Virginia Woolf once famously wrote: “On or about December 1910, the world changed.” She was referring specifically to Roger Frye’s first exhibition of post-impressionist painting in London. The images of artists like Van Gogh, Cezanne and Matisse were viewed with both amazement and rejection by the gallery-visiting public of London. Where the parallel between earlier Impressionist painting and the objective world seem tolerable to many, the distortions of space, form and color in the paintings of Cezanne and Matisse were considered unnatural and unconvincing by a significant number of critics and art-lovers of the day. However, as Woolf suggests, the freeing of form and color in post-impressionist painting, heralded a new era of the aspirations and achievements of the visual arts, and by extension, the experiments in the musical and literary arts.

Paul Cezanne was and remains a revolutionary figure in the history of painting. While his early work was inspired by the work of Manet and others of the Impressionist movement, his mature work began to explore bolder and freer contrasts of color and form, as well as a manipulation of the representation of space. Where the rules of perspective held for most artists, Cezanne began to flatten and manipulate spatial representation in his work. Cezanne loved the natural world and his famous still-lifes of fruit as well as his depiction of the mountain St. Victoire, have attained iconic status is modern art. But, Cezanne introduced a visionary rearrangement of perspective and color that were freed from traditional expectations of realism. For instance, many of his great still-lifes portray fruit and objects on apparently tilted surfaces, as if in our physical world, the objects would fall under the force of gravity. But Cezanne’s vivid colors and sharp forms almost hand in midair, giving an unusual radiance and inner-vibrancy to these objects.

Cezanne’s paintings and drawings of Mount St. Victoire show a remarkable reorientation to the concepts of perspective and space. In these images Cezanne seems to anticipate a kind of multi-faceted cubism by presenting multiple aspects of perspective within the same canvas. The impressionist style of blurred lines and colors is present, but to style is added the experience of a number of different perspectives. The mountain itself is in the distance, seemingly flattened and abstracted into blocks of color, while foreground trees and buildings appear as if seen from a different point of view. In a way, Cezanne is recording the movement of the eye and its ability to register quickly more than one spatial framework. Focusing on the foreground yields one perspective, while gazing at the mountain in the greater distance produces another. In this sense, Cezanne suggests that space is not a single unitary experience, but a complex of points of view and differences in perspective. This mingling of different perspectives produces a sense of disorientation or strangeness in the viewer while also opening up the possibility of a richer experience of space and object. By stepping aside from a unitary concept of perspective, Cezanne suggests that the world and the eye are not absolute, but relative. Not singular, but multiple.

While Cezanne develops out of an Impressionist aesthetic, his mature work leads towards early versions of abstraction and expressionism. Cezanne is not as radical at first as Picasso is in his Cubism or Kandinsky is in his Abstractionism. But, Cezanne’s pushing against the assumptions of realism and perspective marks a major shift into the era of modernism.