“With an apple, I will astonish Paris” Cezanne once claimed. Leaving his native Aix-en-Provence for Paris in his 20s, this is precisely what he did, a story explored in a new exhibition at Tate Modern.

Cezanne’s still lifes, landscapes and paintings of bathers were to give licence to generations of artists to break the rule book. The history of painting was never to be the same again.

Focusing on the many tensions and contradictions in Cezanne’s work, this exhibition seeks to understand the artist in his own context, as an ambitious young painter proudly from the Mediterranean South, yet eager to make it in metropolitan Paris.