Paul Cézanne

This bold landscape shows Cézanne’s radical interest in spatial relationships and three dimensional form. A fence follows from the left behind the turning road; to the right of where the road disappears, brown paint could suggest an upright fence obscuring the white building, or flat earth leading to it. Patches of green—leaves or grass, near or distant—exacerbate this tension between flatness and depth. “I am progressing very slowly,” Cézanne noted, “for nature reveals itself to me in very complex forms.” Widely misunderstood by contemporary critics, Cézanne’s work was admired and collected by his colleagues. This landscape, for example, once belonged to Claude Monet.