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Fondation Beyeler’s Major Cézanne Show Reframes a Founding Modernist

The Basel show foregrounds his method of perception, inviting fresh judgments on his place in modern art.

Overview

  • Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel presents roughly 80 portraits, landscapes and still lifes, on view through 25 May 2026.
  • The galleries spotlight Cézanne’s working methods, from recurring motifs like Montagne Sainte-Victoire to figure groups where bodies and terrain coalesce.
  • Curator Ulf Küster rejects the label “unfinished,” describing many canvases as “open images” that activate the viewer’s imagination.
  • The exhibition concludes with a short film by Albert Oehlen that draws on Joachim Gasquet quotations whose authenticity is contested.
  • Coverage uses the show to reassess his status as modernism’s progenitor, contrasting praise from Picasso, van Gogh and Rothko with views that he prepared rather than invented later breakthroughs.