Paul Cézanne was interested in developing formal structure in his paintings. In his own way, he organized visual form to achieve structured clarity of design, and his paintings influenced twentieth-century formalist styles.
Cézanne sought to achieve strength in the formal structure of his paintings. “My aim,” he said, “was to make Impressionism into something solid and enduring like the art of the museums.”1
Cézanne saw the planar surfaces of his subjects in terms of color modulation. Instead of using light and shadow in a conventional way, he relied on carefully developed relationships between adjoining strokes of color to show solidity of form and receding space. He questioned, then abandoned, linear and atmospheric perspective and went beyond the appearance of nature, to reconstruct it according to his own interpretation.