Tate Modern’s magnificent homage to Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) opens with the artist himself: shy, wary, prematurely balding in his 30s; almost unwilling to look himself in the eye in his own self-portrait. His mouth is a single red dab in an obliterating black beard; he wears the era’s heavy dark coat. Yet all around him is an ecstasy of pink and umber swirls, lifting off like clouds, or smoke, or vapour vanishing into purest abstraction; the 19th-century painter surrounded by a vision of the future.
His glance – modest, oblique – draws your eyes close to the canvas, to see how the look of it comes into existence, mark by mysterious mark. And this is how it goes, all through this mesmerising show (which drops the acute accent from its title, in further respect to Cezanne, who didn’t use it in his signature). What he painted may be simply summarised: apples and oranges, his wife and son, his gardener, the trees outside his studio in Aix, the great baked pyramid of Mont Sainte-Victoire across the valley, over and again. Even the late bathers, in their ethereal Arcadia, exist in a recognisable Provence.
