Paul Cezanne

Works in the MOMA collection

Works in the Hermitage collection

Works in the Guggenheim collection

Works in the TATE collection

How should we look at Cézanne? Pablo Picasso regarded him as a “mother hovering over,” Henri Matisse as “father to us all.” Inevitably, our understanding of Cézanne’s painting is colored by later cubism and abstraction, focusing attention on the formal aspects of his work. His reduction of the visible world into basic, underlying shapes, the faceted brushstrokes that seem to reconstruct nature through purely painterly forms, the fracture and flattening of space—all these can be seen as the beginnings of modern art. Yet Cézanne himself stressed that he painted from nature and according to his sensations, seeking to realize a “harmony parallel to nature.”

Cézanne associated with the Impressionists, but always had other aims. He said that his ambition was to ‘make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums’. Cézanne’s work was discovered by the Paris avant-garde during the 1890s. It had a significant influence on Picasso and the development of 20th-century art…