Paul Cezanne

The painter Picasso and Matisse called 'the father of us all' — the solitary figure who bridged Impressionism and the 20th-century avant-garde and who found a way to preserve what he valued in both Poussin and Monet simultaneously. Cézanne trained alongside Zola in Aix-en-Provence and spent time in Paris, where he exhibited briefly with the Impressionists, but fundamentally he worked outside the Paris art world, returning to his family estate in the south and painting from nature with an obsessive patience that his contemporaries found eccentric. The problem he set himself was how to render the three-dimensional weight of things — an apple, a jug, a mountain, a face — through color alone, without conventional chiaroscuro shading. His solution was to build form from small, parallel planes of color that shift in temperature and value as they describe a curved surface, simultaneously maintaining the flatness of the canvas and the depth of the subject. Mont Sainte-Victoire, the limestone ridge visible from his studio, appears in more than sixty paintings over thirty years — each version a slightly different attempt to solve the same fundamental equation. His still lifes deliberately shift viewpoint within a single canvas, the tabletop tilting here, a jug viewed from a slightly different angle there — a distortion so systematic it would become the direct foundation for Cubism. Cézanne's reputation during his lifetime was confined to a small circle of admirers, including Pissarro and, later, the young dealers Ambroise Vollard and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. A 1895 exhibition at Vollard's gallery brought him wider attention, and by the time of his death in 1906 he was a mythic figure to the generation of Matisse, Picasso and Braque. Without Cézanne, the cubist fracturing of the picture plane is almost inconceivable.