High up on the wall in the first room of the Tate Modern’s blockbuster Cézanne exhibition, there was a quote from the revered postimpressionist: “With an apple, I shall astonish Paris.” To which, surely, the only response is: “OK mate. Nobody has ever been astonished by an apple. Least of all Parisians, who tend to greet most things with a Gallic shrug.”
There is no doubt that Cézanne was extremely influential and did, indeed, astonish. The very fact a 19th-century artist was being shown at the Tate’s modern arm is down to his avant garde impact on cubism and beyond. And the exhibition, which has just closed, was striking for its comprehensive exploration of the painter’s masterly career – from early self-portraiture to the quasi-baroque and Romantic stylings of The Eternal Feminine, from nude bathers to gorgeous renderings of seas, forests and his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire. But there were also – over and over, gluttonously – apples.
