information:classification, structural:expansion
Contemporary art criticism

The first joint Impressionist exhibition, in Paris from April to May 1874, attracted extensive criticism. Audiences and art critics, for whom "the ideal" of the École de Beaux Arts was proof of the existence of art, burst out laughing. One critic claimed that Monet painted by loading his paints in a gun and shooting them at the canvas. A colleague performed an Indian dance in front of a painting by Cézanne and shouted: “Hugh! I am the walking impression, the avenging palette knife, Monet's 'Boulevard des Capucines', 'The House of the Hanged Man' and 'The Modern Olympia' by Mr. Cézanne. Hugh! Hugh!

In 1883, the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans replied to Pissarro in a letter to Pissarro's accusation that Cézanne was only briefly mentioned in Huysman's book L'Art Moderne by suggesting that Cézanne's view of the motifs was distorted by astigmatism : " but it There is certainly an eye defect involved, which I am assured he is also aware of.” Five years later, in La Cravache magazine, his judgment became more positive when he described Cézanne's works as “strange yet real” and as “revelations”. designated.

The art dealer Ambroise Vollard first came into contact with Cézanne's works in 1892 through the paint dealer Tanguy, who had exhibited them in his shop in the Rue Clauzel in Montmartre in return for the delivery of painting utensils. Vollard recalled the lack of response: the shop was rarely visited, "since it was not yet fashionable at the time to buy 'atrocious works' expensively, not even cheaply." Tanguy even took interested parties to the painter's studio, to which he had a key where small pictures and 100 francs large pictures could be bought at a fixed price of 40 francs. The Journal des Artistes echoed the general tone of the time, anxious to ask whether its sensitive readers would not be sickened at the sight of "these oppressive abominations, which exceed the measure of evil permitted by law."

The art critic Gustave Geffroy was one of the few critics who judged Cézanne's work fairly and unreservedly during his lifetime. As early as 25 March 1894, he wrote in the Journal about the then current relationship between Cézanne's painting and the efforts of younger artists, that Cézanne had become a kind of forerunner to which the Symbolists referred, and that there was a direct connection between Cézanne's painting and of the Gauguins, Bernards and even Vincent van Goghs. A year later, after the successful exhibition at the Vollard Gallery in 1895, Geffroy again led the Journal: "He is a great truth fanatic, fiery and naive, harsh and nuanced. He will go to the Louvre.” Between these two chronicles, Cézanne painted the portrait of Geffroy, which Cézanne left unfinished because he was dissatisfied with it.