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In the first and most obvious place, the show is a mighty narrative of development. There was no art in Cezanne's background in Aix-en-Provence, where he was born in 1839. His father was a laborer who became a hatter and, eventually, a banker, thus securing his son from money worries. From 1852 to 1858 young Cezanne studied humanities at the College Bourbon in Aix, where he met the future writer who was to be his lifetime friend, Zola. Then he studied law for a while, but under Zola's constant prodding he turned to painting. By 1861 both young men were in Paris.
Cezanne was fascinated by Gericault, Daumier, Delacroix and the revolutionary Realism of both Courbet and Manet. But he had no facility at all; the impression given off by his early style couillarde--his "ballsy style," as he called it--is of a thwarted, tumultuous, half-articulate imagination bashing against the limits of its own abilities. He produced dark, macabre paintings of murders and orgies whose motivation, despite the guignol of their subject matter, remains as mysterious as their muddy paint and overladen black tonalities.
Nevertheless, he painted his first masterpiece in 1869-70, a portrait of his fellow painter from Aix, Achille Emperaire, with his dwarf's body and weak mantis limbs, enthroned--there is no other word for its weirdly authoritarian effect--in a high-backed chair upholstered in floral chintz. Painted darkly in homage to Manet and preceded by some of the most beautiful head studies in Cezanne's early work, it depicts the stunted Emperaire as a parody king, an "emperor," but with compassion; no mere caricatural impulse could account for the averted gaze and the great, sad, liquid eyes.
Cezanne was, from that point on, a great portraitist, one of the best the world has seen, especially of himself. His self-portraits invite comparison with those of Rembrandt, and the best of them justify it. He begins, in his own images, as a wild man, a solitary, an uncouth glaring peasant with greasy hair massed on either side of the pale dome of a bald head; he ends, in his last years, as a kind of sage. Between the extremes is a painting like the Self-Portrait (Portrait of the Artist with a Rose Background), with its powerfully modeled head, "formed," as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote after he saw it at the 1907 Paris Salon, "as though by hammering from within." The figure gazes at you with that uniquely Cezannian conjuncture of wariness and authority, every molecule of its flesh and bone asserting its pictorial structure against the dissolution suggested by the lavish wet brushstrokes that represent the wallpaper pattern behind it.