October 5, 2022
The Father of Us All: Cézanne at Tate Modern
Tate Modern's 2022 Cézanne retrospective celebrated the stubborn Provençal painter whom Picasso and Matisse called 'the father of us all'.
Picasso and Matisse both called Paul Cézanne 'the father of us all'. Tate Modern's 2022 retrospective showed why — gathering the apples, bathers and endless studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire through which he quietly cracked open the future of art.
Working in stubborn isolation in Provence, Cézanne broke the world into faceted planes of colour, pushing past Impressionism toward something more solid and structural — the doorway to Cubism and modern art.
His paintings can look awkward, unfinished, almost wrestled into being. That struggle is precisely the point: Cézanne painted not appearances, but the very act of seeing.
Image: “La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue de la carrière Bibémus, par Paul Cézanne” — Paul Cézanne, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.