Paul Cezanne once referred to the area around his birthplace in the south of France as “this country, which has not yet found an interpreter worthy of the riches it offers.” Focusing his career in his native Aix-en-Provence, he became that interpreter. Painting with emotion and passion, Cezanne (1839-1906) created views of its venerable villages, verdant landscape and towering Montagne Sainte-Victoire that have become icons of world art. He also recorded the look and setting of his family home and his studios, immortalized his wife and other sitters in portraits and painted some of the finest still lifes of all time. Cezanne’s hard-won achievements grew out of a lifetime of trauma and struggle. Tormented, obstinate and gifted, he virtually willed himself into becoming a great artist. Cezanne’s work had an enormous impact on painters who followed. In particular, he exerted great influence on avant-garde artists of the Twentieth Century. Picasso called him “the father of us all”; Klee, “the supreme master”; Matisse, “a kind of benevolent god of painting.” Over the years, he has been called the patron saint of movements from Fauvism and Cubism to abstraction. In spite of the adulation of fellow artists and thorough study by art historians, few major painters have remained such an enigma as this driven Frenchman. Marking the centennial of his death, “Cezanne in Provence,”on view at the National Gallery of Art through May 7, explores theartist’s deep attachment to his region and the masterworks hecreated there. More than 120 paintings and works on paper, ablyselected and organized by Philip Consisbee, senior curator ofEuropean paintings at the National Gallery, and Denis Coutagne,director of the Musee Granet, are displayed largely by sites andthemes. Original site photographs taken in the 1930s by the late,preeminent Cezanne scholar John Rewald help put the artwork incontext. The exhibition is comprehensive, informative, moving,intriguing and challenging. The son of a strong-willed hatmaker who bought the only bank in town, Cezanne was born, raised and died in historic Aix-en-Provence. Growing up, he roamed the countryside with his chum, future literary giant Emile Zola, who encouraged him to became a painter against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to be a lawyer. Painted many years later, “Large Pine and Red Earth,” 1895, symbolizes Cezanne’s nostalgia for the natural beauty to which he was exposed as a carefree youth. In deference to his father’s wishes, Cezanne briefly studied law in Aix. Breaking away for several visits to Paris in the 1860s, the shy, awkward provincial hobnobbed with Zola and aspiring artists, such as Edouard Manet, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, seeking to participate in the lively art world of the city. But he was twice rejected for admission to the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Copying works in the Louvre by Poussin and Rubens laid the foundation for an art based on scrutiny of the past. Cezanne was deeply wounded when his early Gustave Courbet-like paintings – filled with restless energy and angst – were rejected by the annual Salon – as were all others throughout his career, and were harshly judged by critics and the public. Cezanne’s numerous unsparing self-portraits emphasize his bald pate, scruffy beard and baleful look. It is hardly the image of a successful, debonair Parisian artist. A turning point came in the 1870s, when his friend, theImpressionist artist Pissarro, encouraged him to paint outdoorsusing a brighter palette and incorporating the effects of light.Cezanne’s newly vibrant canvases moved in the direction of theImpressionists, but he continued to search for his own style. In the early 1880s, Cezanne took refuge at Jas de Bouffan, the family’s late Seventeenth Century provincial-style farmhouse estate in Aix, where he labored at his art while becoming increasingly withdrawn, eccentric and embittered by his lack of success. He worked diligently to reduce natural objects to their basic forms, to represent volume and modeling by the manipulation of color, without the use of shadows or perspective, and to achieve pictorial unity when combining flat and three-dimensional effects in the same composition. It was a tough struggle, requiring tenacity and perseverance in the face of repeated rebuffs. His paintings of Jas de Bouffan record its red roof and the chestnut trees that continue to grace the estate. This year, the house and grounds are open to the public. A favorite painting site was the nearby harbor town of L’Estaque, squeezed between mountains and sea. “The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L’Estaque,” circa 1885, offers a geometrical arrangement of sober, Nineteenth Century red-roofed houses set against an expanse of blue water, with Marseille and the mountains in the distance. It combines a feel for the peace and grandeur of the Mediterranean and the sturdy structures that abut it. Cezanne painted a number of bathers – male and female, nudeor seminude. “Bather with Outstretched Arms,” 1877-78, perhapsinspired by the artist’s teenage son, shows a lad maintaining hisbalance on a rocky shore. The artist’s three versions of “The LargeBathers,” highlighted by one painted in 1894-1905, from theNational Gallery in London, feature groups of distorted, arbitrarynude females in an idiosyncratic composition. “Collectively [they]represent his ultimate contribution to the European grand manner infigure painting,” says Consisbee. Cezanne’s depictions of stolid, rustic men playing cards and his colorful, tightly composed still lifes are memorable examples of Cezanne’s ability to endow the homeliest subjects with palpable dignity. “The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Evenement,” 1866, is a vigorously executed likeness of his powerful, overbearing parent perusing a leftist newspaper he would not have normally read – but which had published a favorable review by Zola of his boyhood friend’s work. While his father had his doubts about his son’s prospects as a painter, he provided an allowance that enabled Cezanne to pursue his dream. In Cezanne’s compelling portraits of his long-suffering wife, she looks placidly, or with an air of boredom, at the viewer. “Madam Cezanne in the Conservatory,” 1891-92, is endowed, in curator Coutagne’s words, “with powerful integrity, capturing the spirit of this rather majestic woman, with her serene oval face.” Cezanne literally reached his peak in a series of paintingsof Montagne Saint-Victoire, the giant limestone mountain dominatingthe Aixois countryside, works “dense in matter, rich inchiaroscuro, vibrant in color, passionate in feeling and whichendure in Cezanne’s signature motif,” in curator Consisbee’sdescription. Whether depicted from the Bibemus quarry or fromMontbriand or the Chateau Noir or his carefully sited studio, LesLauves, the awesome, simple form of the whitened conical summitmajestically rises to the sky above a wide, intensely coloredvalley dotted with stuccoed houses and farm buildings withred-tiled roofs. Following the death of his parents and the sale of the family estate in 1901-02, Cezanne designed and had built a large studio on a hill in Les Lauves, just north of Aix. The site commanded views of Montagne Saint-Victoire and boasted a garden that the painter depicted in a fascinating, primarily abstract canvas of color patches. Painted around 1906, “The Garden at Les Lauves” is in The Phillips Collection. The studio is highly evocative; visitors today can see painting gear and props he used in the famed still lifes and views of bathers that culminated his career. Isolated in Aix for the last decades of his life and obsessed with his artistic struggles, Cezanne grew increasingly resentful of intrusions on his privacy and embittered by lack of recognition for his achievements. General appreciation did not come until 1890s solo exhibitions at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in Paris. A memorial exhibition in 1907, the Armory Show of 1913 and numerous exhibitions since then have solidified his high standing. Impelled by a consuming sense of his own inadequacy, of his failure to achieve his artistic goals, Cezanne labored zealously to the end. In the fall of 1906, he collapsed while working outdoors in a cold rain and died a week later. Prophetically, he had vowed “to die painting.” He had spent most of his career searching for an elusivegoal: a perfect balance between nature and art. A deeply troubledman who sought to free himself from personal demons throughpainting, for Cezanne, success came too little and too late. Hesurely would feel vindicated that “Cezanne 2006” events all overFrance and especially in Aix-en-Provence will commemorate hislasting contributions to world art. His family home, Jas deBouffan, and his Les Lauves studio will be open to the public, aswill the newly renovated Musee Granet, a major regional museum. More than most artists, Cezanne’s work needs to be viewed in person in order to appreciate his color and forms and overall approach to painting. “Cezanne in Provence” demonstrates how he applied his innovative style and used perspective and composition to immortalize his native region. In so doing, he changed forever the way painters approach a canvas. Cezanne made it possible for modern artists from Picasso and Matisse to Pollock and Warhol to follow their own muses. The 350-page catalog, chockfull of color reproductions and vintage photographs, is a beauty. It contains valuable essays by Consisbee, Bruno Ely, Benedict Leca and Paul Smith, and entries about each work in the exhibition by Consisbee, Coutagne and others. A chronology, bibliography and map add to this well-rounded publication. Produced by the National Gallery and published in association with Yale University Press, the catalog sells for $60 hardcover and $40 softcover. A full program of lectures, tours and concerts accompany the show. The National Gallery of Art is on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW. For information, 202-737-4215 or www.nga.gov.
28 Feb 2006 / 0 Comment
‘Cezanne In Provence’ At The National Gallery Of Art
Published: February 28, 2006
In “The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Evenement,” 1886, Cezanne depicted his parent, seated in a huge chair, perusing an unlikely newspaper. National Gallery of Art, Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon.
“Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibemus,” circa 1897, records the majesty of the great Aixois mountain from one of Cezanne’s favorite painting sites. Museum Folkwang, Essen.
Painted in his studio at Jas de Bouffan, Cezanne’s strikingly simplified “Cardplayers,” 1890-99, shows two laborers engaged in a silent confrontation over a game of cards. Musee d’Orsay, Paris, Bequest of Comte Isaac de Camondo.
Cezanne, shown here in a photograph at Les Lauves early in 1906, painted to the very end of his life. Photo by Kerr-Xavier Rousel. National Gallery of Art Gallery Archives, Rewald Papers.
Deeply committed to his home region, Cezanne reveled in depicting its venerable houses and villages, as in “Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley near L’Estaque,” circa 1883. National Gallery of Art, Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon.
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