The father of modern art

In his lifetime Cézanne was largely shrugged off by the official art establishment and worshipped by the young. The turning point came the year after he died. The 1907 retrospective (a large show surveying a dead artist’s whole career) at the Salon d’Automne (the Autumn Salon, a progressive yearly Paris exhibition founded in 1903 as a rival to the official Salon) put his work in front of the rising generation all at once, and it hit them like a revelation. Picasso, Braque, and Matisse (Henri Matisse, another painter who would reshape 20th-century art) all came away marked by it, and the late Mont Sainte-Victoire canvases, with their flattened space and their architecture of color, especially.

That is how a quiet provincial painter of one mountain became what Western art history calls the father of modern art, the direct ancestor of Cubism and the abstraction that followed. The thing he was doing alone on a hill above Aix, dissolving a landscape into planes of color and tipping deep space up onto a single surface, turned out to be the exact problem the next revolution wanted to solve.

The late Les Lauves Mont Sainte-Victoires are now seen as the bridge from Impressionism to Cubism and abstraction. The Impressionists had broken light into color; Cézanne took the next step and broke form into planes of color, building solid structure back out of those planes. The Philadelphia canvas, in front of you, sits right on that hinge.

And the throughline is worth saying flat. A man painted the same mountain more than thirty times in oil, chasing a way to make a picture out of pure relationships of color and shape rather than out of drawing and illusion, and he never quite finished the chase, which is why he left the canvas open and bare in places. He died with the work still unfinished, and the work was modern art’s starting gun. Cubism begins on that hill.