Cézanne,
who exhibited little in his lifetime and pursued his interests increasingly
in artistic isolation, is regarded today as one of the great forerunners of
modern painting, both for the way that he evolved the putting down on canvas
exactly what his eye saw in nature, and for the qualities of pictorial form
that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass, and color.
Cézanne was a contemporary of the impressionists, but he went beyond
their interests in the individual brushstroke and the fall of light onto objects,
to create, in his words, ``something more solid and durable, like the art of
the museums.''