Mont Sainte-Victoire

From the 1880s until his death, Paul Cézanne was fascinated with Mont Sainte-Victoire, a mountain near Aix-en-Provence in southern France. Cézanne abandoned traditional means of representation, such as the use of perspective to indicate a gradual recession from foreground to background, and descriptive drawing to indicate details. Instead, he emphasized the painted surface by bringing the background and middle ground forward to the same, flat plane as the foreground. Cézanne accentuated this effect by indicating form and space through the juxtaposition of small, colored patches of paint laid side by side. This quasi-abstract style would become influential in the development of Cubism.