In 2024, the year in which the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Impressionist movement will be celebrated, one of the most evocative and important art initiatives of the spring will open at Palazzo Reale in Milan, from 19 March to 30 June, which will bring together personalities and the works of two painters, Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who contributed decisively to the fortunes of Impressionism and who influenced future generations of artists.

The exhibition, an exhibition by Palazzo Reale, Comune Milano – Cultura, Skira Arte, Museum Studio, in collaboration with Musée de l'Orangerie and Musée d'Orsay, with the patronage of Ambassade de France en Italie, main partner Enel, premium partner Fineco, is curated by Cécile Girardeau, curator at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, and Stefano Zuffi, art historian, with the collaboration of Alice Marsal, head of archives and documentation at the Musée de l'Orangerie, and will present fifty-two masterpieces, capable of offering an exhaustive cross-section of the work of the two artists, from the first canvases of the 1870s to the more mature works of the early twentieth century, brought together by the art dealer Paul Guillaume (1891-1934) and, after the his death, by his wife Domenica (1898-1977), all preserved in the prestigious headquarters of the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, flanked by a selection of works by the two masters from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and two canvases by Pablo Picasso.

Starting from their most appreciated and well-known paintings, the exhibition will give an account of the different trajectories that the two authors followed throughout their respective careers: a more rigorous and geometric one in Cézanne, a more rounded and harmonious one in Renoir. The exhibition itinerary will highlight the meeting points of these two itineraries, developed in parallel with the birth of a sincere friendship, which began already in 1860, which resulted in mutual admiration, leading the two masters to ask themselves common questions and to cultivate a shared interest for some genres, such as still life, landscape, portrait and nude.

This dialogue between the work of Cézanne and that of Renoir constitutes the natural extension of the exchange undertaken by the two in Charles Gleyre's atelier at the beginning of their respective careers. Their elective affinities manifested themselves already in the Seventies, at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes and on the occasion of the first impressionist exhibitions in which they participated together. Despite Cézanne's progressive distancing from the Parisian scene, the two friends continued to hang out and, in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, Renoir was a guest of the master from Aix-en-Provence several times.

The exhibition, which will follow a thematic criterion, will allow us to appreciate their stylistic evolution, which will lead them to very different aesthetic solutions, a dialogue in which the warm expressiveness of Renoir contrasts with the analytical precision of Cézanne.