Lecture 7: Cézanne’s posterity

If you missed Lecture 7: Cézanne’s posterity from Terence Maloon’s series The 50 years that changed painting 1867–1917, you can watch the recorded version below or on our Youtube channel. 

The lecture series continues on the first Sunday of each month till September 2025. Learn more about the upcoming lectures and book a seat here.

Lecture 7: Cézanne’s posterity
At the dawn of the twentieth century modern painting was poised to assert its difference from anything that had gone before it. In decades past, Paul Cézanne had been a marginal figure in the French art world, yet suddenly he became the most adulated and imitated artist for the rising generation, his influence felt not only in France but worldwide. On the face of it he was a most unlikely candidate for such a position of pre-eminent authority. A late starter with seemingly little aptitude for painting and drawing, the strange fact was that the flaws and idiosyncrasies of Cézanne’s approach became legitimised as new orthodoxies of modernist painting.