Cezanne and his apples at the Tate Modern

"With an apple, I want to surprise Paris!"

This sentence that Paul Cézanne liked to say will now apply to London, where the Tate Modern is devoting a magnificent exhibition from October 5, 2022 to March 12, 2023 which brings together more than 80 works by the Provençal painter...

Paul Cezanne Nature morte aux pommes 1893 – 1894 . The J Paul Getty Museum

Paul Cezanne Portrait de l'artiste avec fond rose 1875. Paris, Musée d'Orsay, donation de M. Philippe Meyer, 2000. Photo (C) RMN - Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean

Dubbed the "greatest of us all" by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne is a central figure in modern painting who enabled generations of artists to dispense with conventional rules. Determined to succeed as an artist in the metropolitan Paris of the 1860s, Paul Cézanne befriended the Impressionists in the 1870s, before drifting away from their circle and the Parisian art scene, returning to his native Provence in pursuit of his own radical style.

The Tate Modern exhibition features an incredible variety of still lifes, landscapes, portraits and genre scenes including more than 20 works never before seen in the UK. To this end, museums such as The Art Institute of Chicago or the Philadelphia Museum of Art have lent some of their treasures. We see the artistic evolution of Paul Cézanne from the first paintings made in his youth, to the works completed in the last months of his life. An entire room is devoted to the Sainte-Victoire mountain, while a gallery brings together several paintings of bathers, a lifelong subject for the artist.

Paul Cezanne Montagne Sainte - Victoire 1902 Philadelphia Museum of Art. Don de Helen Tyson Madeira, 1977

While Paul Cézanne is often mythologized as a solitary figure, the exhibition highlights the relationships at the heart of his life, in particular his wife Marie-Hortense Fiquet and their son Paul. It examines the artist's intense relationship with his childhood friend Émile Zola and reveals how peers such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro were among the first to appreciate his visionary approach. Many great artists have even collected his works, like Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Henry Moore.

Paul Cezanne Bathers c. 1894 - 1905 . Presenté par the National Gallery, acquis avec l'aide particulière de la fondation Max Rayne 1964

The EY: Cezanne exhibition is organized by the Tate Modern and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tate Modern

Bankside

London SE1 9TG

In his art history lectures, Fabrice Roy combines the past with the present, in a poetic and playful evocation of the French 19th century...