'What he did was to paint terribly well the weight of space on that circular form'

Pablo Picasso on looking at Paul Cézanne's paintings of apples.

"The weight of space on that circular form."

How prophetically this phrase cuts to the heart of modern physics, which posits that the Higgs boson - a theoretical particle never yet detected - by its interaction with matter gives objects mass and, in effect, creates the world as we know it.

But this isn't about bosons and such, it's about Cézanne's apples.

A new show, "Cézanne and the Dawn of the Modern," at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany through January 16, then moving to New York's Guggenheim Museum on February 10, 2005, is drawing rave reviews.

Jackie Wullshlager of The Financial Times termed it "magnificent" and "magisterial."

She wrote that it is "a spectacular and original canvas-by-canvas exploration of Cézanne's impact on his immediate followers."

Matisse called Cézanne "le père de nous tous" [the father of us all].

Picasso said that that Cézanne's pictures were full of anxiety, reflecting the master constantly battling against himself.

The show features more than a dozen pictures borrowed from Russian museums, rarely seen in the West and far more colorful than the works of Cézanne most frequently seen in European and American museums.