"The father of modern art," Post-Impressionist master
A Post-Impressionist painter revered by both Picasso and Matisse as "the father of us all." Unsatisfied with Impressionism’s catching of a fleeting instant of light, he asked instead: how, on a flat surface, to paint the solid, permanent structure of an object? He reduced apples, mountains, and bodies alike to basic geometric forms — spheres, cones, cylinders — and this step pushed open the door to Cubism and the whole of modern art.
Cézanne once said he would "astonish Paris with an apple." He painted those few apples, that Mont Sainte-Victoire, over and over — not to paint them lifelike, but to find the geometric structure hidden behind all things. It was exactly this vision of "reducing the world to basic forms" that Picasso took up and grew into Cubism — an apple that truly moved the whole art of the twentieth century.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.