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