‘Cézanne and Us’: Paris’s Grand Palais opens giant exhibition with 174 works — from 69 masterpieces by the master to Picasso, Matisse and Warhol

The Grand Palais in Paris opened on September 23 the exhibition ‘Cézanne et nous’ (‘Cézanne and Us’), the first major exhibition on Paul Cézanne in the French capital since 1995, as USA Art News reports. The exhibition brings together 174 works — 69 by Cézanne himself and 105 by 78 other artists he inspired — tracing his influence from the 1880s to the present day, and it remains open until January 17, 2027.

According to the curators, this is not an ordinary retrospective, but a ‘journey into the influence’ of the master. Claire Bernardi, director of the Musée de l’Orangerie and one of the four curators, says it is difficult for today’s public to understand how ‘strange and even shocking’ his work seemed when it first appeared: ‘For us he is a heritage artist, but when his painting appeared — and for long afterwards — his work was so new, so radical, so revolutionary, that all people saw was its strangeness.’ Jean-Rémi Touzet, a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, recalls the strong reactions at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, where critics called his works signs of ‘dementia’.

The exhibition is a co-production of Grand Palais RMN, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie — an unprecedented collaboration, prompted partly also by the Pompidou’s five-year closure for renovation, as Le Monde writes. The opening section, ‘An artist for artists’, sets Cézanne’s ‘Bathing’ (1885), lent by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, against Peter Doig’s ‘Bathing’ (2023), from Larry Gagosian’s collection, while photographer Wolfgang Tillmans pays homage to the master with a photograph of a postcard of the iconic bather in a domestic setting.

The exhibition also shows ‘The Large Bathers’ (1894–1905), the National Gallery of London version, as well as works lent by the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the Phillips Collection in Washington, Swiss museums and the Goulandris collection. Among the artists exhibited alongside Cézanne are Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso — who called the master ‘the father of us all’ — Mondrian, Joan Mitchell, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Bridget Riley, Georg Baselitz, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Zao Wou-Ki.

Cézanne’s career did not begin with immediate recognition: by the late 1880s he had given up active exhibiting, but artists and collectors encountered his works at the Paris shop of Julien ‘Père’ Tanguy, while the dealer Ambroise Vollard gave him his first solo exhibition in 1895. After his death, the great 1907 exhibition at the Salon d’Automne sealed the fame he had lacked during his life. Alongside the exhibition, France 5 broadcasts on October 2 the new 60-minute documentary ‘Looking for Cézanne’.