"Cezanne has long been celebrated as the founding father of modern art. But astonishingly there has never been a study devoted to his self-portraits. Now, for the first time, Steven Platzman reveals the remarkable light these haunting works throw on the artist and his era." "Platzman begins with the young Cezanne struggling to make his mark in the Parisian art world of the 1860s. His earliest self-portraits express all the hostility he projected at both the official Salon and the avant-garde in these years. By the early 1870s, however, he found himself deeply isolated: military defeat and revolutionary upheaval had produced a conservative backlash throughout French political and cultural life. Cezanne responded by seeking rapproachement with the avant-garde, joining Camille Pissarro at Pontoise and temporarily adopting Impressionist technique. His self-portraits depict a more sober and accommodating figure, often sporting the rough-and-ready outdoor attire of the plein air Impressionist painter." "Like Rembrandt, Cezanne also inserted his own image into narrative paintings, in particular a series of often luridly erotic scenes from the late 1860s and 1870s. The femme fatale makes a regular appearance in these works, threatening - but always failing - to entice him from the paths of art and virtue." "By his final years Cezanne's self-portraits communicate a quieter spirit of introspection and skepticism that was very much in tune with the Symbolist mood of the times. These works are also, finally, serene and magisterial, depicting a man who, despite the doubts that never left him, had seen his aesthetic path and was sworn to pursue it till the day he died." "Cezanne: The Self-Portraits is a study of the nineteenth century's greatest painter. Accessible, authoritative, and generously illustrated, it concludes with a definitive catalog of all Cezanne's painted and drawn self-portraits."--Jacket.
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