PARIS — The Grand Palais opens "Cézanne and Us" to the public Wednesday, a sprawling exhibition that argues for Paul Cézanne's influence less through his own career than through the artists who spent the following century absorbing, imitating and arguing with him. The show, running through Jan. 17, brings together nearly 180 works — 69 by Cézanne and roughly 105 by 78 other artists — in the Grand Palais's Galleries 3 and 4.
Organized by the GrandPalaisRmn with the Centre Pompidou and the public institution overseeing the Musée d'Orsay and Musée de l'Orangerie, the exhibition is curated by Claire Bernardi, Michel Gauthier, Xavier Rey and Jean-Rémi Touzet. Rather than a conventional retrospective, it is structured around direct pairings: Cézanne's "Trois baigneuses" hangs near André Derain's own bathers, his view of the Gulf of Marseille from L'Estaque sits opposite Ellsworth Kelly's "Lake II," and his still-life apples face off against Roy Lichtenstein's Pop-art versions of the same fruit.
The artist list traces a line from Cézanne's immediate admirers — Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian — through postwar and contemporary figures including Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley, Georg Baselitz and Peter Doig, according to the museum. The show's premise leans on a historical irony: Cézanne sold little and was dismissed by much of the Parisian establishment during his lifetime, and it was only a large posthumous exhibition in Paris in 1907, a year after his death, that secured the reputation later generations of painters would spend decades responding to.
General admission is priced at €19, with a €16 reduced rate and an open ticket at €24; entry is free for visitors under 18, jobseekers and visitors with disabilities, and the museum is offering French Sign Language tours alongside its standard accessibility program. The exhibition arrives in a crowded season for Cézanne and his circle in Paris: the Musée de l'Orangerie opens "Monet and Time" on Sept. 30, and the Musée d'Orsay is currently running a show on the Statue of Liberty's sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, through January.
The exhibition is scheduled to remain on view through Jan. 17, 2027, making it one of the longer-running major shows on the Grand Palais's current calendar and placing it alongside the Orsay and Orangerie exhibitions as part of a broader autumn focus on late-19th-century French painting across the city's museums.
