Cezanne is the key figure of the post-Impressionist search for form. In many ways he is the ancestor of both Fauvism and Cubism, the two main streams of twentieth- century French painting. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, European painting became, increasingly experimental. As the artist's market grew smaller, he turned in upon himself, and developed an interest in techniques rather than in subject matter. The Impressionists gave new brilliance to the painter's colors with their semi-scientific color and atmospheric method. But their figures dissolved in a shimmering haze. Toward the end of the century progressive painters like Cezanne tried to correct this deficiency. At the same time, they disavowed the illustrative, story-telling pictures of the academic or conservative school. Apart from the banality of their concern with a pretty sentiment, a homey tale, or ancient allegory, these also lacked form.

The so-called post-Impressionists (Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat) felt this loss of solidity and composition in contemporary painting. Some of them, like Gauguin and Van Gogh, also felt that emotional values had been sacrificed to an either too lyrical or too literal approach.

Cezanne's art marks a self-conscious effort to return to painting the kind of controlled form and space it has not known since the old masters. In the strenuousness of his attempts he tended to treat his themes more as arrangements of form, color, and texture than as subjects with emotional meaning. The subject matter chosen by the artist had almost always been a direct reflection of his feelings. With Cezanne all this changed; he devoted his life to technique. He tried to make of Impressionism "something as solid and durable as the art of the museums" and neglected the overtly emotional side of painting.

A member of the original Impressionist group, Cezanne soon separated from them. He avoided the atmospheric effects of his associates in favor of a more carefully constructed and arranged composition. Although he used their little spots of clean color, he applied these in such a way that they modulate the form from highlight to shadow. He also felt that the richer the color, the more rounded the ultimate form effect would be. Cezanne's most significant contribution, however, came in his treatment of space. In order to get tighter composition, he gradually limited the degree to which the spectator could penetrate the distance. To achieve this, he brought the background as close to the foreground as possible, projecting the forms toward the spectator rather than away from them.

In The Card Players (below) each figure is a solid form consisting of clean color areas that move from one intensity to another. The activity of card-playing is subordinated to the composition. The three players are blended into a solid arch balanced by the man at the left and the curtain at the right. The standing man and the curtain, like the pipes on the wall and the converging glances of the players, lead to a central point in the foreground. This reverses the usual front-to-back movement of earlier painting. The total effect is to bring the wall close to the table and to move the table itself toward us. This illusion is aided by making the side players touch the upright figure and the curtain, as well as the sides of the picture. Everything is related to the rectangular, front outline of the painting. Yet a picture of this kind, though formal in purpose, is not without emotional meaning. It has a certain seriousness and solemn 'quietness that bring to mind the great works of the Le Nains in the seventeenth century.

The difference between Cezanne's approach and the outdoor Impressionists' is even more striking in landscape painting. The Mt. Sainte-Victoire (below) again shows his ability to organize a theme into a series of controlled and definitely limited elements. The trees at the left and right not only establish the foreground boundaries of the picture, they also relate this foreground area to the mountains in the background. Note, for example how the branches of the tree fit into the curves made by the mountains. Thus the background and the painting as a whole are tilted forward and brought into close relationship with the foreground.

Unlike his predecessors, the artist's aim is not to represent the momentary effect of light striking an object. The post-Impressionist painter like Cezanne or Seurat distributes a permanent, all-over light that has nothing to do with a particular moment in time. In one way this makes the picture less real in the photographic sense; yet the net result is to give a potently solid impression of the individual forms.

Just as the painter arranged the mountain scene, so too has he brought the parts of the Still Life into a patterned relationship. The objects lack the subject relation of the traditional kitchen or living room themes. They have been brought together arbitrarily by the artist to convey the interplay between various kinds of round surfaces. These spread out from the far walls and are brought toward us by the white and flowered cloths. The picture is tilted forward in the typical reverse perspective.

Curiously enough, the persecuted Impressionists had little use for what Cezanne tried to accomplish. As for the public, they lumped. Cezanne with the "new painting" and condemned him on the same specious grounds as they did the others. This misanthropic but dedicated man worked in isolation for many years in his home city of Aix. He was “discovered” only shortly before his death. His impact on the modern art world is perhaps greater than that of any other single painter.