This video offers a virtual tour of Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings, the first major exhibition to examine an essential but understudied aspect of the revolutionary French painter’s work: his profound interest in rock and geological formations. Throughout his career, Cézanne made canvases that take rock formations as their principal subjects. Although they are among the artist’s most extraordinary landscapes, such paintings of geological forms have never before been the focus of significant scholarship. Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings features approximately 15 of the most important of these paintings, as well as selected watercolors and related documentary material. Together, they reveal the artist’s fascination with geology, which helped shape the radical innovations of his artistic practice.

This video is narrated by curator John Elderfield, who served from 2015 to 2019 as the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, distinguished curator and lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum, and is chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.