Cezanne show starts summer spectacularly

Insight on the News, June 24, 1996 by Stephen Goode, Joanna Shaw-Eagle

Although 'blockbuster' art shows have become the norm, the Cezanne exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art lives up to its billing: 100 stunning paintings by a truly gifted and original artist.

Late in life, Paul Cezanne claimed that he had always worked without concern for art critics. Many artists have made this boast, but with Cezanne it was a thoroughly honest one.

Born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, Cezanne turned to painting after a stint in law school to please his father. Critics denounced his work as awkward and bizzare. He would be one month shy of his 57th birthday before he had his first one-man exhibition in 1895, a very late age for an artist to gain recognition.

A century later all that has changed. One hundred paintings by the celebrated artist, along with 80 of his drawings and watercolors, are on display this summer in a superb exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The show, which closes Sept. 1, already has been viewed by millions at the Tate Gallery in London and at the Louvre in Paris. Philadelphia is its only American venue.

Although Cezanne's father was disappointed his son did not go into law, he helped him keep body and soul together when his work failed to sell. (Cezanne remained true to his desire never to paint works merely to please others, neither buyers nor critics.) But it was the artist's own strong certainty that kept him going. "It is the brush ... that heaven has placed in my hands," he declared. About art critics, he wrote, "Chatter about art is almost useless."

Almost useless, but not quite: Cezanne himself made use of art talk to describe -- accurately -- what he sought to do in painting. The "methods" artists employ, he wrote, are "but the simple means by which we manage to make the public feel what we ourselves feel and so accept us."

In broadest terms, the feelings Cezanne wished to convey were those about nature, which meant landscapes, people, the world as he saw it. "The painter should devote himself entirely to the study of nature and endeavor to produce pictures that are an education," he wrote.

Cezanne eventually gained widespread esteem in the 1890s, when critic Thadee Natanson declared that the painter had created an "absolute overthrow in the art of painting." It was something fellow painters already had noticed. Jean Renoir voiced their respect for Cezanne when he was heard to murmur, viewing a Cezanne painting long before the artist became famous: "How does he do it? He cannot put two touches of color to a canvas without its being already an achievement!" Cezanne also exerted enormous influence upon painters of the next generation. Pablo Picasso called him "the father of us all," while for Henri Matisse, "Cezanne did not make mistakes.

But for the vast majority of us who are not painters, Cezanne matters, too. What is exciting about the Philadelphia exhibition is that viewers can see Cezanne's steady progress from his early works -- on which he frequently used a palette knife to apply paint rather than a brush -- to the stunning masterpieces of the 1880s and afterward, including Portrait of Madame Cezanne With Loosened Hair (189092), one of several portraits Cezanne did of his wife. Cezanne also is renowned for his still lifes and did numerous highly prized paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire in his native Provence.

After viewing a retrospective of his works following Cezanne's death in 1906, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that the paintings in the exhibition close "over you like a colossal reality." Philadelphia viewers will share the experience. Once they've seen the show, they may share Rilke's opinion of Cezanne's paintings. "It is as if each spot had a knowledge of every other," he wrote.

RELATED ARTICLE: Skething Out the Modern Age

The 130 paintings by 48 artists in the National Gallery of Art's new exhibition, "In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting," explore one theme: Rome and Naples landscapes of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

It was fashionable for neoclassic painters from all over Europe to visit Italy and paint its ruins as part of the "grand tour." But the two generations of artists who worked in Italy between 1780 and 1840 had a new purpose. They began to paint scenery out of doors and "open-air," or plain-air, painting was born.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the focus of the Washington exhibit, brought the open-air movement to maturity with his emphasis on structured forms that anticipated the way Paul Cezanne arranged space. Other painters would lead to the French Im-pressionist movement, with its breaking up of form with light and color, and to the beginning of the modern age. The new invention of photography also influenced these Italian landscapists.

Insight spoke with the curator of the Corot exhibit, Philip Conisbee, a specialist in French art of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. Conisbee is a transplanted Briton who coordinated the National Gallery's show of Louis-Leopold Boilly last winter.