Mont Sainte-Victoire

Mont Sainte-Victoire (c.1903) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art belongs to the final, most radically abstract phase of Cézanne's mountain series, painted from his new studio at Les Lauves in the three years before his death. By 1903 the mountain had become almost entirely a color event — its geological mass dissolved into vibrating patches of blue, violet, and grey that hovered ambiguously between description and abstraction. The Philadelphia museum's holding of this late version alongside the massive Large Bathers (1899-1906) in the same collection provides the most concentrated demonstration available of Cézanne's final decade's simultaneous pursuit of figure and landscape problems through increasingly open, gestural handling. Braque and Picasso encountered these late mountain paintings in the Salon d'Automne retrospective organized the year after Cézanne's death (1907) — the exhibition that is widely considered the triggering event of Cubism — finding in their dissolution of solid form into color planes the formal permission they needed for their own radical experiments.

Cézanne's brushwork in this late version is more open and gestural than in earlier treatments, with patches of bare canvas left untouched between strokes. The mountain's planes are constructed through modulated passages of blue, violet, and gray, while warm ochres and greens in the foreground advance and recede through colour temperature rather than linear perspective.