Paul Cézanne

Cézanne wanted to make Impressionism into something as solid as museum art, and spent thirty years taking paintings apart to do it. Objects tilt, table edges fail to line up, apples sit at angles no single viewpoint allows. All of it deliberate.

He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire dozens of times from different distances, building the mountain out of patches of colour that function as structure rather than description. The bathers series pushed the same logic onto figures.

His early work was dark and violent and the Salon rejected him constantly. He retreated to Aix, worked in near isolation, and had almost no public success until the 1895 exhibition Vollard organised. Matisse and Picasso both called him the father of modern art, and Cubism came directly out of what he had done with form.