Cézanne: 'The Father of Modern Art'
Paul Cézanne is one of the best-loved painters of Western art. Yet the popularity of his still life and landscape works has perhaps tamed the radicality of his vision in our own eyes. It is easy to forget that these seemingly traditional 19th century Post-Impressionist paintings caused 'a landslide in art'.
Jacky Klein explains why we should see the 'painter of apples' as a pioneer for initiating new ways of looking and thinking about art. She uses Cézanne's works in the Courtauld collection to trace how his style developed through the 1870–1890s, pushing the frontiers of what painting could do, despite being met with derision in his own times.
Looking at Cézanne's output afresh, Klein makes the case for the painter as being 'father of Modern art', his works inspiring countless Modern and contemporary masters since.
Time Period:
19th century
Themes:
Jacky Klein is an art historian, author and broadcaster. She co-presented 'Britain's Lost Masterpieces' for BBC4 with Bendor Grosvenor in 2016, travelling the UK to discover some of the greatest lost paintings in the national collections. She has contributed to a range of programmes for BBC TV and radio, the Art Fund and Bloomberg TV, and she regularly broadcasts live for the auction house Christie's.
As a curator at the Courtauld and Hayward galleries, she worked on a range of exhibitions on artists from Rubens to Wyndham Lewis, Quentin Blake to Antony Gormley. In 2008, she moved into the world of art publishing as Commissioning Editor at Thames & Hudson. Jacky is now Commissioning Editor-at-Large at Tate Publishing, overseeing the gallery's art and children's books. She is the author of Grayson Perry and co-author of a number of books including Body of Art and What is Contemporary Art? A Children's Guide.
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