How Cézanne’s masterwork pushed painting towards experimentation and abstraction

At the end of his life, the influential French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne laboured for seven years over his painting ‘The Large Bathers’. More than just one of his most celebrated and ambitious works, the painting helped to lay the foundation for the vast range of experimentation and abstraction in art that would follow. In this close analysis of the painting, the US filmmaker and vlogger The Nerdwriter explores how ‘The Large Bathers’, first exhibited in 1906, helped to make Cézanne ‘the bridge between all that came before and all that was to come’.