Cezanne: A Biography. - book reviews

Paul Cezanne was an outsider who for years sought recognition from the Establishment. Although the juries of the annual Salons in Paris repeatedly rejected his work, the artist from Aix kept making submissions. He even allowed himself to dream about having his paintings hung among the Old Masters in the Louvre. Of course, when the state inherited the five canvases which were in the Caillebotte bequest, it only accepted two. However other outsiders responded to Cezanne's art fervently. During his lifetime he became the archetypal painter's painter. Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Gauguin were among his biggest boosters. So, later, were Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. And even before the Great War there were American, German, and English admirers who purchased, exhibited, and wrote glowingly about his pictures and works on paper.

By midcentury, articles and books by Rainer Maria Rilke, Roger Fry, and Meyer Shapiro had set the standards for informed, impassioned responses to the artist's achievements. Moreover, the sense of urgency occasioned by an opportunity to view this modern master's work in depth was conveyed over eighty years ago by Vanessa Bell as she was about to cross the Channel in January 1914 to attend a one-person show of the artist's paintings at Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. In a January 14 letter to Duncan Grant, Bell wrote, "It won't be long I expect before one will have to go to Germany or Finland to see any more [Cezannes], so one had better take one's chances."(1)

As it has turned out, a good many great Cezannes ended up in collections in Germany - and in Great Britain and the United States. Many were featured in the comprehensive international retrospective of over one hundred paintings and sixty-eight watercolors and drawings organized last year to coincide with the one-hundredth anniversary of the Provencal artist's first solo show, held when he was fifty-six years old at Ambroise Vollard's gallery on the rue Laffitte in the French capital.

Blockbuster crowds turned out for the exhibition, which traveled from Paris to London to Philadelphia, lining up to get into the galleries in all three cities, just as they had in 1993 for another major exhibition, this one of ninety-seven paintings, mounted in Tubingen, Germany. The latest Cezanne exhibition provoked keen scholarly interest as well. At the American venue of the show no fewer than two dozen art historians presented brief talks during a three-day symposium held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The centennial celebration, the hefty catalogue accompanying it, and the tome by Gotz Adriani that served as the Tabingen catalogue (newly available in English) have made it possible to look at Cezanne afresh. The organizers of the international exhibition expanded the discourse by borrowing many usually inaccessible paintings, drawings, and watercolors from private collections and out-of-the-way places. And the authors of the lengthy catalogue entries - Francoise Cachin, Isabelle Cahn, Henri Loyrette, and Joseph J. Rishel in one publication and Adriani in the other - have reviewed the previous literature on individual works and responded with their own interpretations. In separate essays Cachin and Rishel also have transformed the Philadelphia catalogue into an indispensable English-language reference book by encapsulating the most important, as well as the earliest, accounts devoted to Cezanne. Besides summarizing the core arguments of each previous critic and scholar, they quote from these texts in enough detail to provide a whiff of individual writing styles.

In the introduction Cachin and Rishel cosigned, they modestly "make no claim to providing new keys" (p. 13) to appreciating Cezanne. Yet this disclaimer is too modest, for they have achieved something quite radical: They have restored the modern master to the nineteenth century. While a number of reviewers of the blockbuster cited Cezanne as the father of twentieth-century art, the retrospective and the publication dealt with a different person They allow you to see where this artist came from as well as where he was headed, while clarifying the conservative allegiances that underscored his radical artistic ambitions. If you get a glimpse of Gustave Courbet and Eugene Delacroix in the early years and Picasso, Braque, and Matisse in the later ones, the primary focus remains Cezanne and his stubborn artistic development.

The artist on view in Paris, London, and Philadelphia never made a nonrepresentational work of art - nor did he ever consider making one.(2) This exhibition emphasized the fact that narrative remained central to Cezanne's concerns: Although at the beginning of his career he held a more or less traditional attitude toward it, and by the end of his life it was in a different form, storytelling never lost its significance for him. An old woman he depicted as late as 1895-96 is, after all, holding rosary beads and not a necklace or a circle of dots. (Given Cezanne's daily attendance at mass in Aix during the last years of his life, this detail reverberates.) The painter from Aix expected color, line, and texture, among other elements, to enhance aspects of his figures, landscapes, and still lifes rather than to replace them.