Evans is a place on Earth: A Quiet Revolutionary:Cezanne @ Tate Modern.

"I paint as I see, as I feel... They also feel and see like me, but they don't dare... I dare" - Paul Cezanne, 1870

Mont Sainte-Victoire (1886-7)

Paul Cezanne's popular with the public now (on a Tuesday afternoon in February, Tate Modern was heaving with punters for their ongoing exhibition of his work, titled simply Cezanne) but he is, almost more than any other artist in history, an artist's artist. There are musings, mostly quite pretentious ones, on caption boards alongside his paintings by contemporary artists like Luc Tuymans, Ellen Gallagher, Laura Owens, Etel Adnan, and Pyllida Barlow, and then there's the big names who have sung his praises down the decades.

Picasso called Cezanne "the one and only master", Gauguin owned and treasured works by Cezanne, Monet too as well as Matisse (who said he "knew that Cezanne made no mistake"), Henry Moore, and Jasper Johns, Renoir said of the man that he "cannot put two touches of colour on to a canvas without it being already an achievement", and Pissarro admitted that while he was an influence on Cezanne, Cezanne was also an influence on him. The Austrian modernist poet Rainer Maria Rilke said of one Cezanne work that it "does not have a single unmoving part".

Being incredibly cultured myself (ha!) I am, of course, a fan. In 2005 I even visited Aix-en-Provence and had a look at Mont Sainte-Victoire, along with his apples one of his most famous subjects. To be honest I also got drunk and saw a man dressed up as a Stabilo Boss marker but they're stories for another time.

Portrait of the Artist with a Pink Background (c.1875)

The Tate show is both an education and a joy. It tells of how Cezanne (1839-1906) approached painting as both a process and an investigation. How he came to regard uncertainty as having a pivotal role in the creation of his work and how, famously, he tried to "astonish Paris with an apple".

It opens with a self-portrait of Cezanne in his mid-thirties (though looking older). Cezanne lived in a time, both in France and in the wider world, of political turmoil and at a time when life seemed to be speeding up. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why his art still speaks to us now.

Although considered to be a member of the Impressionist group (and participating in group shows with the likes of Manet, Van Gogh, Renoir, Degas, and Gauguin) he was, in many ways, a quieter painter than most of the others. He was, also, quite revolutionary in his approach. A quiet revolutionary who paved the way for the Cubism of Picasso and Braque.

The Basket Of Apples (c.1893)

In 1861, at the age of 22, Cezanne's future as an artist was not assured. His father wanted him to remain in his home town of Aix-en-Provence and become a lawyer. Luckily, for him and for us, Cezanne was persuaded to move to Paris by the writer Emile Zola, his school friend, and in the capital Cezanne began to move in creative circles within the city's avant-garde set.

He never fully settled in Paris and would regularly travel back to Provence but Paris influenced his life and career. He was able to visit museums and make studies of sculptures and paintings and in Paris he met Camille Pissarro. Nearly a decade older than Cezanne, Pissarro became something of a mentor as well as a friend. Under Pissarro's influence, Cezanne's painting style moved from the dark, moody Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup to the more colourful, light filled Still Life with Fruit Dish. They're shown on opposite walls at Tate Modern so we can see this for ourselves.

Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup (1865-70)

Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879-80).

Cezanne had found his style, he'd found his 'constructive stroke', but he would not rest easily. He would spend the rest of his career, the rest of his life, honing both his style and technique. He painted the grey skies and rooftops of Paris with an almost geometrical rigour yet still made them look evocative. Using 'considered parallel brush strokes' he painted the Francois Zola Dam near Aix (designed by Emile Zola's father) and the work was loaned to the Tate in London in 1922 where it received praise from the painter and critic Roger Fry.

You can see in these works a kind of subtle blockiness as Cezanne breaks both cityscape and countryside up into defined rectilinear spaces. He's trying to show us not what the Francois Zola Dam looks like if we stand in one place and look at it but what it looks like if we move around while looking at it. The mountain seen from multiple angles. It was exactly the sort of thing that Picasso would later develop into fully formed Cubism.

Rooftops In Paris (c.1882)

The Francois Zola Dam (1877-8)

The Murder (c.1870)

It may seem odd that his painting of Provencal countryside should seem more revolutionary, more controversial, than the one he made of a murder scene about seven years earlier. The French newspapers of the time had become pruriently obsessed with murder and violence and Cezanne, quite clearly, was sucked into this.

Which seems not to be typical of the man. He was, by all accounts, something of an outsider. He dressed formally, eschewed metropolitan fashions, and remained married to the same woman, Marie-Hortense Fiquet, until his death. He did, however, believe that a violent society demanded a violent style of painting. He even described his work as 'ballsy'. That's not aged well.

He felt the style of painting taught at the Academie des Beaux-Arts was stale, or bourgeois, while he saw his own work as raw or even 'virile'. The establishment, in return, considered his work to be too radical and when he submitted two paintings to the 1870 Salon exhibition they were rejected. Something that became a regular event for Cezanne. The caricaturist Charles-Henry Stock depicted him as a wild revolutionary with piercing eyes and an impenetrable expression.

The Battle of Love (1879-80)

Charles-Henry Stock - 'Le Salon pat Stock', Stock-Album No.2 (1870)

Nude Woman (1885-7)

The Eternal Feminine (c.1877)

He painted sex workers but he was too shy to ask anybody to sit for him so copied images from the side of champagne bottles and he painted love as a battlefield more than a century before Pat Benatar came to the same conclusion. The sexual politics of the time, quite clearly, were not as they are now and a popular phrase used back then to refer to idealised, or desirable, women was "the eternal feminine".

The curators of the exhibition claim Cezanne's take on the eternal feminine was quite possibly inspired by Eugene Delacroix, Cezanne's favourite 19c artist, and that is easy enough to believe. When they claim that the figure, the naked woman, represents Paris itself and that Cezanne is making a political and social comment on the state of the French nation I find it less plausible.

It looks like a load of pervs having a good lech to me. Though why some people have brought trombones along to the lechfest I'm not sure. I may be being a bit cynical here. Though Cezanne was never as politically outspoken as the likes of Pissarro (a committed anarchist) and Zola (who wrote in support of the Republican movement) he did take a deep interest in the political and social upheaval of the time.

Different groups in France fought for a different kind of Franc (a monarchy, a republic, or an empire?) and regional movements campaigned for more self-governance. In 1870 Prussia invaded and defeated France after a brutal siege of Paris and tensions and debates around slavery were intensified following the end of the American Civil War.

France, like other exploitative European powers, was reaching peak empire. Slavery had ended in France in 1848 but Scipio, possibly a nickname taken from Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1835 anti-slavery book Uncle Tom's Cabin, still bears the marks of it. Both on his back and, of course, in his soul.

Scipio (1866-8)

The Conversation (1870-1)

The Plate Of Apples (c.1877)

Madame Cezanne In A Red Armchair (c.1877)

Madame Cezanne In A Yellow Chair (1888-90)

Portrait Of The Artist's Son (1880)

It was a rare foray into political activism for Cezanne who was more at home with apples, portraits of his wife and son, Paul fils, and, best of all in my opinion, his wonderful landscape work. There's a room at Tate Modern dedicated to the works he made in the coastal village of l'Estaque near Marseille. Cezanne would holiday there in his youth and again with his wife and child as an older man.

He hid from his father (who didn't know he'd gotten married and may have stopped sending him funds) and military conscription in the Franco-Prussian war there from 1870 to 1871 and he found it an almost perfect place to paint. The isolation helped but so did the local geology, the Mediterranean sunlight on the rocks. When, during a later visit in 1876, Cezanne wrote to Pissarro he described the views as "like a playing card. Red roofs against blue seas". He'd needed to move to Paris to discover that his native region actually provided him with the conditions and inspiration he needed for his art to thrive. We never know our home town until we've been around the world.

Landscape:Road With Trees In Rocky Mountains (c.1870)

The Gulf Of Marseille Seen From L'Estaque (1878-9)

The Bay Of Marseille, Seen From L'Estaque (c.1885)

The Viaduct At L'Estaque (1879-82)

L'Estaque With Red Roofs (1883-5)

These paintings are absolutely gorgeous. You can almost feel the sun's heat as it beats down on the walls of L'Estaque's buildings, you can easily imagine how pleasant the shade of a tall tree would feel, and you look out to the sea with that pensive sense of longing. I enjoyed looking at these paintings but even more I wanted to be in them.

They're, along with the Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings, the very best works Cezanne did but at Tate Modern they're delving a bit deeper into his work so we get less celebrated lithographs (like The Large Bathers, below) and unfinished work (Still Life With Water Jug, also below). They're not as immediately impressive, little is, but they do help us understand a little more about how Cezanne worked.

The Large Bathers (c.1898)

Still Life With Water Jug (c.1892-3)

Curtain, Pitcher And A Fruit Bowl (1893-4)

Still Life With Apples (1893-4)

Grand Bouquet Of Flowers (c.1892-5)

Often he worked in his studio and on still life painting. Still life painting had traditionally been considered the least important genre of art but for Cezanne that was not the case. After - along with his mother and his sisters - inheriting his father's estate, Jas de Bouffan, in 1886, he set about a new, and singular, method of painting the same items over and over again. With often very minimal differences.

Apples (of course), pears, flowers, bottles, water jugs, and sugar bowls. Sometimes with a curtain as background. Often sections were left completely unpainted. These paintings may have been representations and depictions of real material objects but they were also, even more so, paintings about how we look at these things. How we choose to see them and how the light plays on them. An apple in the morning may not be the same as an apple in the evening.

The colours, often highly nuanced, that Cezanne used to create still life images were also applied to his portraits and to his landscape work. Below we can see a farm worker from Jas de Bouffan called pere Alexandre and below him the chestnut trees in Jas de Bouffan itself. Glimpsed through their denuded branches we can see the outline of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Man In A Blue Smock (c.1896-7)

Chestnut Trees At Jas De Bouffan (c.1885-6)

A view Cezanne came to know very well. For him, familiarity did not breed contempt. It bred knowledge and a form of comfort in which he was freed to focus on his sensory feelings towards the landscape. What he called 'sensations'.

Cezanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire more than eighty times between 1882 and 1906. From many different vantage points. No human figure, it seems, ever appears in these works. Instead we are invited to consider nature as a presence in its own right. It is unchanging and monumental and yet at the same time it looks different depending on where, and when, you look at it. Cezanne, almost miraculously, managed to resolve that dichotomy in his paintings.

Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-6)

Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen From The Bibemus Quarry (c.1895-9)

The Bather (c.1885)

Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) (c.1894-1905)

Five Bathers (1885-7)

Three Bathers (1879-82)

Cezanne was almost as obsessed with making paintings of bathers as he was with Mont Sainte-Victoire. It was a theme he returned to throughout his life and it's possible that the artist, often so unafraid to break free of convention, saw in his portraits of bathers a link to a long and distinguished classical tradition.

Nudes in idyllic, and imagined, landscapes. Cezanne painted male and female bathers and because he was too shy to ask people, except family members it seems, to sit for him much of his anatomical study came from long hours spent in museums. Which, of course, would have given the paintings an even more classical feel. If Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) seems familiar that's because it's normally on display at The National Gallery on the other side of the Thames to Tate Modern.

In 1897, Cezanne's mother died and Jas de Bouffan was sold. Two years later, Cezanne sold the contents of his Paris studio and is said to have destroyed many of his early works. He'd been diagnosed with diabetes and was starting to feel increasingly frail. His work took on a darker tone, skulls even appeared.

But he remained busy in his last years. As if railing against mortality, he designed a purpose built studio and he received younger artists as visitors who found him to be a modest man yet one of art's all time greatest innovators. A man who created a new visual language for the world to be understood. A man who, mostly without fuss, changed how we look at art. A quiet revolutionary.