And though he became a major influence on younger artists, he was increasingly withdrawn.

But he never sold much during his lifetime. In 2011, a version of Cézanne's card players went for $250 million. He's working at the end of the 19th into the 20th century, so he kind of leads us into what happens.' Hauptman said, ' Sometimes people describe him as kind of the beginning of modernism. In fact, these closeups of geometric forms help explain why Cézanne is considered a pioneer, paving the way for cubism and abstraction. It was a way to continue expressing form throughout the process of using color.' Cezanne under the microscope. 'That is absolutely not his style at all. 'Traditional watercolor artists were encouraged to draw very lightly, so that when your paint goes on, your sketch disappears,' Neufeld said, 'and it looks like you didn't have to do that step.' Watercolor and pencil on paper.Īnd in MoMA's lab, conservator Laura Neufeld is putting some of the works under a giant microscope to see how Cézanne made them – interweaving pencil and watercolor in a revolutionary way. 'Mont Sainte-Victoire' (1902-06) by Paul Cezanne. 'He's trying to understand the shape of the mountain, but he isn't ever quite getting it,' Hauptman said. 'Even in a household that might not have been a perfect marriage, I think there's something about that intimacy that is very moving.'Ĭézanne spent much of his time rambling through the forests and countryside near his home.īraver asked about a study of Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he did over and over and over again. 'There's a sadness, there's a kind of tenderness,' Hauptman said of Cézanne's images of Fiquet. It was a famously difficult marriage, though he often sketched and even painted her. His parents didn't accept Hortense Fiquet, the artists' model he married, until the couple had a son. He would spend most of his life back in the south of France.

'And they were especially intimate for Cézanne, who was working in these sketchbooks all the time and carrying them with him.' Hauptman told correspondent Rita Braver that, although Cézanne is best known for his paintings (a few of which are scattered through the exhibit), it's not the works on canvas, but those on paper – including pages from one of his sketchbooks – that really show how Cézanne thought: 'Drawings often are closer to the mind and the hand of the artist,' Hauptman said. A view of the exhibition 'Cezanne Drawing,' a collection of the artist's works on paper, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The exhibit contains more than 250 works from all over the world. 'If you look closely at these works, you see the way he moves a pencil across the paper – and he's always searching for something,' said Jodi Hauptman, a senior curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, now host to a landmark exhibit of Cézanne's drawings and watercolors. For the renowned French artist Paul Cézanne, it was all about the effort: 'I can't seem to express the intensity which beats in upon my senses,' he said.

He would return to the same subjects again and again: forests and trees, fruit and faces, bathers in and out of water.

Cezanne cubism