While the most surefire way to move large numbers of partygoing feet to the dance floor is yelling, "It's the (expletive deleted) remix!!“—Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine is a different sort of remix.

Long before it was en vogue for artists to confuse researchers by giving the same title to various works and repeating the same image over and over, Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, identical in title and nearly identical in composition to another painting from 1886-87, seems calculated to do just that: throw researchers a curve ball. This work is a "double-take," an illustration of the saying that you never step in the same river twice, or, as Cézanne put it in a letter to his son, "The same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study of the most powerful interest…I could occupy myself for months without changing place, by turning now more to the right, now more to the left." Cézanne was my one and only master," Pablo Picasso once said. "He was like the father of us all." Picasso picked up on Cezanne's practice of converting a landscape into a sea of simplified and satisfying geometric shapes. 

Cézanne gave one of his Mont Saint Victoire with Large Pines to his friend, the writer Joachim Gasquet, with whom he discussed his mystical approach to his practice. Cézanne sought to convey, through the work, his "cosmic religious feeling" that "everything is connected," that trees are conscious, and that "sensation is at the root of everything." In keeping with the mystical tradition of many cultures, Cézanne isolated himself in his apartment on Rue Boulegon in Aix-en-Provence near the mountain, trying to create a vacuum-sealed membrane around the peaceful waters of his brain. As you'd expect, he hired a woman, Madame Brémond, to help his sister with the cooking and cleaning during this time, and Brémond deserves credit (and extra pay) for tiptoeing around the sensitive genius at work. "I am under orders not to touch him, not even with my dress when I go past him," Brémond wrote Emile Bernard.

In the 1930's, this painting resided in the Home House private club, which now contains a sleek chrome cellphone-esque cocktail bar by the late, great architect Zaha Hadid. This work belongs to a series of portrayals of Mont Sainte-Victoire, composed by Cézanne between 1882 and 1906.