BASEL.- For the first time in its history, the Fondation Beyeler is devoting a solo exhibition to Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) – a pioneer of modern art and a prominent artist in its collection. Bringing together around 80 works, the exhibition focusses on the French painter’s last and most significant phase, showcasing Cezanne at the height of his powers: enigmatic portraits, idyllic scenes of bathers, viscerally evocative landscapes of his native Provence, and endlessly renewed depictions of his favourite motif, the Montagne Sainte Victoire. Working in his studio in the South of France, Cezanne brought his masterful intuition to establishing complex and powerful tension between colour, light and form, constructing revolutionary images that have inspired generations of artists to this day. The exhibition illustrates how Cezanne transformed painting and, in the words of Pablo Picasso, became “the father of us all”.

Bringing together 58 oil paintings and 21 watercolours from celebrated institutional and private collections in Switzerland, France, Germany, England, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United States, the exhibition showcases Cezanne’s groundbreaking late work. Next to iconic works from major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Musée d’Orsay, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Tate, half of the paintings on display are loans from private collections, many of which are rarely seen in public.

The exhibition’s highlights include the bringing together of nine depictions of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, as well as the joint presentation of two of Cezanne’s rare depictions of card players, the celebrated painting of the Courtauld Gallery in London and the legendary version from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In addition, the exhibition features 14 of the artist’s much-admired fruit still lifes, as well as eight outstanding portraits and self-portraits. With La pierre à moudre au parc du Château Noir (La meule) (Millstone in the Park of the Château Noir (Millstone)), 1892–1894, a major work from Philadelphia is also on view, presented in Europe for the first time. The exhibition presents, for the first time, a juxtaposition of two watercolour versions of The Boy in the Red Vest. It also includes several works that have not been shown publicly for decades, among them the Portrait de Paul Cezanne (Portrait of Paul Cezanne) created around 1895. Also on display are numerous intentionally unfinished paintings in which Cezanne left parts of the canvas unpainted, as well as more than 30 landscape paintings of Provence.

The exhibition starts in the mid-1880s, when Cezanne had freed himself of the influence of Impressionism and found the style that would make him a key figure of modern art. Born in Aix-en-Provence, in the late 19th and early 20th century Cezanne took a radical new departure by releasing painting from traditional conventions such as the central-perspective. Cezanne’s declared ambition was to no longer depict nature, but rather to analyse and make visible in his work the process of painting motifs taken from nature.

With this newly-won artistic freedom, Cezanne turned to the subjects that were to define his later work, most notably the landscapes of his native Provence. They provided him with a field of experimentation in which to develop his vision of a new form of painting. In Paul Cezanne’s work, the landscape of Provence becomes much more than a painterly backdrop – it becomes the centrepiece of a startingly new and modern visual language. With his views of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire and forests bathed in southern light, Cezanne influenced not only the history of art but also the way in which the region is perceived to this day. His pictures turned the Provence into a place of longing, where nature, calm and timeless beauty merge. By translating the landscape into colours, Cezanne gave it an iconic presence that resonates far beyond painting. For today’s audience, his Provence motifs reveal both the roots of modernity and the magical charm that gives the region its enduring appeal.

Paul Cezanne was captivated by the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Again and again, he set up his easel facing the mountain, seeing in it an ideal testing ground for the question at the core of his art: how to paint the world as one really experiences it? For Cezanne, this meant not simply depicting nature but making visible its forms, its colours and its atmosphere; art as parallel to nature. From the 1880s to his death, he painted the Montagne Sainte-Victoire about 30 times in oil as well as producing numerous watercolours. The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler brings together seven oil paintings and two watercolours.

The Montagne Sainte-Victoire is the motif with which Cezanne put to the test his technique of constructing images on canvas. Cezanne did not paint objects as he knew them but rather what he saw directly before him: sensory impressions of colour (“sensations colorantes”), which he transposed onto canvas dabs of color (“taches colorées”). He thus explored the way form can be created by mere colour. His many versions were less the expression of an unrelentingly inquiring mind than a systematic attempt to approach this way of seeing. Cezanne sought to reconcile the mountain’s enduring force and the fleeting impressions of the moment. A quest that was to later exert crucial influence on artists such as Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque.

Figures of bathers also feature prominently in the exhibition – a subject that Paul Cezanne kept returning to in various ways, exploring the relation between the human body and nature. Rather than depicting idealised figures, Cezanne fuses bodies and landscapes to such an extent that the bathers take on the rhythm of the trees and the curve of the river bank, or seem to grow from the ground like plants. This quiet merging lends his bathing scenes their distinctive tension: the figures are both there and about to fade into their surroundings. Cezanne’s bathers combine the classical tradition of the nude with a modern understanding of form and space.

His still lifes also manifest Paul Cezanne’s tireless endeavour to transfer the visible world into stable, almost timeless order. His seemingly straightforward arrangements of apples, pears, oranges, jugs, pitchers, bread and carefully draped cloths in fact operate as a stage on which to insistently explore form, colour and balance. By condensing pieces of fruit into compact bodies of colour, draping fabric into animated landscapes and exploring the subtle play of light and shadow on the smooth surfaces of various vessels, he transformed common objects into constitutive elements of a new pictorial architecture. His still lifes are carefully considered constructions, in which each object is given weight, volume and spatial effect – and in which we can see Cezanne’s quest for the inner order of things play out as much on a small scale as on the awe-inspiring scale of nature.

Next to still lifes featuring fruit and vessels, the exhibition also addresses Cezanne’s engagement with the motif of the skull, which reflects an existential dimension of his work. Unlike the arrangements of fruit and cloths, the skull is no merely decorative object but rather a symbol of transience and the fundamental questions of human existence. The skull takes on a dense, sculptural presence, whose weight, shadow and outlines are granted the same attention as all the other objects of Cezanne’s still lifes. In these paintings, the object’s material reality merges with a reflection on time mortality and fleetingness.

The exhibition attempts to show how Cezanne made visible the structures of his pictures, thereby inviting viewers to engage with and participate in his painting process. This is especially true of the works that appear unfinished, in which the artist took the liberty of leaving parts of the canvas unpainted, achieving a new form of harmony. These compositions are characterized by a kind of open-endedness, allowing the engaged viewer to mentally continue and complete them in their imagination.

In this spirit, at the end of the exhibition viewers are given the opportunity to try out for themselves the watercolour technique in which Cezanne achieved such mastery. By setting up a studio within the museum space, the Fondation Beyeler aims to make the artist’s unique approach accessible not only to the eye but also to practical experience.

The exhibition closes with the short film Cezanne on art, 2025, conceived and directed by celebrated contemporary painter Albert Oehlen and renowned filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel, known for international films such as Downfall, 2004, and The Experiment, 2001. Inspired by conversations between Cezanne and his friend, the writer Joachim Gasquet, the film fuses art, philosophy and landscape into an atmospheric evocation of the artist – with Sean O’Brien, Sam Riley and Nichole Galicia in the lead roles. Filmed on original locations such as the Montagne Sainte-Victoire and the Bibémus Quarries, it captures the light and the fascinating atmosphere of the landscape that so influenced Cezanne’s painting. The film will premiere at the Fondation Beyeler.

The exhibition “Cezanne” is curated by Ulf Küster, Senior Curator of the Fondation Beyeler.

The exhibition catalogue, designed by London-based graphic designer Melanie Mues, is published in German and in English by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin. On 200 pages, it brings together essays by Louise Bannwarth, Gottfried Boehm, Ulf Küster and Fabienne Ruppen as well as a biography illustrated by Sarah Weishaupt.