In 2025, in Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne in the spotlight

Aix-en-Provence, the painter’s town, will offer a journey from his former drawing school, located at the Granet museum, to his Lauves workshop, where he painted the last four years of his life, passing through the bastide of Jas de Bouffan.

With more than a hundred works on display, his family bastide and his workshop restored, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), the “master of Aix”, returns to his city next year, which intends to offer an event exhibition, but also a unique journey in the footsteps of the painter at home.

“The common thread of Cézanne 2025 will be Cézanne at home”explained the mayor of Aix-en-Provence, Sophie Joissains, Monday November 25 during a press conference. And it’s quite a journey that the city will offer to the 350,000 visitors expected from June 28 to October 12, 2025, from its former drawing school, located on the ground floor of the Aix museum – today the Granet museum. where more than a hundred works will be exhibited -, to the bastide of Jas de Bouffan or his workshop in Lauves, where he painted the last four years of his life.

Throughout their stroll, visitors will be able to admire the motifs painted by the painter: his landscapes from the Bibémus quarries with a view of the emblematic Sainte-Victoire mountain, but also the objects preserved in his workshop, restored to their initial form .

Purchased by the city in 2018, the bastide of Jas de Bouffan, owned by the Cézanne family from 1859 to 1899, is also the subject of a major restoration project for an amount of 4.7 million euros. Le Jas de Bouffan, central theme of the exhibition at the Granet museum, “it’s Cézanne’s home base, the only place he always returns to”, according to the museum’s director, Bruno Ely.

And this large 18th century country house has not yet finished revealing its secrets. In the summer of 2023, surveys uncovered fragments of a marine fresco on one of the walls of the “Large living room” on which the young Cézanne painted and repainted directly on the plaster. This fresco was covered by a major work, “The Game of Hide and Seek”, which will be loaned to the Granet museum by a Japanese collector.

The “Large living room” will also be largely reconstituted inside the Granet museum thanks to loans of works which, after the painter’s death, were removed and transposed onto canvas.

“It’s a real international cooperation that took place around Cézanne,” welcomed the mayor of Aix, with around a hundred confirmed loans, including around forty from the United States, others from Great Britain, Japan, Canada, the Czech Republic, Switzerland…

Two other exhibitions of archives and photographs around the one Picasso called “our father to all” will also be organized at the Vieil Aix museum and the Vendôme pavilion, and a “small Cézanne gallery” will be dedicated to children.