A centennial celebration of Cezanne: the innovative pioneer, renowned in his lifetime as "The Master of Aix," died 100 years ago "on the eve of a revolution in art that his work had firmly set in motion."

In the decade after his final, 1885 sojourn in L'Estaque, Cezanne continued depicting the Provencal landscape in several locations outside of Aix. The decade was a turbulent one personally for Cezanne: his father died; his mother's health began to fail; and he broke off relations with his oldest friend, Zola. Despite the emotional upheaval, the paintings from this period are suggestive of the artist's continuing aspiration, in his own words, "to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring, like the art in museums."

Near his sister Rose Conil's home, to the south of Aix, he was attracted to the estate and pigeon house of Bellevue and the views around the River Arc valley toward the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Farther to the east lies Gardanne, a small village situated on a high hill, where Cezanne lived for a short time with Hortense (whom he finally married in 1886) and their young son Paul. The town's cascade of cubic houses lent itself well to his preoccupation with architectonic forms, which had first emerged in the paintings of L'Estaque. The composition of "Gardanne" (c. 1886) stresses the geometric rhythm of homes staggered along the hill, their angular structures integrated into the soft organic forms of the landscape. The fluidly painted composition is unfinished, yet the passages of bare canvas contribute to the overall sense of fight that emanates from it. As he did in the views of L'Estaque, Cezanne ignored the industrial presence of Gardanne--in this case factories and coal pits that dotted the surrounding landscape--creating instead a timeless image of a picturesque Provencal town dominated by its bell tower.

Along the roads traveling east out of Aix lies a landscape that the artist knew intimately. As a youth, he had headed out in this direction with Zola and Baille to explore the country-side's myriad delights, which included a Roman aqueduct, a dam built by Zola's father. and Bibemus, a quarry that had been mined since Roman times for its rich supply of red sandstone. Because of these memories of childhood, the area had special resonance for Cezanne.

After his first one-man show in Paris in 1895, Cezanne began to face increased, unwanted attention from critics and the public. Complaining about those who would get their "hooks" into him, he withdrew to the solitude of sites such as Bibemus, which had been abandoned by the time he sought it out. For severn years, he rented a nearby cabin so that he could work daily in the depths of its quiet, empty caverns, creating powerful images such as "Bibemus Quarry" (c. 1895). Here, the wall of geometrically cut rock rises up high, nearly blocking out the sky entirely. Pushed close to the picture plane, it creates a claustrophobic and oppressive space that contrasts strikingly with the open views of works such as "The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L'Estaque" (c. 1885).

Near the quarry on a hillside was an old country house known as the Chateau Noir (whose name--the "Black Manor"--may relate to a previous exterior color), where Cezanne rented a room to keep his materials. In its decrepit isolation, the house inspired some of the artist's most foreboding images. The eerie structure seen in "Chateau Noir" (1900-04), seemingly in rains, is half-hidden behind pines that, like the rocks of Bibemus, ominously obstruct the sky. Cezanne's intense palette--dark greens, blues, and ochers--makes the scene all the more mysterious. The somber, enclosed spaces of the Bibemus and the Chateau Noir paintings, which count among his most emotionally intense pictures, are indicative of a decided melancholy that pervades the artist's work in his last decade, when, suffering from diabetes, he began to face the reality of his own mortality.