Cezanne et nous

An exhibition devoted to Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and his artistic legacy. From Paul Gauguin to Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley and Peter Doig, nearly 180 works trace how his work was discovered, interpreted and transformed from the late 19th century to the present day. In the late 1880s, when he was no longer seeking to exhibit, artists and collectors discovered Cézanne’s work in Père Tanguy’s shop. There they found a formal radicalism that reinforced their search for a “pure” art already moving toward abstraction.\n\nSubsequently, Cézanne gradually gained recognition and the reception of his work became rich and multifaceted. From the first solo exhibitions organized by the dealer Ambroise Vollard to major museum and international events, as well as early large posthumous shows such as the Salon d’Automne in 1907, he established himself as a figure of modernity.\n\nHis work became a point of reference for the 20th-century avant-gardes, who questioned the relationship between painting and reality and found in the idea that “art is a harmony parallel to nature” an essential tool for reflection.\n\nBeginning with Cézanne, the triumph of modern art and of formalism — the reduction of painting to its fundamental compositional elements — continued to be examined and surpassed. Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley, Peter Doig... From lyrical abstraction to geometric abstraction, including hard-edge painting, Cézanne remains a constant reference, sometimes explicitly claimed, sometimes reinterpreted, always debated. In the era of postmodernism, his status as the “father of modern art” continues to be interrogated.\n\nCézanne and Us is an exhibition that simultaneously tells this double story: that of his influence and, by contrast, that of the artists who have claimed him. The exhibition highlights a complex and plural history, made up of appropriations, lineages and aesthetic tensions. It invites us to view Cézanne through the successive perspectives he has provoked, up to our contemporary gaze.