Paul Cezanne

Bridge between Impressionism and the 20th-century avant-garde, building form from patches of color rather than line and shading. Cezanne worked stubbornly outside the Paris art world from his family estate in Aix-en-Provence, painting the same mountain — Mont Sainte-Victoire — more than sixty times across thirty years. His still lifes deliberately tilt and shift viewpoint, hunting for what he called the 'underlying geometry' of an apple or a jug. Picasso and Matisse both later called him 'the father of us all'; without his fractured table-tops, Cubism is hard to imagine.