The painter rejected by some became the foundation for others.
Paris
Paul Cézanne remains one of the most influential and contested figures in modern art, and a new exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris is examining why his legacy still provokes such different reactions. Cézanne et nous brings together more than 170 works, including 69 by Cézanne and around 100 pieces by 78 artists influenced by him. The exhibition places his apples, bathers, portraits and Provençal landscapes in direct dialogue with later generations. Its central argument is that Cézanne did not simply precede modern art. He helped make many of its possibilities imaginable.
Few artists generated such contradictory judgments. Claude Monet considered Cézanne the greatest among his peers, while Pablo Picasso described him as a father figure and a fundamental master. Henri Matisse also looked to him during periods of creative doubt. Yet the surrealists often rejected his work, and Salvador Dalí dismissed him in dramatically negative terms. That division helps explain why his influence remains so difficult to reduce to a single movement or interpretation.
The exhibition emphasizes precisely that diversity. Cézanne’s influence can be traced through Cubism, abstraction, postwar painting and contemporary practices, appearing in the work of artists as different as Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell and Peter Doig. His treatment of form, color and spatial structure offered later artists a way to move beyond conventional realism without abandoning the physical world entirely. Different generations found different Cézannes inside the same body of work.
One of his most enduring contributions was the freedom to reconstruct rather than merely reproduce reality. In landscapes such as the repeated views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne transformed observation into a system of color, geometry and rhythm. In still lifes, ordinary fruit became an investigation into balance and perception. In portraits and bathers, physical resemblance often mattered less than the relationship between bodies, space and structure.
That radical freedom explains why his paintings can still appear restrained beside the enormous canvases and conceptual works that followed them. Their scale may be modest, but their consequences were not. Cézanne helped dismantle assumptions about perspective, finish and representation long before later movements pushed those ideas further.
A century after his death, the disagreement surrounding him may be part of his importance. Cézanne continues to fascinate not because everyone sees the same thing in his paintings, but because artists keep finding different futures inside them.
La narrativa también es poder. / Narrative is power too.