Turning Road at Montgeroult

Turning Road at Montgeroult (c.1898) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, depicts a village near Pontoise in the Île-de-France — the same general area where Cézanne had worked with Pissarro in the early 1870s — painted during one of his later northern French visits. By 1898 his mature structural method was applied with complete confidence to any landscape subject he encountered, and this curving village road demonstrates the universality of his approach. The MoMA holding of this canvas alongside The Bather (c.1885) makes the New York museum one of the small number of American institutions able to represent both Cézanne's figure and landscape work with key examples. The turning road — a motif he returned to repeatedly — challenges his anti-conventional perspective method: how to allow the eye to follow the road's curve while maintaining the picture surface's planar integrity. His solution — color temperature recession rather than convergent lines — is demonstrated here with particular clarity.

Cézanne built surfaces through parallel, directional 'constructive' brushstrokes that model form and recession simultaneously. His palette of muted greens, ochres, and blue-greys is applied in overlapping planes that create a sense of solidity without conventional shading.