In the late Nineteenth Century, as a result of study in Paris or examination of reproductions in this country, ambitious young American painters were exposed to the ideas of the European avant-garde †Cubism, Fauvism and Impressionism. In particular, European titans Claude Monet, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso inspired America’s best talents to take up the cause of Modernism.
The artist who most influenced US painters, reclusive French genius Paul Cezanne (1839‱906), served as a bridge between Impressionism and Twentieth Century American Modernism. Most inspiring was his late work, post-1880 masterpieces that Cezanne created after returning from Paris to his native Aix-en-Provence in southern France.
His use of experimental techniques, including vertical brushwork, flattened perspectives, carefully designed compositions, patches of color to define forms and his ability to penetrate beneath the surface to reveal the essence of things, made a lasting impression on up-and-coming American artists. As Cezanne observed, “What I wanted was to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums&[O]ne does not replace the past, one only adds a future link to it.”
A key to conveying Cezanne and Modernism across the Atlantic was the celebrated Paris salon of Leo and Gertrude Stein, where visiting Americans were exposed to European avant-garde works. Also important were Claribel and Etta Cone, wealthy, astute sisters from Baltimore, who became friends of the Steins and European Modernists, bought up avant-garde art, and carried the progressive vision across the Atlantic. In New York, gifted photographer and perceptive art impresario Alfred Stieglitz exhibited works by Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso in his 291 gallery, and championed their early American Modernist followers.
This fascinating chapter in US art history is effectively documented in “Cezanne and American Modernism.” Organized by Gail Stavitsky, chief curator of the Montclair (N.J.) Art Museum, where it opened, and Katherine Rothkopf a senior curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it traveled next, it is currently on view at the Phoenix Art Museum through September 26. “Cezanne and American Modernism” assembles 16 Cezannes with 80 works by 33 American acolytes who helped transform the nation’s art at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
Cezanne’s influence can be gauged by the extent to which US artists incorporated his stylistic ideas into works on his favorite subjects: landscapes, still lifes, bathers and portraits.
The most important of Cezanne’s followers, Marsden Hartley (1877‱963), worked in all four genres. A peripatetic bachelor from Maine, he painted strong, colorful landscapes of his native state, and traveled widely in Europe, Mexico and the American Southwest in search of artistic inspirations. He admired Rembrandt, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and especially Cezanne.
Hartley’s respect for Cezanne led him to rent a room for three years in the late 1920s on the estate at Chateau Noir outside Aix, where Cezanne did some of his most inspired work. Seeking to emulate the old master, Hartley depicted the estate’s buildings and surroundings, including Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain looming over Aix, which was the Frenchman’s favorite subject.
With his predilection for depicting mountains and taking full advantage of the bright light of Provence, Hartley employed a high-keyed palette to paint Mont Sainte-Victoire. The only American to successfully portray the majestic mountain, Hartley painted it a number of times from angles similar to Cezanne’s, but with more imaginative colors †blues, greens, oranges, purples and yellows. In doing so, he paid homage to Cezanne’s works, which he wrote “are not cold studies of inanimate things, they are pulsing realizations of living substances.”
Perhaps the first American to grasp Cezanne’s significance, Maurice Prendergast (1858‱924), famed for his color-filled, tapestrylike watercolors of crowds on beaches and sidewalks, learned about the avant-garde during artmaking visits to France and Italy. Prendergast modeled his chaste nudes by the sea on Cezanne’s bathers, and also created idiosyncratic but Cezannesque portraits and still lifes.
Russian-born Max Weber (1881‱961) applied the old master’s style and motifs to some of the earliest and most adventurous of American Modernist paintings. Following a sojourn in Paris, Weber exhibited at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, and served as an influential link between the European and American avant-garde.
Weber’s portraits, still lifes (notably “Still Life from Paris,” 1907, and “Strewn Apples,” 1923), landscapes (“Connecticut Landscape,” 1911) and bathers in landscapes (“The Bathers,” 1909) recreate Cezanne themes and careful compositional structures.
The spirited brushwork and use of color to define space and distance suggest the manner in which John Marin (1870‱953) was inspired by Cezanne. During five years in Paris, Marin created some of his finest early work, especially on visits to the Alps, such as a loosely brushed, multihued “Mountain in the Tyrol,” 1910. It reflects what National Gallery of Art curator Ruth Fine calls his “more explosive and experimental approach, one in which his watercolors were marked by a looser paint application, brighter colors and subjects far grander in scale.”
Marin’s close association with Stieglitz, who organized shows of his works for years, and with his circle kept the artist in touch with Modernist thinking. Whether painting in New Jersey, Maine or New Mexico, Marin applied Cezanne’s ideas to help capture the dynamism, energy, rhythms and movement of his subjects. In his New Mexico watercolors of adobe structures and panoramic landscapes, like “Taos Mountain, Pueblo and Mesa,” 1929, “Marin echoed his predecessor [Cezanne] in examining a visual source from multiple vantage points, and in his sensitive balance of painted hue and white paper,” says Fine.
The manner in which he adapted European avant-garde styles into a personal style †using skyscrapers and bridges to express his keen response to New York City, and mountains, sea and sky to capture the vibrant air and light of the Maine coast †made Marin one of the most creative and original American Modernists.
After starting out as an Impressionist, Arthur G. Dove (1880‱946) painted the first American abstractionist work around 1908 following an eye-opening stint in Paris, where he became a fan of Cezanne. Dove likely saw much of Cezanne’s art at the height of the Frenchman’s fame in his native land, says Modernist scholar William C. Agee. He cites Dove’s decorative canvas “Still Life against Flowered Wallpaper,” 1909, as reflecting Cezanne’s inspiration in “a new solidity& tactile materiality of color and thus form,&asic tenets of Cezanne’s art. The color is higher keyed than his earlier work, indicating that Dove&⁷as looking at Cezanne, at least in part through the eyes of [Henri] Matisse.”
Dove’s affinity for Cezanne’s solidity and Matisse’s bright Fauvist colors manifested itself in glorious evocations of sunrises and sunsets on water. For years he applied studiously selected colors in tightly knit parallel brushstrokes that recall Cezanne’s technique.
Dove’s great friend Alfred Henry Maurer (1868‱932), another underappreciated avant-garde master, was the son of Currier & Ives artist Louis Maurer, who disliked his son’s progressive art. Stimulated by visits to the Steins salon, “Alfy” abandoned his successful, Whistlerian work and took up the vibrant colorism of the Fauves and the formal manner of Cezanne in powerful, richly hued landscapes, still lifes and figure studies. He became one of the earliest Americans “to demonstrate a nuanced and intuitive understanding of Matisse and Fauvism&iltered through the lens of Cezanne,” observes Maurer expert Stacey C. Epstein.
Maurer used the strident colors of Matisse and the compressed space and compositional arrangements of Cezanne in such works as “Woman with Blue Background (Portrait of a Woman),” circa 1907; “Landscape (Autumn),” 1909; “Two Figures,” circa 1927′9, and, a highlight of the show, “Still Life with Candlestick, Brass Bowl and Yellow Drape,” circa 1928. Although he was not very successful during his lifetime, Maurer’s work of late has begun to gain overdue appreciation.
Two other artists who combined influences of Cezanne and Matisse, Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890‱973) and Morgan Russell (1886‱953), worked together to evolve Synchromism. It drew on the Fauvist idea of the primacy of color and color relationships and Cezanne’s use of color to create form. “Without Cezanne,” Macdonald-Wright declared, “there never would have been any development of Modern painting.” Both created vividly colored, Cezannesque still lifes, with Russell going so far as to replicate the French master’s “Five Apples” with his own “Three Apples.” Macdonald-Wright created a portrait of his brother that drew on Cezanne’s likenesses, while Russell created a faithful imitation of Cezanne’s “Self-Portrait” of 1879‱882
After Patrick Henry Bruce (1881‱936) studied with Matisse in Paris and absorbed Cezanne’s emphasis on structure and color harmonies, he turned out Cezanne-like landscapes and fruit and flower still lifes. Later he created the playful, decorative, colorful still lifes for which he is best known. Agee notes that in these oils, “Forms are few, exactingly placed&⁛and multicolored], recalling Cezanne’s more controlled and classical still lifes&[Bruce’s] harmony of balance and equilibrium, a balance between conception and observation [is] the key to much of Cezanne’s art.”
Three Philadelphia painters, Arthur B. Carles (1882‱952), Charles Sheeler (1883‱965) and Morton Schamberg (1881‱918), and Lancaster native Charles Demuth (1883‱935) all spent time in Europe absorbing Cezanne’s art. Their admiration for the French master was reflected in numerous stills lifes and landscapes; in Demuth’s case, in brilliant watercolors of architectural forms and still lifes of fruits and vegetables.
German-born Oscar Bluemner (1867‱938) studied Cezanne throughout his career, while developing a style that focused on the bare essentials of buildings and landscapes. In hard-edged, brilliantly colored works like “Jersey Silkmills (Paterson),” 1911, repainted 1917, he tried to implement the manner in which he said, “Cezanne dismisses what is not essential to the unity of the idea: the inherent is necessary, the incidental is not wanted.”
Man Ray (1890‱976) became associated with Modernism and Cezanne in New York City and Paris. He channeled Cezanne motifs into landscapes, still lifes and figure studies like “Departure of Summer,” 1914, a clear recreation of the master’s bathers.
Arshile Gorky (1894‱948) came to regard Cezanne as the greatest artist ever after viewing works in New York City museums and reading avidly. In his twenties, he turned out likenesses that are remarkably close approximations of Cezanne’s portraits of his wife, rural landscapes and still lifes with fruit, bowls and white cloths.
The exhibition reveals a surprising number of painters of the Southwest, some of whom, never having seen an original Cezanne, relied on studying reproductions and then incorporated his structural and color styles into their work. Such artists as Andrew Dasburg (1887‱979), B.J.O. Nordfeldt (1878‱955), Josef Bakos (1891‱977), Willard Nash (1898‱942) and William Penhallow Henderson (1877‱943) melded Cezanne’s influence with inspiration from the state’s landscape and culture to wonderful effect.
Americans’ appreciation for Cezanne’s art continues to grow and to influence US artists, who carry on the tradition set by remarkable early American Modernists. As Cezanne presciently told a young artist, “Perhaps I came too soon. I was a painter of your generation more than my own.”
The illustrated catalog is published by the Montclair and Baltimore museums.
The Phoenix Art Museum is at 1625 North Central Avenue. For information, www.phxart.org or 602-253-8662.
