Paul Cezanne, The Large Bathers, 1905

Cezanne is a master of modern art, known for his pallet knife paintings. His painting Les Grandes Baigneuses is one of the very last paintings he worked on, as well as the largest of his paintings. I can easily tell how he is able to achieve balance through geometry, color, and figures, but its fairly obvious. You really don't need a Senior Art History student to see that. What makes the paining so great are the female forms he captures and the way he executes them. Female nudes as a subject is not ne,  but the commonality of the scene is what Cezanne is doing differently than the past. What he captures through his paints is an intimate moment, where all of the subjects are focused on themselves. While some of the proportions are certainly off, the colors he uses to add contrast within the skin tones, as well as leaving parts of the canvas exposed to peer out, gives the painting its modern feel as it steers towards abstraction.

The most interesting fact about Cezanne's The Large Bathers is its impact. At first this painting, along with others in the series, were not seen as masterpieces to the public. However, the works made quite the impact with his contemporaries. You can see how this painting might have influenced the styles of artist like Picasso, Matisse, and Gauguin. In fact, Cezanne, being a master of his craft, was looked up to by many artists, some destined to become masters themselves. Picasso considered Cezanne to be "his one and only master" and Matisse commented:  "At critical moments in my artistic adventure it gave me courage; I drew from it my faith and endurance." These artists would go on to paint figures within landscapes that if someone were to put their works side by side The Large Bathers,  he or she would find some of similarities and influences.

This painting is so influential because the creativity Cezanne has placed on this canvas is inspiring yet not entirely obvious. The way he's able to sculpt these figures into this formation and also thread them into the landscape creates a harmony within the painting. Everything beings to work together. Having said all of this, there has been a great debate as to whether the painting was actually "completed." Being the last painting Cezanne worked on, some claim that due to the style and its rough appearance, Cezanne was still in the process doing the preliminary sketching of the figures. Either way the contrast between the bare canvas and the energy of his colors adds another dimension to the painting that has effected the way we address modern art.