Exhibitions
Paul Cézanne, from post-impressionism to modern painting
The Beyeler Foundation in Riehen is hosting a monographic exhibition dedicated to Paul Cézanne until May 25th, focusing on the final stage of his career, considered the most decisive for the shaping of modern art and one of the most important artists in the museum's collection. The exhibition brings together 58 oil paintings and 21 watercolors organized around the themes Cézanne explored throughout his life: portraits and group scenes, still lifes, and landscapes.
The exhibition concludes with a space dedicated to his watercolors and a contemporary installation that invites visitors to experience and appreciate his artistic work and biography: a film created by the painter Albert Oehlen and the filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel. The exhibition not only displays Paul Cézanne's works but also suggests a way of seeing: slow, analytical, and mindful of the painting process.
Cézanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, into a wealthy family following his father's rise in economic status. Although he began studying law at his family's insistence, he eventually turned to painting, developing a career marked by institutional rejection and a growing artistic independence. His relationship with Camille Pissarro was key to the evolution of his artistic language, which would ultimately have a decisive influence on the avant-garde movements of the 20th century.
Cézanne's figure stands at a point of tension between tradition and rupture. His works do not seek to please or faithfully represent the world, but rather to reconstruct it through painting itself. In this sense, more than a painter of his time, Cézanne seems like an artist who worked against it, against the established way of using paint, daring to innovate and try to represent what he saw with his tools, opening a space where the gaze ceases to be passive and becomes a challenge between the artist and the canvas, between the world and the eyes of the beholder.
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