French painter Paul Cezanne was, as Pablo Picasso famously said, "the father of us all," meaning that Cezanne is one of the foremost names in the development of modern art. Despite Picasso's pronouncement, Cezanne's works are not likely to top the charts with the public when they think of French masters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Far more likely candidates for such adulation are the tortured paintings of Vincent van Gogh, the lilies of Monet, Renoir's self-satisfied women, or the Tahitian exotica of Paul Gauguin. Cezanne was an artist's artist who was much more interested in form than content. His still-life paintings and landscapes depicting Provence, where he spent most of his life, are exercises in his belief that "geometry controls the universe." Cezanne enjoined painters to "treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone," and many have seen in this statement...