THE SPHINX OF PROVENCE

Playing hide-and-seek with Paul Cézanne in his hometown

- WALKER MIMMS

“He didn't know what he was doing,” his wife recalled. “So odd, so timid,” was Claude Monet's judgement, “a victim of too much self-doubt.” “A sphinx,” his childhood best friend, Émile Zola, deemed him.

In life, Paul Cézanne was tentative. (Though commanding, too: He spoke so loudly that he made dishes rattle, painter Mary Cassatt observed.) His paintings followed suit, with such deliberate hesitancy in their brushstrokes that they seemed to destroy the possibility of objective representation. To Braque, Picasso, Duchamp and other 20th-century students of relativity, he was a prophet of doubt.

It's funny, then, that he should be the subject of Europe's art pilgrimage of the summer. With the aim of knowing Cézanne better, thousands are heading to Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne's hometown in the south of France, for Cézanne 2025, a regionwide tourist drive with programming running through French autumn.

It centres on “Cézanne At Jas De Bouffan”, a smartly chosen exhibition of some 130 Cézanne works, most of them on loan, at the Musée Granet, the former drawing school where he first studied art. The show coincides with a partial reopening of his family retreat west of town.

With its aggressive branding, its lines and crowds, and its endless commercial spinoffs in the town's shops and galleries, Cézanne 2025 offers passing tourists the promise of a scavenger hunt between the works in the museum and the many haunts of Provence's biggest painter. For students of art, though, the question is whether paintings are enriched by an understanding of the environment in which they are made.