Tour: Paul Cézanne

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Overview

How should we look at Cézanne? Picasso regarded him as a “mother hovering over,” 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.”

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Captions

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1	Paul Cézanne, The Artist's Father, Reading "L'Événement", 1866
2	Paul Cézanne, Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley near L'Estaque, c. 1883
3	Paul Cézanne, Boy in a Red Waistcoat, 1888-1890
4	Paul Cézanne, Château Noir, 1900/1904
5	Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples and Peaches, c. 1905
6	Paul Cézanne, The Gardener Vallier, 1906