Critics compared Paul Cézanne’s brushwork to a construction worker slopping wet cement with a trowel, and visitors to the 1874 Impressionist exhibition laughed at his canvases as a prank. This episode follows the anxious, isolated painter from Aix-en-Provence, where an authoritarian banker father pushed him into law school and a childhood friendship with Émile Zola fueled his dreams, to Paris in 1860, rejection by the academies, and the violent palette-knife paintings of his dark period.

We trace the calming mentorship of Camille Pissarro, the secret partner and son he hid from his father for years to protect his allowance, and the retreat to Provence where he broke the rules of linear perspective, painted objects from multiple angles at once, and built images from flat patches of color like a mason laying bricks. The conversation covers the friendship-ending Zola novel, his phobia of being touched, the obsessive Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings, Ambroise Vollard’s 1895 exhibition that stunned a younger generation, and his death in 1906 after painting through a freezing storm.

• Why he distorted fruit and tables to serve the internal harmony of the canvas
• How his multi-angle vision resembles a warped smartphone panorama
• Why he wanted financial security rather than the bohemian starving-artist life
• How cylinders, spheres, and cones became his philosophy of nature
• Why Cubism and even digital polygons trace back to his experiments