Paul Cezanne · Mont Sainte Victoire seen from Les Lauves

1904 – 1906 – Oil on canvas – Kunstmuseum, Basel

“Cézanne was my sole and only one teacher (…) He was the mother of all of us”, Pablo Picasso said of Paul Cézanne, one of the most innovating artists of Art history, and arguably the most important influence to avant-garde painting. Although his name is often associated with the Impressionist movement, his works went far beyond any impressionist achievement, and should be linked with many pictorial vanguards of the early 20th century.

Paul Cézanne painted many views of the Mount Sainte-Victoire in the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, and this work is one of the most developed versions of all them. Unlike other paintings of the same subject, here Cézanne has introduced vegetal elements in front of the viewer, delimiting and emphasizing the view of the mountain and the prairie.

“Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective”, Cézanne wrote in 1904. The art of Cézanne, “cubist before the cubism”, set the basis of the 20th century avant-garde.

Text by G. Fernández, theartwolf.com