In my weekly art column I am usually prone to finding the best contemporary art exhibits in Philadelphia. In contemporary art the idea that each interpreter is building a completely different world than the next makes a piece even more intricate and meaningful than that of art with history.

However, as an artist myself, I have always been even more intrigued with the mind of an artist. How does one live or work in order to obtain the thought process needed to create an original piece that evolves to such revolutionary proportions like Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” or even Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind?”

The key to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Cezanne and Beyond” exhibit is that audiences of all kinds are pushed to take on the divine minds of Picasso, Matisse and the master himself, Paul Cezanne, by taking a piece by the French painter and then showing pieces from other artists that have derived from the Cenzanne’s original work.

In 1907, French painter Cezanne’s posthumous exhibition in Paris changed the lives and minds of artists like Picasso and Matisse in that the artists mind had gone beyond that of renaissance and other consistent art boundaries.

In pieces like “Still life with apples,” Cezanne almost mocks the traditional approach toward perspective. The audience can see inside a green vase as though the perspective is from above the objects, but then a blue jug next to it is seen as though the perspective is completely from the side of the object. At the same time, the apples on the same table look as though they are about to fall off while a ceramic sugar bowl seems to be floating on the tablecloth.

To take on more than one perspective in a single piece was just one way that Cezanne intrigued the minds of today’s biggest artists. However, what made Cezanne such a master of his craft was not just perspective. Rather his collection of skills and styles give him the reference master of the art.

One idea that is throughout most of Cezanne’s pieces, the artist will paint a dark outline around a figure or object to add shape or depth. But even while Cezanne’s objects are outlined, there is still this sense of blending of colors and shapes that leave it up to the audience to decide where one object begins and ends.

In “The Lake at Annecy,” the audience has to stare at the work and decide where one color ends and another begins, where the water ends and the shore takes its place, whether there are trees on the mountain or if the atmosphere is just a mossy color.

It is Cezanne’s work that birthed the abstract style of Picasso while influencing a great deal of today’s contemporary art. Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to it; perhaps that is why so many of the exhibition’s artists struggled to get Cezanne out of their minds. He is a collection of minds some how able to lose itself within one.

He is the master, he is Cezanne.