Both Matisse and Picasso thought of him as their Daddy, therefore Cezanne must really be something, if those two big cheeses cite the dude as an influence then the dude is a MAJOR influence, given that they more or less thought that everybody else was pretty hopeless.

Cezanne is a bit of an oddball, you can't shove him into any school, he's out there on his own. Indeed, alone he is enough, his pervading influence is simply mammoth, the title of the Father of Modern Art is far from exaggerated. Cezanne remained steadfast in his belief that art was not a copy of nature but rather a parallel of nature. He re-defined the whole way art would be produced, discussed and thought about.

His most majestic quality was his freedom, he was not restricted to any movement, any rigid system of rules, any preconceived notion of what art should be. It granted him the freedom to explore many different aspects of art, and by golly he did so, with vigour, far from being a jack of all trades, his mastery is evident in all he painted.

He reacted against the lack of structure in Impressionist paintings, he desired firmness, something solid, something durable. He searched and searched for structure, his findings laying the foundation stones for Cubism, abstraction and the whole modern art movement. He became obsessed with form, stressing that is was actually more important than the subject matter itself, in essence he was ripping it all up and starting over. The important thing to realize about Cezanne is that first and foremost he was an astonishing artist in his own right, sure he was a major precursor to what followed and he is perhaps the only link to some of the past but above all he is a master painter.