The father of modern art died 100 years ago - but the town where he was born has only just started celebrating his genius. Until recently, painter Paul Cezanne was far from being Aix-en-Provence's favourite son.
'Aix and Cezanne just didn't get on,' says Yannick, a guide on the Cezanne Trail. He is standing before the statue recently erected in the painter's honour in the ancient town in the Bouches-du-Rhone region where he grew up. Before that the area's only tribute to the founder of modernism was the small fountain in the rue des Bagniers, incorporating a bronze medallion based on the famous Renoir portrait.
'You'd think he'd always been a local hero,' says Yannick as we pass shop after shop displaying Cezanne's face or name. 'Not so. His art was so new and exagger-atedly simple that people laughed at it. He rarely painted in the town centre for fear of public ridicule. No one could understand his style. It was so original: the reduction of forms to geometric essentials. No one would buy his work. Now one painting by Cezanne can fetch US$60 million.'
The family was not popular either. Cezanne's father, Louis-Auguste, opened Aix's first bank, Banque Cezanne et Cabassol. 'No one liked the Cezannes,' says Yannick. 'Today the city owns a few sketches, but none of his paintings.' Belatedly, Aix recently held a major exhibition of 116 works by a man who influenced the likes of Matisse and Picasso and has opened for the first time the Bibemus quarries, where he gained much inspiration. The ancient limestone pits were first worked in the
Roman period; they also helped produce 27 paintings from 1895 to 1904, Cezanne often painting sur le motif (in the landscape).
In The Footsteps of Cezanne, a tour in and around Aix that can be tackled by bus or on foot, takes in more than 40 Cezanne-related sights and begins at his birthplace at 28 rue de l'Opera. Born in 1839, Cezanne was the illegit-imate son of a hat maker (later turned banker) and one of his employees. The hat shop, Chapellerie du Cours Mirabeau, can still be seen. Appropriately, it's now a bank. The family homes in rue de la Glaciere and later in rue Emeric David are still standing, as is the College Bourbon, now College Mignet, where Cezanne met his great friend, novelist Emile Zola.
Cezanne was not successful at school but took drawing classes at the Musee Granet, where the recent commemorative exhibition was held. His father insisted he study law and even paid a man to pretend to be his son so Paul would not be called up for military service.