In the Post-Impressionist pantheon, the French painter Paul Cézanne is first among equals. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin certainly have more compelling biographies, and Georges Seurat—of Sunday in the Park with George fame—has been played on Broadway by the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal. But Cézanne’s newfangled fracturing of old-fashioned still lifes and landscapes became the very motor of modernism. Indispensable to figures as diverse as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, not to mention Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, Cézanne (1839–1906) can still reliably mesmerize. And with a substantial portion of his works in private hands, he can still surprise.
Switzerland’s Beyeler Foundation, blessed with a Renzo Piano–designed premises near Basel, made the case for Cézanne’s supreme position in the visual arts when it mounted “Cézanne and the Modern” back in 1999, giving a native son of Aix-en-Provence pride of place alongside Picasso, Matisse, and Alberto Giacometti. Tomorrow, the museum goes one step further by bumping him from top billing to solo performer. Of the 58 oil paintings and 21 works on paper featured in the exhibition “Cezanne,” around half are from private collections, while the rest are on loan from museums on both sides of the Atlantic.
