The Cézanne Effect

Matisse described Cézanne's paintings as "a kind of god of painting." His method explains the reverence: he would stare at his subject for extraordinary periods before each brushstroke, sometimes spending weeks on a single still life of apples, watching how color relationships shifted as the light changed.

The result records not a single moment of seeing but accumulated visual experience over extended time — a radically different idea of what a painting could represent.