PHILADELPHIA, PENN. -- Tormented, obstinate and gifted, Paul Cezanne virtually willed himself into becoming one of the great artists of all time. "Cezanne's art," scholar Meyer Schapiro once wrote, "is the result of a steadfast searching and a struggle with the self as well as the medium."

Although he worked primarily in the Nineteenth Century, Cezanne's influence on Modern art was greater than anyone else's. Picasso called him "the father of us all"; Klee, "the supreme master"; and Matisse, "a kind of benevolent god of painting." In spite of the adulation of fellow artists and thorough study by art historians over the last century, few major painters have remained such an enigma as this driven Frenchman.

The grand Cezanne retrospective, on view in the spacious galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art through September 1, is the first full-scale exhibition of his work since 1936. Already seen at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Tate Gallery in London, "Cezanne" is everything a major art show should be: comprehensive, fascinating, moving, informative and challenging.

With over 100 paintings and 70 works on paper, carefully selected and organized by Francoise Cachin of the Musees de France and Joseph J. Rishel of the Philadelphia Museum, the display effectively showcases the diversity of Cezanne's output, demonstrates the progression of his creative process, and underscores the enduringly mysterious quality of his work.

The artist behind all this excitement was born, raised and died in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. Cezanne (1839-1906) was the son of a hatmaker who soon bought the only bank in town. Young Cezanne became a painter against the wishes of his strong-willed father, who hoped his son would be a lawyer.

As a teen-ager, Cezanne became best friends with future literary giant Emile Zola. They roamed the countryside around Aix. Cezanne acquired an early love of literature, dabbled in artwork, and studied at the local College Bourbon, becoming perhaps the best educated major artist of his time. Convinced of his friend's artistic talent, Zola encouraged Cezanne to follow him to Paris to pursue a career as a painter, and championed his work for years.

The Cezanne-Zola friendship lasted into the 1880s, when the writer's increasing fame and success made the still-struggling artist uncomfortable. The final rupture came with the publication in 1886 of Zola's novel, L'Oeuvre, which included a failed painter resembling Cezanne. Although critical of his old friend's work in later years, Zola acknowledged that Cezanne's canvases were "unbelievably sincere and truthful."

After some law and art studies in Aix, Cezanne settled for a time in Paris, where he was twice rejected for admission to the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which found his work awkward. He enrolled instead in the Academie Suisse. Spending hours in the Louvre copying works by the likes of Delacroix and Ribera, he later acknowledged that the foundations of his art lay in his scrutiny of the past, what he called "the art of the museums."

Attending classes, copying the Old Masters, hobnobbing with Zola and aspiring artists, Cezanne sought to participate in the lively art world of Paris in the 1860s. But he was uncomfortable in the big city and returned frequently to Aix.

His paintings of this period were dark, brooding and often violent, executed with slashing brush strokes and thick impasto and featuring voluptuous shapes. While he created some strong, thoughtfully composed still lifes and portraits, other canvases conveying crude, powerful images, consistent with their titles, anticipated the Expressionists of the next century.

After his early canvases were rejected by the annual Salon - as were all his others throughout his career - Cezanne joined with similarly situated artists, such as Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley and van Gogh to stage alternative shows. The public and even some of his fellow artists, however, disliked Cezanne's early works. Their harsh criticisms deeply wounded the shy provincial, who felt increasingly unwelcome in fashionable Parisian art circles.

Cezanne's numerous self-portraits, which tend to be unsparing, emphasize his bald pate, scruffy beard, occasional hat squashed on his head, and baleful look. Hardly the image of a successful, debonair Parisian artist.

In the 1870s, his friend and supporter Camille Pissarro, nine years Cezanne's senior, took him under his wing, urging the younger artist to paint what he felt and saw. Under his mentor's tutelage, Cezanne's palette brightened and his paintings took on a new vibrancy. Painting in the open air with his coach, the steadily maturing artist learned uses of color and light, leading to canvases reflecting freshness, vitality and freedom. Moving in the direction of the Impressionists, while searching for his own style, Cezanne became a landscapist.

Generally regarded as the masterpiece of his Impressionist period, "The House of the Hanged Man, in Auvers-sur-Oise" of 1873, showing a solid picturesque village, was painted with a lightened touch. Pleased with his work, Cezanne exhibited it often.

He participated in the 1874 exhibition, which gave Impressionism its name and entered 16 canvases in the Impressionist show of 1877, but never really belonged to the movement. While Monet and company focused on capturing nuances of light and shadow at different times of day and in different seasons, Cezanne preferred bold renderings of small towns, sylvan glades and rough coast lines.

After 1882, Cezanne secluded himself at home in the south, increasingly withdrawn, eccentric and embittered by his lack of success. Out of these years of loneliness came his greatest artistic fulfillment. Trying to realize his unique "vision," Cezanne worked furiously to reduce natural objects to their basic form, to represent volume and modeling by means of color alone, without the use of shadows or perspective, and to achieve pictorial unity when combining flat and three-dimensional effects in the same composition. It was a struggle all the way, requiring tenacity and perseverance in the face of repeated rebuffs. To writer D.H. Lawrence, Cezanne was "the most interesting figure in Modern art, and the only really interesting figure ... not so much because of his achievement as because of his struggle."

When he ventured out of Aix, one of his favorite painting sites was l'Estaque, a harbor town near Marseille, squeezed between the mountains and the sea. Cezanne rented a house there frequently, 1876-1885.

Favoring a high view from the pine woods above the village, he turned out a score of colorful paintings looking across or down the bay of Marseille and beyond. The scene, Cezanne wrote Pissarro in 1876, is "like a playing card. Red roofs against the blue sea."

For all the angst in his life, Cezanne's work after the mid-1880s often conveyed a sense of serenity, assured design and ease of execution in stark contrast with his early tormented, romantic output. On view in handsome numbers are the most familiar of these paintings: depictions of bathing figures; solemn, seated portraits of his wife and others; heaped still lifes, and spacious views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Of particular note, also, are several depictions of stolid, rustic men playing cards, memorable examples of Cezanne's ability to endow the homeliest human subjects with grandeur and majesty.

Climaxing years of investigating the problem of depicting nude figures in landscape settings, Cezanne sought to create, in the manner of the Old Masters, large compositions of unclothed bodies without using allegorical or mythological themes. Perhaps the finest is "The Large Bathers" (1906), a prized possession of the host museum, which combines studies of nature in the central landscape with distorted, arbitrary figures in a composition that has long puzzled observers. Gathered on a riverbank under tilting trees are 14 nude women engaged in disparate activities, with a swimmer behind them in midstream and two mysterious people on the opposite shore. Among the curious aspects of this painting is a seated, headless figure to the far left.

Among Cezanne's most compelling likenesses are those of Hortense Fiquet (1850-1922), a woman of modest origins who was the artist's companion and mother of his son, years before he married her in 1886. Cezanne's most frequent model - she posed for over a score of painted portraits; she appears most often seated in a chair, hands in lap, looking serenely, or with an air of boredom, at the viewer.

Cezanne once said he wanted "to astonish Paris with an apple," and, in a series of still lifes of indescribable beauty, he eventually did just that. A generous selection of these masterpieces - colorful, tightly-composed canvases with intriguing spatial relations and richly chronicled everyday objects - confirms the artist's preeminence in the field. A particularly lovely canvas in the show, "Still Life With Apples" of 1893-94, was recently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum from a private collector for a reported $25 to $30 million or more. In May, a lesser Cezanne landscape, "Road [The Town Wall]" (1875-76), was sold by Sotheby's to an unidentified bidder for $2.3 million.

Other than his signature still lifes, perhaps Cezanne's most solid, enduring symbol is Mont Sainte-Victoire, the giant limestone mountain dominating the Aix countryside. He depicted it frequently with intense feeling and rich color. From whatever angle he painted, Cezanne's unforgettable canvases focus on the grand, simple form of the great mountain rising to the sky from the unmoving horizontal of earth. Seven of the some 20 views of the great summit, as painted from his sister's farm, "Bellevue," are in the exhibition.

Except for extended visits to Paris and sojourns at a few painting sites, Cezanne remained in backwater Aix for the last decades of his life. Obsessed with his artistic struggles, he grew increasingly resentful of intrusions on his privacy and embittered by the lack of recognition for his achievements.

General appreciation did not come until the retrospective exhibitions of 1895 and 1898 at Ambroise Voillard's gallery in Paris. A memorial exhibition in 1907, the Armory Show of 1913, and numerous exhibitions since then have solidified his high standing in the art world.

Impelled by a consuming sense of his own inadequacy, of his failure to achieve his artistic goals, Cezanne labored zealously to the end. In the fall of 1906, he collapsed while working outdoors in a cold rain, and died a week later.

As an artist, Cezanne spent most of his career searching for an elusive goal: a perfect balance between nature and art. A deeply troubled man who struggled to free himself of his personal demons through painting, success for Cezanne came too little and too late. If he never found inner peace, this glorious exhibition demonstrates how his innovative style and his use of perspective, composition and color forever changed the way painters approach a canvas. Cezanne made it possible for artists from Picasso and Matisse to Pollock and Warhol to follow their own muses. Congratulations to all responsible for this once-in-a-lifetime homage to a genuine titan of world art.

Lavishly illustrated, the 600-page Cezanne catalogue includes a comprehensive review of critical responses to the artist's work during and after his lifetime, scholarly entries on all works exhibited, quotations by the painter and his contemporaries, an extensive chronology, and an annotated glossary of artists and collectors who acquired Cezanne's work. A must of Cezanne admirers, this extraordinary volume sells for $75 (softcover).

Elsewhere in the Philadelphia Museum, visitors can view other Cezanne paintings and works on paper, including over 80 drawings from two sketchbooks, which provide insights into the artist's working process and skilled draftsmanship.

Fans are also encouraged to visit the Barnes Foundation, a half-hour away, to see the world's largest and perhaps most significant Cezanne collection - 61 oil paintings and eight works on paper acquired by the eccentric perceptive Dr Albert Barnes. The Barnes Foundation at 300 North Latch's Lane, Merion, Penn., 19066, telephone 610/667-0290, is open Thursdays through Sundays. It is best to call ahead.

Also highly recommended is a visit to the nearby Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to view a complementary exhibition, "To Be Modern: American Encounters With Cezanne and Company." This spectacular display recreates, in abbreviated form, the ground-breaking show held at the academy in 1921, the first comprehensive museum exhibition of American Modernist works. If time in Philadelphia permits, do not overlook this colorful, stimulating exhibition, which will be on view through September 29. The accompanying 80-page, illustrated catalogue, with essays by curator Sylvia Yount and art historian Elizabeth Johns, is a beauty. Its price is $24.95 (softcover).

All tickets available to "Cezanne" through the Philadelphia Museum of Art's phone center have been sold. However, 15 Philadelphia hotels still have "Cezanne" packages for sale that include admission to the show. Telephone 1-800/752-8206 for details.