Paul Cézanne worked for most of his life in near-total isolation from the Paris art world, dismissed by critics and even rejected by the Salon des Refusés, yet he pursued his investigation of form, color, and pictorial structure with an intensity that bordered on the monastic. Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, he had a long friendship with Émile Zola — later ruptured when Zola published a novel whose failed artist protagonist was widely understood to be based on Cézanne — and an uneasy relationship with the Impressionists whose exhibitions he occasionally joined. His influence on twentieth-century painting is almost incalculable: he is the father of Cubism, the godfather of Fauvism, and the figure from whom nearly every significant modernist claimed descent.
