Cezanne: Landscape into Art. - book reviews

Still, one quirk emerged from the centennial exhibition as well as from the show mounted in Tubingen.(5) Americans and other Europeans continue to see Cezanne differently from the French. In Paris the exhibition emphasized the artist as a French cultural hero; this was clearly Cezanne's apotheosis. The first painting on view was not even by the modern master. Instead, gallery-goers faced an homage painted in 1900 by Maurice Denis that featured Nabis artists gathered in Vollard's shop admiring a still life by CEzanne that was once owned by Gauguin. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art a lone picture appeared at the entry to the show: the stunning Self-portrait (Portrait of the Artist with a Rose Background) of circa 1875. Until fewer than five years ago this picture had never been reproduced in color. Had it been better known, perhaps different conclusions about the artist's depictions of himself would have been drawn. A magnificent oil, its presence called attention to the man who painted the pictures you are about to see. This more casual American attitude personalized the artist, but less worshipfully than the French installation.

The late John Rewald's long-awaited catalogue raisonne of Cezanne's paintings has finally appeared in stores and libraries. The massive, two volume set, published by Harry N. Abrams, has been completed by Jayne Warman, a New Yorker who was Rewald's assistant, and the Zurich-based scholar Walter Feilchenfeldt, who also contributed two wonderful essays to both retrospective exhibition catalogues. With so much other material newly brought together, this sterling document is a truly worthy anchor for what will now emerge from this latest phase of activity surrounding Cezanne's art. And how propitious: Rewald was born in Germany, specialized in nineteenth-century French art, and lived and worked in the United States. This new edition provides a perfect and fitting coda to the Year of Cezanne.

Notes

1. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 153.

2. Of course the term "abstraction" meant something entirely different at the close of the nineteenth century from what it means at the end of the twentieth.

3. What exactly do the photographs of Cezanne's motifs reveal? Not much. When you have actually visited a number of the sites he painted (as I did last autumn), you understand this. Representational issues are not as paramount as you are led to believe by so many critics and historians. It is much more a matter of space and such aspects related to seasonal change and weather as light, color, and temperature. When you are in the Quarry or at the Jas de Bouffan, the experience is more like being at a basketball game rather than watching it on television or like seeing a Shakespeare play performed rather than reading it. How do you transpose three dimensions into two dimensions? This was a part of Cezanne's anxiety.

4. For example, the chronology of the catalogue reads that the artist was out painting on October 15, 1906, when "he collapses and remains in the rain for several hours. The next day he goes to his studio . . . then returns home seriously ill" (p. 568). On October 23, 1906, he died. In this instance - and almost everywhere else - hardly any writer (including Rewald) ever investigates the artist's diabetes, a disease that was once treated as secretively as breast cancer is today. Surely this chronic ailment played a role in hastening Cezanne's death.