
Richard Cork
☝ MASTER OF PARIS
I’ve waited all my life for a proper CÉZANNE retrospective, and the Grand Palais show certainly doesn’t disappoint. The painter revealed at the exhibition is mercifully removed from our oppressive mythology of Cézanne as the Moses figure who laid down the law about the subsequent course of Modern art, for this retrospective is nourished by fruitful contradictions.
The myth of Cézanne is that the violence evident in the rebarbative paintings in the first room of the exhibition disappeared once he began his steady, patient exploration of the observed world in the 1870s. At the