Gardanne

In November 1929, a little over a week after the Wall Street crash, a new museum opened in rented rooms on the 12th floor of an office building on Fifth Avenue in New York. The Museum of Modern Art began with a show of Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh made up entirely of loans, and this view of Gardanne hung in it, lent by Franz Hirschland, a German-born chemist living in New York. Cézanne had painted it more than 40 years earlier in this hill town near Aix, where he worked from the summer of 1885. He never finished it. In the lower left the paint gives out and bare canvas shows through, and the sky is laid in with loose strokes of blue. In 2016 the Metropolitan Museum, which has owned it since 1957, included it in an exhibition devoted to unfinished works.