The Bather

Paul Cézanne completed this The Bather around 1885, showing a single male figure standing in a landscape. The muscular youth faces forward, hands at his sides, in a pose echoing classical sculpture. But Cézanne's distinctive brushwork fragments the figure into geometric planes.

Cézanne painted numerous bathers throughout his career, both male and female. This monumental single figure influenced Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon and countless later artists. The flattened space and simplified forms point toward Cubism. Cézanne's instruction to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" finds expression here. It hangs in MoMA.