“Cézanne and Us” Exhibition in Paris Looks to Comparison for Enduring Influence
The show takes a comprehensive look at the winding road beyond the apples, and where it happily circles back
Opening September 23 at the Grand Palais, “Cézanne and Us” looks at what happened after artists began taking the once-divisive painter seriously. The exhibition brings together 174 works: 69 by Cézanne and 105 by 78 other artists, among them Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Joan Mitchell, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Bridget Riley, Georg Baselitz, and Peter Doig.
The premise makes sense for Cézanne, whose rise was not an overnight affair. By the late 1880s, he was no longer actively seeking to exhibit his work. Artists and collectors nevertheless encountered his paintings at the Paris shop of Julien “Père” Tanguy. Dealer Ambroise Vollard gave Cézanne his first solo exhibition in 1895. Major posthumous exhibitions in Paris in 1907, including a retrospective at the Salon d’Automne, helped secure the reputation that had eluded him for so long.
The Grand Palais exhibition is a bit less concerned with retelling the reputational ascent than with what other artists subsequently did with it. Trois baigneuses, painted around 1874–75, appears alongside André Derain’s treatment of the same time-honored subject. A Cézanne view across the Gulf of Marseille from L’Estaque is shown with Ellsworth Kelly’s Lake II. His apples encounter Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop ones.
On a different note, Matisse took something different from his Cézanne than Picasso did. Kelly’s spare compositions bear little obvious resemblance to a Cézanne’s tabletop crowded with fruit. The exhibition reaches from Cézanne’s earliest admirers through postwar abstraction in Europe and the United States, Pop, and along to contemporary painting. Rather than leaving him safely installed at the beginning of modernism, it follows the very different uses artists have continued to find for him.
Cézanne spent much of his career failing to impress the Paris art establishment. The generations that followed were considerably more enthusiastic.
“Cézanne and Us” is on view at the Grand Palais in Paris from September 23, 2026, through January 17, 2027.