The Paintings of Paul Cezanne, a Catalogue Raisonne. - book reviews

Magazine Antiques, July, 1997 by Alfred Mayor

Cezanne's paintings

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) only sometimes signed his paintings and even more infrequently dated them. He kept no inventory, left no notes about his work, and cared nothing about the commercial aspects of his art. Dating, authenticating, and generally tidying up Cezanne's oeuvre has preoccupied scholars since before his death.

The first was Ambroise Vollard, the Paris art dealer, who began to prepare a catalogue raisonne about 1904. This may have evolved into the first biography of the artist, published by Vollard in 1914. The first published catalogue raisonne was compiled by Lionello Venturi, a professor of art history at the University of Turin, Italy, and edited by the Paris art dealer Patti Rosenberg, who initiated the book. It was published in 1936 just as the author of the present catalogue raisonne, John Rewald, had had his thesis about Cezanne and Emile Zola accepted by the Sorbonne.

Rewald died in 1994 before finishing his monumental work but not before entrusting its completion to Jayne Warman, who had been his research assistant since 1979, and Walter Feilchenfeldt, a Swiss art dealer and scholar. However, as Feilchenfeldt explains: "For two reasons Jayne Warman and I decided not to try to complete the missing texts, except when Rewald's notes, of which a variety was available, presented new information that was important to include. First, because we wanted this to be John Rewald's book, and we could not match his knowledge and experience. Second, we did not want to prolong the date of this book's appearance even further. We felt the obligation to make the material accessible as soon as possible to those who had been waiting for it so long."

The commentaries are contained in one volume, along with sixty color plates, a concordance of the numbers Rewald and Venturi assigned to the paintings, a list of Cezanne exhibitions, an extensive bibliography, and a general index as well as an index of owners. The second volume contains black-and-white illustrations of the 954 paintings - 110 more than Venturi accepted as authentic.