Les Grandes Baigneuses

Cézanne worked on this enormous canvas of bathers for about seven years, and it was still unfinished when he died in 1906. By then he had all but stopped painting from live models, uneasy with hiring nudes in his home town of Aix, so the figures come mostly from memory, old drawings and his imagination. That is part of why they look less like particular women than like blocks built into the scene. He bent their bodies to match the leaning trees, so the whole picture settles into a great triangle with the two arching trunks meeting near the top. Younger painters took careful note. A few years later Picasso and others would push exactly this idea, the body treated as architecture, much further.