Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne began as a full participant in the Impressionist circle, exhibiting in the first group exhibition of 1874, where his submissions drew particular derision from critics, and again in the third exhibition of 1877, the last time he showed with the group. After 1877 he largely withdrew from Paris's exhibiting circles and worked in increasing isolation around Aix-en-Provence and L'Estaque, pursuing what he described as an ambition to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums. He built form through methodical, faceted patches of modulated color, treating natural forms as underlying geometric structures and returning obsessively to a small set of motifs, most famously Mont Sainte-Victoire and, in his final decade, his multi-figure Card Players series. This structural, analytical approach is understood today as the crucial bridge between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and it directly shaped the early development of Cubism through Picasso and Braque, who studied his late work closely; Cezanne is accordingly classified primarily as a Post-Impressionist rather than as an Impressionist, notwithstanding his participation in two of the movement's own group shows.