Episode Details

Paul Cezanne spent decades painting the same mountain, the same apples, and the same bathers — and in doing so, he dismantled the way Western art had depicted space since the Renaissance. He flattened perspective, fractured forms, and painted objects from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Picasso called him "the father of us all," and without Cezanne's quiet revolution in a Provencal studio, Cubism, abstraction, and most of modern art would not exist.

This episode traces Cezanne from his banker father's disapproval through the Impressionist years, the retreat to Aix-en-Provence, and the solitary decades of painting that laid the foundation for twentieth-century art.

• Cezanne's domineering father and the struggle to pursue painting against family opposition
• The Impressionist exhibitions, the critical savaging, and the withdrawal from Paris
• The obsessive painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire and the still lifes that rebuilt visual perception
• Picasso's debt, the Cubist revolution Cezanne made possible, and his death painting outdoors in a storm