“Cézanne is alone, desperately alone”, wrote François Jourdain half a century ago, and in a few words he managed to catch the whole spirit of a patient and painful search, almost pathetic in its extreme vulnerability. Cézanne ignores the unconstraint, the optimism, the happy sensuality of painters such as Monet or Renoir and focuses completely on his own view of the world, on his wish of building which, despite arising from the contact with nature, transcends it to achieve its essential and permanent element.   
The whole modern art, the art of our century, began with Cézanne. And it is actually easy to understand why the Italian figurative culture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in front of such phenomena as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, in the presence of real giants of thought and image like Paul Cézanne, always suffered from an inferiority complex.   
Times change, however, and in the past few years the late nineteenth century structure of exchanges, influences and values has undergone a process of critical revision aiming at redeeming the Italian situation between the two centuries from being marginal and provincial. And this is proven here in Livorno by the exhibition being set up in the wonderful halls of Villa Mimbelli that houses the Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori.   
The exhibition aims at analysing the renewal triggered off in the Italian painting of the twentieth century by the knowledge and the observation of Cézanne's masterpieces present in Tuscany at the beginning of this century. The main aim is to build a slice of history marked by a fertile and far from provincial opening to the most vital artistic excitement of the period.   
The key point and the junction of this precocious and timely reconsideration of the Italian art are two figurative events equally fundamental and noteworthy, carefully underlighted by the exhibition's curators.   
First of all the presence of Egisto Fabbri and Charles Loeser's prestigious collections in Tuscany that include a large number of Cézanne's works among which such masterpieces as New York's Bathers and Oslo's Portrait of a sitting man. And then the last production of the outstanding Macchiaioli master Giovanni Fattori whose space and chromatic choices at the end of his career were so bare, austere and unobtrusive that they could almost be the works of the Aix-en-Provence's master.   
Drawing the line of this solid stylistic similarity between the two masters pushed the exhibition's curators to re-examine a series of works and painters that were influenced in various ways by the Italo-French production. Artists such as Amedeo Modigliani, Ardengo Soffici, Ottone Rosai, Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi were in fact spurred to undertake a decisive renewal in the sense of an essential and synthetic formal representation, by then already modern, by Fattori and Cézanne's joined teaching.