Cézanne et nous — Les Galeries nationales du Grand Palais — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 5 months: September 23, 2026 → January 21, 2027

The exhibition Cézanne and Us presents a new dialogue between the work of Paul Cézanne and that of artists who, from the late nineteenth century to today, found in his work an invitation to renew painting. Nearly 180 works are brought together, including around 70 by Cézanne and more than 70 by other artists. Together they trace an exceptional lineage, based both on the influence he exerted and on the deliberate appropriation of his legacy.

The exhibition begins in the 1880s and 1890s. At that time Cézanne, discouraged by repeated failures, almost stopped exhibiting. Yet a few painters discovered his canvases at Père Tanguy’s shop and were struck by their formal boldness. This radical approach reinforced their own search for a more autonomous art already moving toward abstraction. The exhibition then highlights the key stages in Cézanne’s recognition: the essential role of the dealer Ambroise Vollard, the exhibitions organized between 1895 and 1906, the first museum acquisitions, the posthumous tribute at the 1907 Salon d’Automne, and the major international shows of the 1910s.

These events helped establish the artist’s critical and commercial success and he came to be seen as one of the founders of modernity. The exhibition then shows the diversity of interpretations of his work by European and international avant garde movements of the early twentieth century. All of them explored the relationship between painting and reality in line with Cézanne’s idea that art is a harmony parallel to nature.

This multiple reception forms the thread running through the exhibition. From Cézanne onward modern art and the formalism that accompanied it, focused on the essential elements of painting, took lasting hold. After the Second World War his legacy remained central to movements that renewed abstraction in Europe and the United States, including lyrical abstraction, optical art and hard edge painting. The exhibition traces a nuanced history in which each generation constructs its own Cézanne while asserting its own approach, leading up to the challenges of postmodernism that question his mythical status.

Cézanne and Us is the first exhibition to follow this double trajectory from the 1880s to today: the decisive influence of the artist and the creators who claimed him as their own, considering him, in Picasso’s words, our father of us all. What emerges is a shifting and sometimes contradictory image of a painter rejected by academic institutions but who became a major figure of modern Western art, a we that refers both to artists who inherited Cézanne and to our contemporary gaze on his work through them.