Paul Cézanne | Post-Impressionist painter

Cézanne's🎨 works were rejected numerous times by the official Salon in Paris and ridiculed by art critics when exhibited with the Impressionists.

Yet during his lifetime Cézanne was considered a master by younger artists who visited his studio in Aix.

Along with the work of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, the work of Cézanne, with its sense of immediacy and incompletion, critically influenced Matisse and others prior to Fauvism and Expressionism.

After Cézanne died in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in a large museum-like retrospective in Paris, September 1907.

The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly affected the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism.

Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris and others to experiment with ever more complex views of the same subject and eventually to the fracturing of form.

Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.

• Picasso referred to Cézanne as "the father of us all" and claimed him as "my one and only master!"

Other painters such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Kasimir Malevich, Georges Rouault, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse acknowledged Cézanne's genius.