Mont Sainte-Victoire 1906

Paul Cézanne made this painting, Mont Sainte-Victoire, without a specific date, using oil paint. The way he builds the image with these careful, blocky strokes is so interesting. It’s like he’s not just painting what he sees, but also how he sees, breaking the world down into its basic shapes and colors. Look at how he uses color – the blues and purples in the mountain, those yellows and greens in the foreground. It’s like he’s building the landscape piece by piece, color by color. There is one particular stroke, the way the paint sits on the canvas, thick and kind of stubby, almost like little building blocks. It’s like each one is a tiny decision, a little experiment in how to capture the light and form of the mountain. You can almost feel him standing there, making those marks, one by one. Cézanne really paved the way for artists like Picasso, who took this idea of breaking things down even further. It’s like he started a conversation about how we see the world, and artists are still responding to it today.