In Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d"Avignon, and Leger's The City, there are clearly visible similarities in the pictorial structures of the paintings. In viewing Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cezanne depicts the landscape scene with angular planes and distorts the natural forms of the environment. The subject matter he depicts is still clearly understandable. It is just not represented naturally. Cezanne also paints the objects with the appearance of being molded or fused together, creating unity in the work and a shallow sense of space. These characteristics can be seen a little more drastically in Les Demoiselles d"Avignon, where Picasso uses sharp, geometric lines and angular, overlapping planes, and dehumanizes the figures by giving them distorted bodies and mask-like faces. Picasso also creates a flat appearance by "fusing the figures together without much indication of deep space in the scene or of weight in the forms" (Picasso's Art p.54). Some of the features present in Picasso's work are also shown in Leger's The City. Here Leger depicts a "strong geometric composition of flat tracts of brilliant color and greatly emphasized verticals indicating houses, steel structures, a port, posters, traffic lights, and huge stencil letters" (Leger colorplate 16). In looking at all three paintings, it is evident that sharp lines, geometric forms, angular planes, and flat spaces are the common formal elements shared between these works. .
According to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., "For four or five years, from about the end of 1906 on, the profound and difficult art of Cezanne exerted an important influence on Picasso" (Picasso's Art p.53). Picasso looked at and was inspired by Cezanne's paintings, which "look forward to Cubism both in free deformation of natural forms and flickering angular planes which tend to spread throughout the whole canvas thereby creating an all-over unity of design" (Picasso's Art p.
