Cézanne Begins His Mont Sainte-Victoire Series

Beginning in the 1870s by the “Father of Post-Impressionism,” this series of forty-five watercolor and thirty-six oil paintings would have an outsized impact on art history. Significant for their challenging approach to landscape paintings, Cézanne broke from traditional conventions by flattening the space and using repeated forms to create a sense of depth. Cézanne famously believed that painters should “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone,” one of the first breaths of abstraction in arts modernization. Cézanne also portrayed his subject matter, in this case Mont Sainte-Victoire, from diverse angles and points of view, highly influencing Picasso and Georges Braque’s development of Cubism. “His innovations were tremendously influential for the masters of modernity, like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Picasso even went so far as to call Cézanne ‘the father of us all.’”