“Cezanne” at the Fondation Beyeler

From revolutionary still lifes and enigmatic portraits to iconic landscapes and idyllic bather scenes, the exhibition traces the key themes of the last phase of the artist’s career.

In a conversation with the photographer Brassaï, Pablo Picasso once referred to Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) as “notre père à nous tous” – the father of us all. An undisputed pioneer of modern art, the French master is the focus of a new solo exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler – the first of its kind at the museum, more than twenty-five years after “Cezanne and Modernism”, a group show exploring the painter’s influence on subsequent generations of artists.

Open until 25 May 2026, the exhibition brings together around 80 works from the last and most significant phase of Cezanne’s career and across his iconic subjects of still life, portraiture, landscapes, and bather scenes. The 58 oil paintings and 21 watercolors – half of which come from leading museums, while the other half come from renowned private collections – showcase Cezanne’s groundbreaking late work, painted from his studio in the South of France, where the artist revolutionized the powerful intersection and tension between color, light and form.

The exhibition is divided into 8 thematic rooms and starts in the mid-1880s, when Cezanne had freed himself from the influence of Impressionism and abandoned the traditional conventions of painting, notably the gravity of central-perspective, thus tracing the culmination of his signature pictorial style.

Highlights of the exhibition include the bringing together of nine depictions of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which Cezanne painted from the vantage point of his studio on the hill of Les Lauves in his native Aix-en-Provence. A subject of constant reexamination for the artist, the mountain offered endless opportunities for variation, allowing him to capture the constantly changing nature of his surroundings in contrast to its enduring presence.

Certainly not to miss is the joint presentation of two of Cezanne’s rare depictions of card players: the celebrated painting of the Courtauld Gallery in London and the legendary version from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The enigmatic canvas of two men captured in the timeless moment just before their game’s first move has become one of the painter’s most iconic scenes, obsessively revisited by the artist five meticulous times throughout his career.

But if anything could be considered to be synonymous with Paul Cezanne, it would be his modern reinterpretation of the classical subject of bathers, a motif to which he repeatedly returned from the 1870s onwards. Cezanne’s bather scenes range in size from intimate watercolor sketches to monumental oil paintings and became particularly radical for their lack of mathematical perspective or anatomical “correctness”. Rather, the works offer a window into Cezanne’s personal interpretation of a modern “arcadia”, a paradisical union of human and nature held together by the painter’s tangle of dynamic strokes of color.

The exhibition also includes several works that have not been shown publicly for decades, among them the Portrait de Paul Cezanne (Portrait of Paul Cezanne) created around 1895. However, Cezanne’s painterly means of expression is most palpably captured in the show’s display of numerous intentionally unfinished paintings in which he left parts of the canvas unpainted. These works are the ultimate manifestation of the artist’s mission to liberate painting from its subject matter and to achieve what he termed “réalisation” – to capture the “sensations colorants”, that is, the sensory impressions of color that emerge from a motif and are then processed by the artist. Cezanne’s half-finished canvases are not reproductions but deeply personal impressions of a scene, a fragmentary but nonetheless crisp record of a fleeting moment in time.

After having encountered the work of the artist who lay the foundation for what we refer to as modernism today, make sure to follow in his footsteps and try your own hand at Cezanne’s watercolor technique in the Fondation Beyeler’s Watercolor Studio – and give free reign to your creativity.