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One Fine Show: “Cezanne” at the Fondation Beyeler

This masterpiece-laden exhibition brings together around 80 paintings from the artist's later career, including many works seldom seen in public.

The new Resident Evil just dropped, and while reviews praise its gameplay, for me, these games have always conjured the experience of absorbing a great still life. Yes, the majority of your time will have you prowling a post-apocalyptic locale with a pistol as you try to avoid zombies, but the main activity is not fighting them. Instead, it is picking up piece after piece of hand-sized objects and rotating them as you search for keys and clues. These might include a cup, a rotting apple, a note from a regretful scientist, a vase. All of this dingy ephemera is rendered with cutting-edge graphics technology as you rotate it under an unexplained light source and admire its semi-realistic art style.

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Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was someone who made great advancements in the medium of still lifes using the technology of painting, to the point that Pablo Picasso referred to him as “the father of us all.” His work is currently the subject of a blockbuster show at Fondation Beyeler near Basel that collects around 80 paintings from his later career: 58 oil paintings and 21 watercolors from institutional and private collections in Switzerland, France, Germany, England, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United States. Though many hail from sources like the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, over half come from private collections and have rarely been seen in public.

Among these are 14 of the artist’s beloved still lifes of fruit, including Apples and Oranges (c.1899). This is a painting of bounty. At least two dozen pieces of fruit cluster the pristine tablecloth with such quantity and casual positioning that they seem like they might crowd each other off the table. It’s hard to tell if their colors emerge from the skin, from the light in the room or from the ambient reflections of the other fruit nearby. Each ball of pigment is crafted with such care, each boasting a bespoke border separating it from the world, that you begin to feel that they have their own personalities. Cézanne worked slowly and apparently preferred apples to other fruits because they took a long time to spoil.

This may be a personal favorite, but the show also features a host of his famous masterpieces, including The Card Players (1893-1896). What’s strange about these fellows is that even though they’re most likely doing battle, they seem to be as wrapped up in themselves as the fruit. Behind them, the tavern roils. Maybe that’s where all the tension went, the background where Cézanne’s signature patchwork brushstrokes

Group of Bathers (c.1895) could be a merger of the two previously described works. Here, the liberated background beckons with greens, blues and teals, the buttocks of the bathers given the same level of chaotic characterization as the fruit in the first work described. All three are masterpieces in a show that seems to be full of them.

“Cezanne” is on view at the Fondation Beyeler through May 25, 2026.

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