The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (96 page)

(1921– ).
French sculptor. His work is highly varied, but he has become best known for his ingenious use of scrap material. In the mid 1950s he began to make sculptures from material that he found in refuse dumps—scrap iron, springs, tin cans, etc.—building these up with wire into strange winged or insect-like creatures. These had closer affinities, however, with the insect-creatures of Germaine
Richier
than with the expressionistic industrial forms characteristic of the California
Junk
school of sculpture. During the 1960s he became internationally known mainly for sculptures made by crushing car bodies.

 
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(1568–1640).
Italian
Mannerist
painter, active mainly in Rome. He had an enormous reputation in the first two decades of the 17th cent., when he gained some of the most prestigious commissions of the day, most notably the designing of the
mosaics
for the dome of St Peter's (1603–12). Although some of his early work is vigorous and colourful, his output is generally repetitious and vacuous, untouched by the innovations of
Caravaggio
(who was briefly his assistant) or the
Carracci
. He was primarily a fresco painter, but he also did numerous
cabinet pictures
of religious or mythological scenes in a finicky Flemish manner.

 
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(1839–1906).
French painter, with
Gauguin
and van
Gogh
the greatest of the
Post-Impressionists
and a key figure in the development of 20th-cent. art. He was born at Aix-en-Provence, son of a hat dealer who became a prosperous banker, and his financial security enabled him to survive the indifference to his work that lasted until the final decade of his life. His school-fellow Émile Zola introduced him to
Manet
and
Courbet
, and persuaded him to take up the study of art in Paris. There at the
Académie
Suisse in 1861 he met Camille
Pissarro
, and the following year he got to know
Monet
,
Bazille
,
Sisley
, and
Renoir
. His painting at this time was in a vein of unrestrained and uncouth
Romanticism
, with a predilection for themes of violence or eroticism (
The Murder
, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). It was completely different from his mature work and gave little hint of greatness to come. In 1869 he met Hortense Fiquet, a model and seamstress, who became his mistress and bore him a son, Paul, in 1872. Cézanne kept them a secret from his family—he was terrified of his domineering father—but eventually married Hortense in 1886, shortly before his father's death. From about 1870 Cézanne started painting directly from nature and began to impose a more disciplined restraint on his natural impetuosity. In 1872 he settled in Auvers-sur-Oise, near Pontoise, the home of Camille Pissarro , and entered upon a long and fruitful association with him (in the last year of his life he even described himself as a ‘pupil of Pissarro’). He exhibited with the *Impressionists in 1874 and again in 1877, but never identified himself with the Impressionist group or wholly adopted their aims and techniques (he was a touchy character and hid his insecurities by posing as a provincial boor, once refusing to shake hands with the elegant
Manet
because he claimed he had not washed for days and did not wish to dirty the great man). Cézanne was less interested in the realistic representation of casual and fleeting impressions and the fugitive effects of light, devoting himself rather to the structural analysis of nature, looking forward in this respect to the
Neo-Impressionists
. His own aims are summarized in two of his sayings: that it was his ambition ‘to do
Poussin
again, from Nature’ and that he wanted to make of Impressionism ‘something solid and enduring, like the art of the museums’. He trod a solitary and difficult path towards his goal of an art which would combine the best of the French
classical
tradition of structure with the best in contemporary naturalism, an art which appealed not superficially to the eye but to the mind.
After the death of his father in 1886 and his inheritance of the family estate (the Jas de Bouffan, which features in many of his paintings), Cézanne lived mainly in Aix. He devoted himself principally to certain favourite themes—portraits of his wife, still lifes, and above all the landscape of Provence, particularly the Monte Ste Victoire. His painstaking analysis of nature differed fundamentally from Monet's exercises in painting repeated views of subjects such as
Haystacks or Poplars
. Cézanne was interested in underlying structure, and his paintings rarely give any obvious indication of the time of day or even the season represented. His later paintings are generally more sparsely composed and open, permeated with a sense of air and light. The third dimension is created not through perspective or foreshortening but by extraordinarily subtle variations of tonality. He worked in comparative obscurity until he was given a one-man show by the dealer
Vollard
in 1895. From that time his painting began to excite younger artists and by the end of the century he was revered as the ‘Sage’ by many of the avant-garde; in 1904 the
Salon d'Automne
gave him a special exhibition. Since his death his reputation has increased and he has exercised an enormous influence on 20th-cent. art, most notably on the development of
Cubism
. His work was introduced to England with the Post-Impressionist exhibitions organized by Roger
Fry
in 1910 and 1912, and in 1914 Clive
Bell
wrote that: ‘He was the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.’ The belief that the picture surface has an integrity of its own irrespective of what it represents—a characteristic of so much modern painting—stems directly from him.
Although Cézanne was a laboriously slow worker—he is said to have had over 100 sittings for a portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Petit Palais, Paris, 1899) before abandoning it with the comment that he was not displeased with the shirt front—he left a substantial body of work (drawings and watercolours as well as oils). There are works in many major museums, with particularly fine collections in, for example, the Courtauld Institute Galleries, London, the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania. His studio in Aix is now a Cézanne museum.

 
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(1914– ).
One of the leading English sculptors of his generation. He trained as an architectural draughtsman and took up sculpture after serving as a pilot in the Second World War. At first he experimented with
mobiles
and these were followed by what he called ‘balanced sculptures’, ponderous metal structures supported on thin legs, bristling and rough-finished. His work has been shown in a number of international exhibitions and in 1956 he was awarded the International Sculpture Prize at the 28th Venice
Biennale
. During the 1960s and 1970s his work became more block-like and monumental, and in his more recent sculpture he has exploited highly polished surfaces and facetings.

 
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