Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
The ‘father of us all’
As artists like Picasso and Matisse recognised, Paul Cezanne's radical break with tradition was the seed for a new era of modern art, says CHRISTINE LINDEY
IN 1861 Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) arrived in Paris from Provence, then an unfashionable backwater, as a provincial outsider.
Combative and curmudgeonly, he was as vociferous an opponent of aesthetic orthodoxy as he was of Louis Napoleon’s undemocratic, corrupt Second Empire.
His art was so radical that he was in his sixties before a handful of admirers hailed its importance. He’d invented a new visual language which laid the foundation of modern art.
More from this author

CHRISTINE LINDEY welcomes a fascinating survey of the work of the communist and socialist artists who founded the AIA in the 1930s

CHRISTINE LINDEY guides us through the vivid expressionism of a significant but apolitical group of pre WWI artists in Germany

CHRISTINE LINDEY salutes an outstanding exhibition imbued with a sense of national guilt

CHRISTINE LINDEY surveys the cosmopolitan, enigmatic compositions of an idiosyncratic artist whose work speaks of mystery and exile