Cezanne centenary spurs worship and disquiet

Art lovers from around the world are heading towards Aix-en-Provence in the sun-blessed south of France for a gigantic yet also contested retrospective of Paul Cezanne, the artist who single-handedly swept away the art of the 19th century.

Public museums and private collections on three continents are contributing to the 85 paintings and 32 drawings on show at the Musee Granet in Aix. As many as 300,000 people are expected to pass through the turnstiles, 40 per cent from abroad.

Cezanne in Provence is intended as a pictorial journey through Cezanne's eyes, from his family mansion at Jas de Bouffan nearby Aix, where his father built him a little studio, to the stone hut in the hills above the Bibemus quarry, where he obsessively painted the Montagne Sainte-Victoire and to L'Estaque, a fishing village near Marseille, where his canvases shimmer with the dazzling light and bright colours of the Mediterranean.

This tiny corner of France - it is just 40km from L'Estaque to Sainte-Victoire - is enduringly linked with Cezanne. His paintings capture its ochre and pink rocks and warm roof tiles, its intense blue skies and sea, the dense green of its forests, with the colours luxuriously enhanced in a thick black outline.

"The originality of this exhibition, and its major interest, lies in the fact that it deals only with Provence," said Thomas Grenon of the National Museums body, which co-produced the exhibition.

But Cezanne is best remembered for the geometric patterns, of rectangles, trapezes and triangles, that populate his canvases - a smashing of the tradition by which the artist tried to render his subject in faithful, natural lines.

Cezanne's deliberate disconnection would inspire Picasso and Braque, the forerunners of cubism, fauvism and, by linear descent, to the avant-garde art of today. The exhibition, which is fresh from Washington DC's National Gallery of Art, is the jewel in the crown of France's Year of Cezanne.

The calendar is studded with big events, including a play, The Lesson of Sainte-Victoire, by controversial Austrian playwright Peter Handke, and a sunset performance by the Berlin Philharmonic, led by British maestro Simon Rattle, amid the towering cliffs of the Bibemus quarry, a backdrop that has remained miraculously unscathed since Cezanne died.

Provence is hoping to reap loads of money from the centennial tourist invasion. Cezanne walks are being held on Sainte-Victoire, Cezanne flags depicting the mountain flutter in the streets of Aix, bakers offer Cezanne-style cakes with oranges and apples, limited-number pilgrimages are being conducted to the Jas de Bouffan, the quarry, and to Cezanne's last studio in the hills at Les Lauves, and a TGV super-express train has been decked out with a Cezanne motif on plastic film.

Cezanne's great-grandson, Philippe Cezanne, 65, is marketing santons, the clay dolls with traditional Provencal dress, as well as decorative tiles, ties, table cloths, bath salts and tableware that are claimed to be "respectful" of the master.

Much of this is raising hackles, particularly among those who hate the chocolate-box image of Provence as peddled by tourist brochures. "Welcome to Cezanneland" was how one daily newspaper acidly described it.

Other commentators point out that even though Cezanne's greatest art was inspired by the landscape of Provence, he never chose to identify himself with the region and always preferred to say that he came from "le Midi", or the south of France generally.

He also encountered such indifference, rejection or even hostility in Aix that he lived in Paris for many years. By 1904, Cezanne had become famous among the artistic cognoscenti, but among the local people he was still dismissed as a duffer, a joker deemed incapable of painting "properly".

In 1906, Cezanne died of pneumonia at the age of 67 at his home in rue Boulegon after being drenched by a storm while painting on his beloved Sainte-Victoire. At the time of his death, the town hall had not bought a single painting by its illustrious son.

Of the several paintings that Cezanne gave as presents to local people, most of the canvases were shoved out of sight in lofts, although one was used to cover a hole in the wall of a henhouse.

This is the first exhibition dedicated to Cezanne in his home town, even though his admirers have been calling for one since the centenary of the artist's birth in 1939.

"Cezanne has become the hero of Aix, which is celebrating the centenary of his death with a pomp that may be proportionate to the bad conscience it feels about having treated him so badly when he was alive. More probably, though, it is proportionate to the expected profit from tourism," sighed Le Monde.