Cézanne review – gags, mountains and murder in a dizzying, devastating show

Tate Modern, London
For a long time, the French artist was the ultimate icon of seriousness. But these beautiful, touching works reveal the sly playful humour at the heart of his genius

Paul Cézanne’s sketchbook lies open at a childish drawing of a tall bendy house. It turns out he often let his little son use it. This openness to child’s play says a lot about the man, and not only as a parent. For Cézanne was the first western artist since the middle ages to claim a child’s freedom to depict things exactly as they pleased.

All around the glass case containing this sketchbook are Cézanne’s paintings of blocky houses overlapping in patterns of squares and triangles, coloured brown and yellow. These are the buildings of L’Estaque, a seaside village just west of Marseille, where Cézanne often stayed with his family – and where he invented cubism. As early as 1878, in The Sea at L’Estaque behind Trees, house walls and rooftops form a jagged cluster of flat yet rugged forms like the abstracted glances of objects that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque would get nicknamed cubists for painting 30 years later. They were proud to claim the influence. Look at the label and you’ll see this has been lent from the Musée National Picasso-Paris, for it was owned by Pablo. Braque, for his part, painted his breakthrough cubist canvases in 1908 in L’Estaque itself, in direct homage to Cézanne.

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