Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne spent much of his career between Paris and his native Provence, working with a deliberate slowness that set him apart from the faster optical impressions of many of his peers. His friendship with Camille Pissarro helped him lighten his palette in the 1870s, and he exhibited with the Impressionists, but his deeper concern became the construction of durable pictorial form through color. Cézanne repeatedly returned to a small set of motifs—Mont Sainte-Victoire, bathers, still lifes, portraits of his wife Hortense and local sitters—using them to test how objects occupy space. His mature paintings destabilize single-point perspective while giving apples, mountains and bodies an unusual structural weight. A 1895 solo exhibition organized by Ambroise Vollard and the major 1907 Salon d’Automne retrospective transformed his reputation and made his work a touchstone for younger modernists.

Painting; watercolor; drawing