanne

text: A portrait of Cézanne was painted by his friend and mentor Pissarro in 1874, and in 1901 the co-founder of the Nabis group, Maurice Denis, created "Hommage à Cézanne", showing Cézanne's painting "Still Life with Fruit" on the easel amidst artist friends at the Vollard Gallery. Originally owned by Paul Gauguin, Hommage à Cézanne was later acquired by French writer and Denis' friend, André Gide, who owned it until 1928. It is now on display at the Musée d'Orsay .


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The first joint Impressionist exhibition in Paris in April to May 1874 attracted extensive criticism. Audiences and art critics, for whom "the ideal" of the École de Beaux Arts was proof of the existence of art, burst out laughing. One critic claimed that Monet painted by loading his paints in a gun and shooting them at the canvas. A colleague performed an Indian dance in front of a painting by Cézanne and shouted: “Hugh! […] I am the walking impression, the avenging palette knife, Monet's 'Boulevard des Capucines', 'The House of the Hanged Man' and 'The Modern Olympia' by Mr. Cézanne. Hugh! Hugh!


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 1883, the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans replied to Pissarro in a letter to Pissarro's accusation that Cézanne was only briefly mentioned in Huysman's book "L'Art Moderne" by suggesting that Cézanne's view of the motifs was distorted by astigmatism : "[...] but it There is certainly an eye defect involved, which I am assured he is also aware of.” Five years later, in "La Cravache" magazine, his judgment became more positive when he described Cézanne's works as “strange yet real” and as “revelations”. designated.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The art dealer Ambroise Vollard first came into contact with Cézanne's works in 1892 through the paint dealer Tanguy, who had exhibited them in his shop in the Rue Clauzel in Montmartre in return for the delivery of painting utensils . Vollard recalled the lack of response: the shop was rarely visited, "since it was not yet fashionable at the time to buy 'atrocious works' expensively, not even cheaply." Tanguy even took interested parties to the painter's studio, to which he had a key where small pictures and 100 francs large pictures could be bought at a fixed price of 40 francs. The "Journal des Artistes" echoed the general tone of the time, anxious to ask whether its sensitive readers would not be sickened at the sight of "these oppressive abominations, which exceed the measure of evil permitted by law."


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The art critic Gustave Geffroy was one of the few critics who judged Cézanne's work fairly and unreservedly during his lifetime. As early as 25 March 1894, he wrote in the "Journal" about the then current relationship between Cézanne's painting and the efforts of younger artists, that Cézanne had become a kind of forerunner to which the Symbolists referred, and that there was a direct connection between Cézanne's painting and of the Gauguins, Bernards and even Vincent van Goghs. A year later, after the successful exhibition at the Vollard Gallery in 1895, Geffroy again led the "Journal": "He is a great truth fanatic, fiery and naive, harsh and nuanced. He will go to the Louvre.” Between these two chronicles, Cézanne painted the portrait of Geffroy, which Cézanne left unfinished because he was dissatisfied with it.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Two retrospectives posthumously paid tribute to the artist in 1907. From 17 to 29 June, the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris showed 79 watercolors by Cézanne. The 5th Salon d'Automne then paid homage to him from 5 October to 15 November, exhibiting 49 paintings and seven watercolors in two rooms in the Grand Palais. Visitors included the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe, who would write the first Cézanne biography in 1910, Harry Graf Kessler and Rainer Maria Rilke. The two exhibitions motivated many artists, such as Georges Braque, André Derain, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, on their crucial insights for 20th century art.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 1910 some of Cézanne's paintings were shown in the "Manet and the Post-Impressionists" exhibition in London (another one followed in 1912). The exhibition had been initiated by the painter and art critic Roger Fry in the Grafton Galleries, which wanted to introduce English art lovers to the work of Édouard Manet, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Cézanne. Fry used the name to describe the Post-Impressionist style . Although the exhibition was judged negatively by critics and the public, it was to be significant in the history of modern art. Fry recognized the extraordinary value of the path that artists such as van Gogh and Cézanne had taken in expressing their personal feelings and worldview through their paintings, even if visitors at the time could not yet understand this. Cézanne's first exhibition in the United States took place in 1910/11 at Gallery 291 in New York. In 1913 his works were exhibited at the Armory Show in New York ; it was a groundbreaking exhibition of modern art and sculpture, although here too the exhibits were met with criticism and ridicule. Today, these artists, who were criticized and ridiculed even by their own art academies during their lifetime, are regarded as the fathers of modern art.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Many "productive" misunderstandings lie hidden in the reception of the works and the supposed intentions of Cézanne, which had a considerable influence on the further course and development of modern art. The list of those artists who more or less justifiably referred to him and who coined individual elements from the wealth of his creative approaches for their own pictorial inventions shows an almost complete art history of the 20th century. As early as 1910, Guillaume Apollinaire stated that "most of the new painters claim to be successors of this serious painter who was only interested in art".


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Immediately after Cézanne's death in 1906, stimulated by a comprehensive exhibition of his watercolors in the spring of 1907 at the "Galerie Bernheim-Jeune" and a retrospective in October 1907 at the "Salon d'Automne" in Paris, a lively examination of his work began. Among young French artists, Henri Matisse and André Derain were the first to become passionate about Cézanne, followed by Picasso, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. This enthusiasm was lasting, as the eighty-year-old Matisse said in 1949 that he owed the most to the art of Cézanne. Braque also described the influence of Cézanne on his art as an "initiation" and said in 1961: "Cézanne was the first to turn away from the learned mechanized perspective." Picasso admitted that "he was the only master for me ..., he was a father figure to us: it was he who offered us protection."


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne expert Götz Adriani notes, however, that the Cézanne's reception by Cubists – particularly by the Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, who placed Cézanne at the beginning of their way of painting in their 1912 treatise "Du "Cubisme"" – was altogether quite arbitrary was. They largely ignored the motivation gained from observing nature. In this context, he points to the formalistic misinterpretations that refer to Émile Bernard's published paper from 1907. Here it says, among other things, "treat nature according to cylinder, sphere and cone". Further misinterpretations of this kind can be found in Kazimir Malevich's 1919 text "On the New Systems in Art". For example, in his quote, Cézanne did not intend to reinterpret the experience of nature in the sense of orienting himself towards cubic form elements; he was more concerned with corresponding to the object forms and their coloring under the various aspects in the picture.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: One of the many examples of Cézanne's influence on modernism is the painting "Mardi Gras", which shows his son Paul with his friend Louis Guillaume and includes a subject from the Commedia dell'arte. Picasso took inspiration from it for the harlequin theme in his pink period. Matisse, in turn, took up the theme of the most classic painting in the Bathers series, The Great Bathers from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in his 1909 painting The Bathers.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The artists just mentioned are just the beginning of a series of people inspired. The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died early, had already seen Cézanne's paintings at Vollard's in 1900, which had deeply impressed her. Shortly before her death, she wrote to Clara Westhoff in a letter on 21 October 1907 : "I am thinking and thinking a lot these days about Cézanne and how he is one of the three or four painters who struck me like a thunderstorm or a major event.” Paul Klee noted in his diary in 1909: “Cézanne is a teacher par excellence for me” after seeing more than a dozen paintings by Cézanne in the Munich Secession. The artist group Der Blaue Reiter referred to him in their 1912 almanac when Franz Marc reported on the kinship between El Greco and Cézanne, whose works he understood as the gateways to a new era of painting. Again, Kandinsky, who had seen Cézanne's painting at the 1907 retrospective at the "Salon d'Automne", refers to Cézanne in his 1912 treatise "On the Spiritual in Art", in whose work he found a "strong resonance of the abstract." recognized and found the spiritual part of his beliefs predetermined in him. El Lissitzky emphasized his importance for the Russian avant-garde around 1923, and Lenin suggested erecting monuments to the heroes of the world revolution in 1918; on the roll of honor were Courbet and Cézanne. Next to Matisse, Alberto Giacometti dealt most extensively with Cézanne's style of representation. Aristide Maillol worked on a Cézanne monument in 1909, but failed due to rejection by the city of Aix-en-Provence. Cézanne was also an important authority for artists of the newer generation. Jasper Johns described him as the most important role model alongside Duchamp and Leonardo da Vinci.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne is one of the greatest of those who changed the course of art history ... From him we have learned that to alter the coloring of an object is to alter its structure. His work proves without doubt that painting is not—or not any longer—the art of imitating an object by lines and colors, but of giving plastic [solid, but alterable] form to our nature. ("Du "Cubisme"", 1912)


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Along with the work of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, the work of Cézanne, with its sense of immediacy and incompletion, critically influenced Matisse and others prior to Fauvism and Expressionism. Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris and others to experiment with ever more complex views of the same subject and eventually to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art. Picasso referred to Cézanne as "the father of us all" and claimed him as "my one and only master!" Other painters such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Kasimir Malevich, Georges Rouault, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse acknowledged Cézanne's genius.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Ernest Hemingway compared his writing to Cézanne's landscapes. As he describes in A Moveable Feast, I was "learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them."


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne's painting "The Boy in the Red Vest" was stolen from a Swiss museum in 2008. It was recovered in a Serbian police raid in 2012.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: "Une visite au Louvre", 2004. Filmed and directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet about Cézanne, based on the posthumously published conversations with the painter, handed down by his admirer Joachim Gasquet. The film describes a walk by Cézanne in the Louvre past the paintings of his fellow artists.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: On the 100th anniversary of Cézanne's death in 2006, two documentaries from 1995 and 2000 about Paul Cézanne and his motif "La Montagne Sainte-Victoire" were re-released. "Cézanne's triumph" was re-shot for the 2006 anniversary year.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: "The Violence of the Motive", 1995. A film directed by Alain Jaubert. A mountain near his hometown of Aix-en-Provence becomes Cézanne's main motif. He shows La Montagne Sainte-Victoire from different perspectives and at different times of the year more than 80 times. The motif becomes an obsession that Jaubert gets to the bottom of in his film.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: "Cézanne – the Painter", 2000. A film by Elisabeth Kapnist. The story of a passion and a lifelong artistic search: the painter Cézanne, his childhood, his friendship with Zola and his encounter with Impressionism are portrayed.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: "The Triumph of Cézanne", 2006. A film by Jacques Deschamps. Deschamps takes the 100th anniversary of Cézanne's death in October 2006 as an opportunity to trace the genesis of a legend. Cézanne encountered rejection and incomprehension before he was allowed to rise to the Olympus of art history and the international art market.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard argues in his work "Misère de la philosophie", that Cézanne has, so to speak, the sixth sense: he senses the reality in the making before it is completed in normal perception. So the painter touches on the sublime when he sees the overwhelming quality of the mountainous landscape, which can neither be represented with normal language nor with the usual painting technique. Lyotard sums it up: "One can also say that the uncanniness of the oil paintings and watercolors dedicated to mountains and fruits derives both from a deep sense of the disappearance of appearances and from the demise of the visible world."


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne's stylistic approaches and beliefs regarding how to paint were analyzed and written about by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty who is primarily known for his association with phenomenology and existentialism. In his 1945 essay entitled ""Cézanne's Doubt"", Merleau-Ponty discusses how Cézanne gave up classic artistic elements such as pictorial arrangements, single view perspectives, and outlines that enclosed color in an attempt to get a "lived perspective" by capturing all the complexities that an eye observes. He wanted to see and sense the objects he was painting, rather than think about them. Ultimately, he wanted to get to the point where "sight" was also "touch". He would take hours sometimes to put down a single stroke because each stroke needed to contain "the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style". A still life might have taken Cézanne one hundred working sessions while a portrait took him around one hundred and fifty sessions. Cézanne believed that while he was painting, he was capturing a moment in time, that once passed, could not come back. The atmosphere surrounding what he was painting was a part of the sensational reality he was painting. Cézanne claimed: "Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting."


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The increase in value of Cézanne's work can be seen from the auction of his painting "Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier" on 10 May 1999, which sold for $60.5 million at Sotheby's in New York, the fourth-highest price paid for a painting up to that time, and the most expensive still life painting at the time.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Cézanne's watercolour "Still Life with Green Melon" set the record for a work on paper at an auction, when it sold for $25.5 million in 8 May 2007, far above its estimate of $18 million. A preparatory watercolour for "The Card Players" series previously thought lost for sixty years sold for $19.1 million on 1 May 2012 to an anonymous bidder.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: One of the five versions of Cézanne's "The Card Players" was sold in 2011 to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price variously estimated at between $250 million ($ million today) and possibly as high as $300 million ($ million today), either price signifying a new mark for highest price for a painting up to that date. The record price was surpassed in November 2017 by "Salvator Mundi" by Leonardo da Vinci. "The Card Players" is now the third most expensive painting of all time after the sale of "Interchange" by Willem de Kooning.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: On 8 November 2022, $138 million US was paid for the painting "La Montagne Sainte-Victoire" as part of the Paul Allen collection sale at Christie's in New York City to setting a new mark for a price paid for his work at auction.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 2000 French courts ordered the seizure of Cézanne's “The sea at l’Estaque” which was part of the “From Fra Angelico to Bonnard: masterpieces from the Rau Collection” exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg because of a claim that it had been looted by Nazis from the gallery owner Josse Bernheim-Jeune.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: In 2020 the provenance of a Cézanne from the Buehrle collection came under scrutiny. The painting, Paysage, had already been flagged as potentially problematic in the 2015 "Schwarzbuch Bührle: Raubkunst für das Kunsthaus Zürich"?. In "Die Wochenzeitung", Keller said the provenance of "Paysage" had been "whitewashed". "Among Keller’s objections to the provenance description on the foundation’s website is the failure to note that the pre-war owners, Berthold and Martha Nothmann, were forced to flee Germany as Jews in 1939."


title: Paul Cézanne

text: Visitors to Aix-en-Provence can discover Cézanne's landscape motifs along five marked trails from the city center. They lead to Le Tholonet, the Jas de Bouffan, the Bibémus quarry, the banks of the River Arc and the Les Lauves workshop.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: The Atelier Les Lauves has been open to the public since 1954. An American foundation initiated by James Lord and John Rewald made this possible with funds provided by 114 donors. They bought it from the previous owner Marcel Provence and transferred it to the University of Aix. In 1969 the studio was transferred to the city of Aix. The visitor will find Cézanne's furniture, easel and palette, the objects that appear in his still lifes, and some original drawings and watercolours.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: During their lifetime, most of the residents of Aix mocked their fellow citizen Cézanne. More recently, they even named a university after their world-famous artist: in 1973 it was founded in Aix-en-Provence, the Paul Cézanne University with the departments of law and political science, business administration as well as natural sciences and technology. In 2011 it was dissolved and combined with the other two universities in Aix and Marseille to form the University of Aix-Marseille.


title: Paul Cézanne

text: As a result of their rejection of his works in the past, the Musée Granet in Aix had to make do with a loan of paintings from the Louvre in order to be able to present visitors with Cézanne, the son of their city. In 1984, the museum received eight paintings and some watercolours, including a motif from the Bathers series and a portrait of Mme Cézanne. Thanks to another donation in 2000, nine paintings by Cézanne are now on display there.


title: Sanya Malhotra

text: Sanya Malhotra (born 25 February 1992) is an Indian actress who works in Hindi films. She began her career with supporting roles in the biographical sports film "Dangal" (2016) and the comedy "Badhaai Ho" (2018), both of which rank among the highest-grossing Indian films.


title: Sanya Malhotra

text: Malhotra received nominations for the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress for her roles in the drama "Photograph" (2019) and the black comedy "Ludo" (2020), and also received praise for starring in the streaming films "Shakuntala Devi" (2020), "Pagglait" (2021) and


title: Sanya Malhotra

text: Malhotra was born and raised in Delhi, India. She is a trained dancer in contemporary and ballet. After graduating from Gargi College, Malhotra participated in the dance reality show Dance India Dance and made it to the top 100. She moved to Mumbai, where she began appearing in auditions and began assisting camerapersons for television commercials. She was later contacted by the film casting director Mukesh Chhabra.


title: Sanya Malhotra

text: Malhotra was selected for Nitesh Tiwari's biographical sports film "Dangal" along with Fatima Sana Shaikh, who was also relatively new. Before the film, she said that she did not know much about wrestling. She then watched several videos on wrestling and "how wrestlers move, walk, their body language" and also did the training. Both Malhotra and Sheikh went through five rounds of auditions, physical training and workshops with Tiwari and Aamir Khan. They were trained by coach and former wrestler Kripa Shankar Patel Bishnoi. Released in 2016, "Dangal" received critical acclaim and became the highest-grossing Indian film ever with earnings of more than worldwide. Anupama Chopra said in her review that Malhotra provides "strong support" to the story. Malhotra later choreographed the song "Sexy Baliye" for the "Secret Superstar" (2017), which featured Khan.


title: Sanya Malhotra

text: Two years later, Malhotra starred in Vishal Bhardwaj's drama "Pataakha" (2018) alongside newcomer Radhika Madan. . Based on the short story "Do Behnen" by Charan Singh Pathik, it tells the story of two warring sisters in Rajasthan. The story was based on the wives of Pathik's brothers. To prepare for the film, both she and Madan met the real inspiration behind the characters to learn their nuances. The two stayed in Ronsi village near Jaipur and learned the Rajasthani dialect; they also got accustomed to milking buffaloes, thatching roofs, plastering the walls with dung and walking for long distances while balancing "matkas" full of water on their head and another around their waist. They also had to put on 10 kg of weight. Critic Raja Sen found Malhotra to be a "fearless actress" and thought that she "plays this character with unhinged enthusiasm". In the same year, she took on a supporting role in Amit Sharma's critically and commercially successful comedy "Badhaai Ho", starring Ayushmann Khurrana.


title: Sanya Malhotra

text: In 2019, Malhotra starred in Ritesh Batra's "Photograph". The film follows a street photographer Rafi, played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who tries to convince a student Miloni (Malhotra) to pose as his fiancée so that his grandmother stops pressuring him to get married. It was screened at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. "The Hollywood Reporter" featured her in their listing of "breakout talent" from the latter festival. Rahul Desai of Film Companion gave "Photograph" a positive review and wrote that Malhotra "becomes the dreamy-eyed participant that enables the film to embrace its quiet glances and gentle flights of fantasy." Malhotra was nominated for the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress for the film.


title: Sanya Malhotra

text: Malhotra's two films of 2020—the biographical film "Shakuntala Devi" and the black comedy "Ludo"—were initially planned for theatrical release. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in India, they were released directly on Amazon Prime Video and Netflix respectively. "Shakuntala Devi", directed by Anu Menon, is about the mathematician of the same name and starred Vidya Balan in the titular role, with Malhotra portraying Devi's daughter Anupama. Mike McCahill of "The Guardian" found Malhotra to be "quietly affecting" in her part and commended her for holding her own opposite her co-star. Anurag Basu's anthology film, "Ludo," featured her alongside an ensemble cast. "India Today"s Nairita Mukherjee took note of the "outstanding camaraderie" between Malhotra and her co-star Aditya Roy Kapur. For her performance in "Ludo", she received another nomination for the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress.


title: Sanya Malhotra

text: Malhotra's first two films of 2021 were released on Netflix. In the black comedy "Pagglait", she starred as a young widow who discovers her late-husband's infidelity. Critic Anna M. M. Vetticad found her to be aptly cast in a subtle part. She received a Best Actress nomination at the Filmfare OTT Awards. Malhotra then starred alongside Abhimanyu Dassani as newlyweds in the romantic comedy "Meenakshi Sundareshwar". The film received criticism for its stereotypical representation of Tamil people.


title: Sanya Malhotra

text: In 2022, she starred in the ZEE5 film "Love Hostel", a thriller about honour killing, opposite Vikrant Massey. Sukanya Verma of "Rediff" wrote that both Massey and Malhotra "effortlessly convey the flavour of the world they inhabit". Malhotra had a small role opposite Rajkummar Rao in the thriller "", a remake of the Telugu film of the .


title: Sanya Malhotra

text: Malhotra will next star in the Netflix satirical film "Kathal", about a small-town cop in pursuit of a missing jackfruit. She will also feature in the action film "Jawan", starring Shah Rukh Khan and Nayanthara, and in the biopic "Sam Bahadur", starring Vicky Kaushal as Sam Manekshaw.


title: Madea

text: Mabel "Madea" Earlene Simmons (née Baker/Murphy) is a character created and portrayed by Tyler Perry. She is portrayed as a tough, street-smart elderly African-American woman.


title: Madea

text: Madea is based on Perry's mother and his aunt. In Perry's own words, Madea is "exactly the PG version of my mother and my aunt, and I loved having an opportunity to pay homage to them. She would beat the hell out of you but make sure the ambulance got there in time to make sure they could set your arm back".


title: Madea

text: The Madea films/plays are comedies, but all contain serious themes and are intended to deliver moral messages about issues such as infidelity, spousal abuse and consequences of one's actions.


title: Madea

text: Madea is said to be born in Greensburg, Louisiana on June 26, 1935, and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana.


title: Madea

text: Her age varies in different movies and plays. Madea was 68 in the first play, "I Can Do Bad All by Myself", as well as "Madea's Class Reunion". In "A Madea Homecoming", set in 2022, it is said she is 95 years old, but with a birth year of 1935, she would actually be 87.


title: Madea

text: She is described as being brought up in poverty, growing up in a shotgun house with her parents and siblings. Madea has stated that although her family didn't have much, they had love.


title: Madea

text: When she was in her early teens, her family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where they lived on the west side. She attended Booker T. Washington High School and was a cheerleader. In "I Can Do Bad All by Myself", we learn that she once lived in Cleveland, Alabama, but later returned to Atlanta.


title: Madea

text: According to "A Madea Christmas: The Play", Madea's mother, "Big Mabel" Murphy, was a hooker during Madea's childhood and was not at all religious. Madea grew up with little knowledge of religion, explaining why she has a tendency to misquote the Bible. Madea makes frequent reference to herself once being a hooker and a stripper.


title: Madea

text: Her maiden name is not stated, but it is presumably either Baker or Murphy, the last names of her father and mother, respectively.


title: Madea

text: It is not revealed where and when she met her first husband, Johnny. Madea and Johnny had their first child, Michelle, as young teens, possibly 15 or 16. When Madea was 18, she got pregnant with her other daughter, Cora, through a one-night stand. Sometime later, Madea and Johnny had a son, William. All of her children are said to be married and had children. Madea and Johnny raised three of their grandchildren, Maylee and Vianne "Khazzy" Simmons, after their daughter's death from drug addiction.


title: Madea

text: In "Madea Goes to Jail" we learn Madea's criminal record began at age nine with a charge of theft. She was charged with her first felony at this age, and her crimes began progressing to illegal gambling at age 18, which later evolved into check fraud, identity theft, insurance fraud (related to her nine deceased husbands), assault, attempted murder, road rage (usually when Madea is in vehicle), and vehicle theft.


title: Madea

text: In "Diary of a Mad Black Woman", Madea and her granddaughter Helen McCarter were both charged with "criminal trespassing, reckless endangerment, criminal possession of a handgun, assault with a deadly weapon, [driving on a] suspended license, expired registration, reckless driving, and a broken taillight," which caused Judge Mablean Ephriam to place Madea on house arrest, while her granddaughter was bailed for $5,000.


title: Madea

text: In "Madea's Family Reunion", Madea was brought before Judge Ephriam once again after she removed her ankle monitor in order to purchase her brother Joe's medication, in effect violating her house arrest. After rigorous efforts, Brian was finally able to persuade Madea to accept Judge Ephraim's ruling to become the foster mother of Nikki Grady.


title: Madea

text: In "Meet the Browns", she was arrested for causing a high speed chase following a routine traffic stop, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer while Joe fled the area claiming that Madea kidnapped him.


title: Madea

text: In "Madea Goes to Jail", Madea was placed under anger management by Judge Ephriam that was overseen by Phil McGraw in light of the car chase and the police officers failing to read Madea her Miranda rights and suspends her already suspended driver's license.


title: Madea

text: In the same movie, she was arrested once again for removing a woman's Pontiac Solstice with a forklift and damaging it in the parking lot of the Big Kmart stealing Madea’s parking spot. She was sentenced to prison for 5 to 10 years by Judge Greg Mathis. This is later overturned and she as part of the “Georgia Seven” are released.


title: Madea

text: In "Madea's Big Happy Family", Madea smashes her car into the fast-food restaurant Snax out of frustration that the manager Sabrina won't give her food even using excuses related to her Cadillac's technical problems in order to persuade the manager to give her food while waiting. No police action was brought up.


title: Madea

text: In the animated film "Madea's Tough Love", Madea is arrested for excessive damage to public property (which she unintentionally committed while chasing after two unruly skateboarders), two bench warrants, 25 unpaid parking tickets, and an unpaid speeding ticket. Madea was released from the sentence when the truth about Mayor Candidate Betsy Holiday's secret illegal activities were exposed proving that Madea was right about her.


title: Madea

text: Madea has appeared in several plays (some of which have been recorded for repeated viewing), fully produced films, a couple of television programs (guest appearances), one book and one animated film. The character made her first appearance in the 1999 play "I Can Do Bad All by Myself", later appearing in numerous other plays by Perry, then appearing in films based on those plays.


title: Madea

text: In the TBS comedy drama "House of Payne" pilot episode "Bully and the Beast", Madea was the foster mother of Nikki. She factored into the plot through a school altercation between her adopted daughter and Curtis Payne's great-nephew Malik. Curtis takes a particular disliking to Madea who is not in the least bit intimidated by Curtis at all. Rather conversely, Curtis became intimidated by Madea and had nightmares about her.


title: Madea

text: In the episode "The Wench Who Saved Christmas", Curtis tries to discourage everyone from having the Christmas spirit. He later fell asleep and dreamt that Madea was the Ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. In this form, she tried to teach him a lesson about his killjoy behaviour.


title: Madea

text: In the episode "Wife Swap", Curtis' wife Ella chastises him for taking her for granted. That night, Curtis has an extended nightmare where he is married to Madea instead of Ella.


title: Madea

text: On another TBS series, "Meet the Browns", Mable is said to be the mother of Cora Simmons as a result of a one-night stand with the show's lead character. She is an unseen character throughout the series.


title: Madea

text: On January 21, 2015, Madea made a special guest appearance in the Oprah Winfrey Network comedy series, "Love Thy Neighbor". The episode titled "Madea's Pressure Is Up" aired as part of the 3rd season of "Love Thy Neighbour."


title: Madea

text: In a commercial for BET+, Tyler Perry explained this streaming service to Madea and Joe at the time when they were arguing on what to watch on TV.


title: Madea

text: "Don't Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings": Perry wrote the book in the character's persona. The book was published on April 11, 2006.


title: Madea

text: In 2009, "Entertainment Weekly" put the character on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "Whether she's going to jail or just opening up a can of whupass, Tyler Perry's Madea is the profane, gun-toting granny you never had but (maybe) wish you did."


title: Madea

text: On April 1, 2013, Orlando Jones pulled an April Fools' Day prank, informing the public via his "Huffington Post" account that he would be replacing Perry as Madea. Jones led the public to believe that the decision had come amid Perry's prior obligations, assisting Oprah Winfrey with her struggling OWN network. As part of the prank, Jones released a photo of himself to the public in which he was impersonating Madea. In addition, he incorporated several pretend quotes seemingly issued by Perry, both acknowledging the news and giving Jones his blessing to continue on with the character. Unaware of the prank, fans responded with outrage and criticism. As result of increasing outcries from fans, Perry informed the public on April 15, 2013, that the news was untrue. Perry was quoted as stating "That was an April Fool's joke that "HE" did. Not true. And not funny. When I'm done with Madea, she is done."


title: Madea

text: Perry has been accused of minstrelsy and playing into black stereotypes with the Madea character, most notably by fellow black director Spike Lee. Perry's argument with Lee dates back to a 2009 interview in which Lee referred to Perry's films as "coonery buffoonery". Lee equated the Madea movies with the old-time minstrel shows which lampooned black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious and happy-go-lucky, and further stated that if a white director made a movie depicting black people in such a manner he would be ostracised. Perry responded by stating that his films were meant as entertainment and should not be taken so seriously, saying, "I am sick of him talking about me. I am sick of him saying, 'This is a coon, this is a buffoon.' I am sick of him talking about black people going to see movies. This is what he said: 'You vote by what you see'—as if black people don't know what they want to see. I am sick of him. He talked about Whoopi, he talked about Oprah, he talked about me, he talked about Clint Eastwood. Spike needs to shut the hell up!" Perry has been criticised for stereotyping black femininity using black masculinity. Some critics believe that the characterisation of Madea, in addition to other black women featured in Madea films, works to legitimise harmful and damaging stereotypes. There is growing concern around these depictions of blackness as critics believe they can have a negative impact on how black women see themselves in society and how they are perceived by others. In addition, Tyler Perry's role as Madea has received criticism due to some viewing his cross-gender acting as a misappropriation of drag culture. Critics have alleged Tyler Perry perpetuates patriarchal ideology through his characterisation of Madea and her interactions with other protagonists.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Edward James "Ted" Hughes (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 "The Times" ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".


title: Ted Hughes

text: Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath from 1956 until her death by suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. His last poetic work, "Birthday Letters" (1998), explored their relationship.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street, in Mytholmroyd in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to William Henry (1894–1981) and Edith ( Farrar) Hughes (1898–1969), and raised among the local farms of the Calder Valley and on the Pennine moorland. Hughes's sister Olwyn Marguerite Hughes (1928–2016) was two years older and his brother Gerald (1920–2016) was ten years older. One of his mother's ancestors had founded the Little Gidding community.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Most of the more recent generations of his family had worked in the clothing and milling industries in the area. Hughes's father, William, a joiner, was of Irish descent and had enlisted with the Lancashire Fusiliers in the First World War and fought at Ypres. He narrowly escaped being killed when a bullet lodged in a pay book in his breast pocket. He was one of just 17 men of his regiment to return from the Dardanelles Campaign (1915–16). The stories of Flanders fields filled Hughes's childhood imagination (later described in the poem "Out"). Hughes noted, "my first six years shaped everything".


title: Ted Hughes

text: Hughes loved hunting and fishing, swimming, and picnicking with his family. He attended the Burnley Road School until he was seven before his family moved to Mexborough, then attending Schofield Street junior school. His parents ran a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop. In "Poetry in Making" he recalled that he was fascinated by animals, collecting, and drawing toy lead creatures. He acted as retriever when his elder brother gamekeeper shot magpies, owls, rats and curlews, growing up surrounded by the harsh realities of working farms in the valleys and on the moors. During his time in Mexborough, he explored Manor Farm at Old Denaby, which he said he would come to know "better than any place on earth". His earliest poem "The Thought Fox", and earliest story "The Rain Horse" were recollections of the area. A close friend at the time, John Wholly, took Hughes to the Crookhill estate above Conisbrough where the boys spent great swathes of time. Hughes became close to the family and learnt a lot about wildlife from Wholly's father, a gamekeeper. He came to view fishing as an almost religious experience.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Hughes attended Mexborough Grammar School, where a succession of teachers encouraged him to write, and develop his interest in poetry. Teachers Miss McLeod and Pauline Mayne introduced him to the poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. Hughes was mentored by his sister Olwyn, who was well versed in poetry, and another teacher, John Fisher. Poet Harold Massingham also attended this school and was also mentored by Fisher. In 1946, one of Hughes's early poems, "Wild West", and a short story were published in the grammar school magazine "The Don and Dearne", followed by further poems in 1948. By 16, he had no other thought than being a poet.


title: Ted Hughes

text: During the same year, Hughes won an open exhibition in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but chose to do his national service first. His two years of national service (1949–51) passed comparatively easily. Hughes was stationed as a ground wireless mechanic in the RAF on an isolated three-man station in east Yorkshire, a time during which he had nothing to do but "read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow". He learnt many of the plays by heart and memorised great quantities of W. B. Yeats's poetry.


title: Ted Hughes

text: In 1951 Hughes initially studied English at Pembroke College under M.J.C. Hodgart, an authority on balladic forms. Hughes felt encouraged and supported by Hodgart's supervision, but attended few lectures and wrote no more poetry at this time, feeling stifled by literary academia and the "terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus" of literary tradition. He wrote, "I might say, that I had as much talent for Leavis-style dismantling of texts as anyone else, I even had a special bent for it, nearly a sadistic streak there, but it seemed to me not only a foolish game, but deeply destructive of myself." In his third year, he transferred to Anthropology and Archaeology, both of which would later inform his poetry. He did not excel as a scholar, receiving only a third-class grade in Part I of the Anthropology and Archaeology Tripos in 1954. His first published poetry appeared in "Chequer". A poem, "The little boys and the seasons", written during this time, was published in "Granta", under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing.


title: Ted Hughes

text: After university, living in London and Cambridge, Hughes went on to have many varied jobs including working as a rose gardener, a nightwatchman and a reader for the British film company J. Arthur Rank. He worked at London Zoo as a washer-upper, a post that offered plentiful opportunities to observe animals at close quarters. On 25 February 1956, Hughes and his friends held a party to launch "St. Botolph's Review", which had a single issue. In it, Hughes had four poems. At the party, he met the American poet Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship. She had already published extensively, having won various awards, and had come especially to meet Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers. There was a great mutual attraction but they did not meet again for another month, when Plath was passing through London on her way to Paris. She visited him again on her return three weeks later.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Hughes and Plath dated and then were married at St George the Martyr, Holborn, on 16 June 1956, four months after they had first met. The date, Bloomsday, was purposely chosen in honour of James Joyce. Plath's mother was the only wedding guest and she accompanied them on their honeymoon to Benidorm on the Spanish coast. Hughes's biographers note that Plath did not relate her history of depression and suicide attempts to him until much later. Reflecting later in "Birthday Letters", Hughes commented that early on he could see chasms of difference between himself and Plath, but that in the first years of their marriage they both felt happy and supported, avidly pursuing their writing careers.


title: Ted Hughes

text: On returning to Cambridge, they lived at 55 Eltisley Avenue. That year they each had poems published in "The Nation", "Poetry" and "The Atlantic". Plath typed up Hughes's manuscript for his collection "Hawk in the Rain" which went on to win a poetry competition run by the Poetry centre of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. The first prize was publication by Harper, garnering Hughes widespread critical acclaim with the book's release in September 1957, and resulting in him winning a Somerset Maugham Award. The work favoured hard-hitting trochees and spondees reminiscent of Middle English – a style he used throughout his career – over the more genteel latinate sounds.


title: Ted Hughes

text: The couple moved to America so that Plath could take a teaching position at her alma mater, Smith College; during this time, Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 1958, they met Leonard Baskin, who would later illustrate many of Hughes's books, including "Crow". The couple returned to England, staying for a short while back in Heptonstall and then finding a small flat in Primrose Hill, London. They were both writing, Hughes working on programmes for the BBC as well as producing essays, articles, reviews, and talks. During this time, he wrote the poems that would be published in "Wodwo" (1967) and "Recklings" (1966). In March 1960, "Lupercal" came out and won the Hawthornden Prize. He found he was being labelled as the poet of the wild, writing only about animals. He began to seriously explore myth and esoteric practices including shamanism, alchemy and Buddhism with The Tibetan Book of the Dead being a particular focus in the early 1960s. He believed that imagination could heal dualistic splits in the human psyche and poetry was the language of that work.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Hughes and Plath had two children, Frieda Rebecca (b. 1960) and Nicholas Farrar (1962–2009) and, in 1961, bought the house Court Green, in North Tawton, Devon. In the summer of 1962, Hughes began an affair with Assia Wevill who had been subletting the Primrose Hill flat with her husband. Under the cloud of his affair, Hughes and Plath separated in the autumn of 1962 and she set up life in a new flat with the children.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Letters written by Plath between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963, unseen until 2017, accuse Hughes of physically abusing her only days before she miscarried their second child in 1961.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Beset by depression made worse by her husband's affair and with a history of suicide attempts, Plath took her own life on 11 February 1963. Hughes dramatically wrote in a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous." Some people argued that Hughes had driven Plath to suicide. Plath's gravestone in Heptonstall was repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone and attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath". Plath's poem "The Jailer", in which the speaker condemns her husband's brutality, was included in the 1970 anthology "". Radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath. There were lawsuits, Morgan's 1972 book "Monster" which contained that poem was banned, and underground, pirated editions of it were published. Other radical feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name. In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of "The Guardian" and "The Independent". In "The Guardian" on 20 April 1989, Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace":


title: Ted Hughes

text: In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early... If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech... The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know.


title: Ted Hughes

text: As Plath's widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath's personal and literary estates. He oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including "Ariel" (1965). Some critics were dissatisfied by his choice of poem order and omissions in the book and some critics of Hughes argued that he had essentially driven her to suicide and therefore should not be responsible for her literary legacy. He claimed to have destroyed the final volume of Plath's journal, detailing their last few months together. In his foreword to "The Journals of Sylvia Plath", he defends his actions as a consideration for the couple's young children.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Following Plath's suicide, he wrote two poems "The Howling of Wolves" and "Song of a Rat" and then did not write poetry again for three years. He broadcast extensively, wrote critical essays and became involved in running Poetry International with Patrick Garland and Charles Osborne in the hopes of connecting English poetry with the rest of the world. In 1966, he wrote poems to accompany Leonard Baskin's illustrations of crows, which became the epic narrative "The Life and Songs of the Crow", one of the works for which Hughes is best known. In 1967, while living with Wevill, Hughes produced two sculptures of a jaguar, one of which he gave to his brother and one to his sister; Gerald Hughes' sculpture, branded with the letter 'A' on its forehead, was offered for sale in 2012.


title: Ted Hughes

text: On 23 March 1969, six years after Plath's suicide by asphyxiation from a gas stove, Assia Wevill died by suicide in the same way. Wevill also killed her child, Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), the four-year-old daughter of Hughes, born on 3 March 1965. Their deaths led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill. Hughes did not finish the "Crow" sequence until the work "Cave Birds" was published in 1975.


title: Ted Hughes

text: In August 1970, Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse, and they remained together until his death. He bought the house Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, and maintained the property at Court Green. He began cultivating a small farm near Winkleigh, Devon called "Moortown", a name which became embedded in the title of one of his poetry collections. He later became President of the charity Farms for City Children, established by his friend Michael Morpurgo in Iddesleigh. In October 1970, "Crow" was published.


title: Ted Hughes

text: In 1970, he and his sister, Olwyn (26 August 1928 – 3 January 2016), set up the Rainbow Press, which published sixteen titles between 1971 and 1981, comprising poems by Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Ruth Fainlight, Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney, printed by Daedalus Press, Rampant Lions Press and the John Roberts Press.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate in December 1984, following Sir John Betjeman. A collection of animal poems for children had been published by Faber earlier that year, "What is the Truth?", illustrated by R. J. Lloyd. For that work he won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award. Hughes wrote many works for children and collaborated closely with Peter Brook and the National Theatre Company. He dedicated himself to the Arvon Foundation which promotes writing education and runs residential writing courses at Hughes's home at Lumb Bank, West Yorkshire. In 1993, he made a rare television appearance for Channel 4, which included him reading passages from his 1968 novel "The Iron Man". He also featured in the 1994 documentary "Seven Crows A Secret".


title: Ted Hughes

text: In early 1994, Hughes became increasingly alarmed by the decline of fish in rivers local to his Devonshire home. This concern inspired him to become one of the original trustees of the Westcountry Rivers Trust, a charity set up to restore rivers through catchment-scale management and a close relationship with local landowners and riparian owners.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Hughes was appointed a member of the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II just before he died. He continued to live at the house in Devon, until suffering a fatal heart attack on 28 October 1998 while undergoing hospital treatment for colon cancer in Southwark, London. His funeral was held on 3 November 1998, at North Tawton church, and he was cremated in Exeter. Speaking at the funeral, fellow poet Seamus Heaney, said: "No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken."


title: Ted Hughes

text: Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Plath, committed suicide in his home in Alaska on 16 March 2009 after suffering from depression.


title: Ted Hughes

text: Carol Hughes announced in January 2013 that she would write a memoir of their marriage. "The Times" headlined its story "Hughes's widow breaks silence to defend his name" and observed that "for more than 40 years she has kept her silence, never once joining in the furious debate that has raged around the late Poet Laureate since the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath."


title: Ted Hughes

text: A memoir by Hughes's brother Gerald was published late in 2014, "Ted and I: A Brother's Memoir", which "Kirkus Reviews" calls "a warm recollection of a lauded poet".


title: Ted Hughes

text: Hughes's first collection, "The Hawk in the Rain" (1957), attracted considerable critical acclaim. In 1959 he won the Galbraith prize, which brought $5,000. His most significant work is perhaps "Crow" (1970), which whilst it has been widely praised also divided critics, combining an apocalyptic, bitter, cynical and surreal view of the universe with what sometimes appeared simple, childlike verse. Crow was edited several times across Hughes' career. Within its opus he created a cosmology of the totemic Crow who was simultaneously God, Nature and Hughes' alter ego. The publication of "Crow" shaped Hughes' poetic career as distinct from other forms of English Nature Poetry.


title: Ted Hughes

text: In a 1971 interview with "The London Magazine", Hughes cited his main influences as including Blake, Donne, Hopkins, and Eliot. He mentioned also Schopenhauer, Robert Graves's book "The White Goddess", and "The Tibetan Book of the Dead".