“L’ESTAQUE”: This oil on canvas painting by Paul Cézanne is featured in “Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings,” on view at the Princeton University Art Museum March 7 through June 14. Organized in association with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the exhibition premieres in Princeton before being shown in London starting July 12.

On view March 7 through June 14 at the Princeton University Art Museum, “Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings” is the first exhibition to examine essential but underestimated aspects of the revolutionary French painter’s work: his profound interest in rocks and geological formations, and his use of such structures to shape the compositions of his canvases.

Three of the principal areas of France in which Cézanne (1839-1906) painted landscapes are full of rocky terrain: the Forest of Fontainebleau, southeast of Paris; L’Estaque, a village in Provence on the Mediterranean coast immediately above Marseille; and the area around Aix-en-Provence, his birthplace.

With significant loans from museum and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, the exhibition features approximately 15 of the two dozen canvases that the artist made at these sites, supplemented by selected watercolors.

Organized by the Princeton University Art Museum in association with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, “Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings” premieres in Princeton before being shown in London from July 12 through October 18. The exhibition is curated by John Elderfield, who served from 2015 to 2019 as the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, distinguished curator and lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum, and is chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.

“This historic project highlights an essential body of work by a monumental artist that has not previously been the focus of such concentrated scholarship,” said James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, director. “The exhibition and publication of these profound, provocative and deeply rigorous compositions afford remarkable insights into the career of a canonical artist and are a fitting finale to John Elderfield’s time here at Princeton.”

With its rocky terrain, quarries, and ancient stone caves, the landscape of Provence had been an established subject for plein air painters for more than a century before Cézanne began working outdoors there. His own interest in depicting geological formations dates to the mid-1860s, a period when changing theories about the evolution of the earth were in play.

Cézanne and a close friend from his youth, Antoine-Fortuné Marion (1846-1900), who went on to become a noted geologist and paleontologist, first began painting the rocks on the Mediterranean coast and visited caves that had been used as prehistoric dwellings. Informed by these early experiences, Cézanne would explain that, when painting a landscape, he had to understand its underlying structure.

Cézanne’s unpopulated paintings of rocks and quarries embody a distanced, formalized view of nature as having its own, ancient order, which he built up with conspicuously assembled, flat patches of paint. While this method aimed at a true representation of the external visual world, it was deeply influential upon early 20th-century artistic developments toward abstraction: Both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso reportedly said, “Cézanne is the father of us all.”

The Princeton University Art Museum is located at the heart of the Princeton campus. Admission is free. Museum hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Sunday 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit artmuseum.princeton.edu.