From left to right: Paul Cezanne, Woman in Blue (1877), courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pablo Picasso The Dream (Marie-Thérèse) (1932) © Pablo Picasso / ARS; Henri Matisse, Woman in Blue (1937), © Succession H. Matisse / ARS.

 “Cézanne’s art may no longer be the overflowing source of modernity it was thirty years back,” Clement Greenberg wrote in 1951, “but it endures in its newness.” The word “source” transforms this comment from a general observation about how fresh Cézanne’s work looked to mid-twentieth-century viewers into something more interesting—an allusion to how artists thought about it. That Greenberg took for granted that Cézanne’s art was an “overflowing source of modernity … thirty years back” itself attests to the enduring newness of that art. In the 1920s, painters had been trying to come to terms with Cézanne’s work for at least two decades.

About half a century before Greenberg published his essay, the overwhelming importance and disruptive power of Cézanne’s art was announced by the 1907 memorial retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, organized to honor the painter, who had died the previous year. With fifty-six paintings and several watercolors, most of them borrowed from the magnificent collection of Auguste Pellerin, it was the largest and most ambitious selection of Cézanne’s work yet assembled, and it transformed the aspirations and efforts of just about any young artist of