Pablo Picasso once said that the great 19th-century French painter Paul Cezanne was "the father of us all." Cezanne's distinctive brush strokes, and the way he distorted perspective and his subjects, influenced the cubists, and most artists who came after him. In Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation is showing a group of still-life paintings by Cezanne.
A few months ago, my neighbor Barbara Baldwin went to the Barnes, which has an incredible collection of pretty much every painting you've ever seen reproduced in art books that's not already at the Met or the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. She was wowed by the Pierre-Auguste Renoirs — the largest Renoir collection in the world. "All those naked women," Barbara says. "Good heavens!"
The current special exhibition is all about naked fruit — apples, mostly. It's called "The World Is An Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cezanne."
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