Cézanne
The man who changed the landscape of art
"If you want to learn to paint," said artist Camille Pissarro, "look at Cézanne." In this centennial year—Cézanne died October 23, 1906, at age 67—two shows focus on different aspects of the career of the gutsy iconoclast who has been called the father of modern art.
"Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne & Pissarro 1865-1885," an exhibition organized by New York City's Museum of Modern Art, is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until January 16. The show, which goes on to the Musée D'Orsay in Paris (February 28 to May 28), highlights the period of Cézanne's immersion in Impressionism, when he often painted side by side with Camille Pissarro. An exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., "Cézanne in Provence" (January 29 through May 7), features more than 100 paintings the artist executed in and around his hometown of Aix-en-Provence in southern France. The exhibition will move to the newly renovated Musée Granet in Aix (June 9 through September 17) as a highlight of a national celebration in France officially marking 2006 as the Year of Cézanne.
"It was by painting his own particular, familiar landscape," says the National Gallery's Philip Conisbee (co-curator of the exhibition with Musée Granet director Denis Coutagne), "that Cézanne changed the way later generations would see the world."
Paul Cézanne wanted to make paint bleed. The old masters, he told the poet Joachim Gasquet, painted warmblooded flesh and made sap run in their trees, and he would too. He wanted to capture "the green odor" of his Provence fields and "the perfume of marble from Saint-Victoire," the mountain that was the subject of so many of his paintings. He was bold, scraping and slapping paint onto his still lifes with a palette knife. "I will astonish Paris with an apple, " he boasted.
In the years when his friends Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir were finally gaining acceptance, Cézanne worked mostly in isolation, ridiculed by critics and mocked by the public, sometimes ripping up his own canvases. He wanted more than the quick impressions of the Impressionists (nature, he wrote to a fellow artist, "is more depth than surface") and devoted himself to studying the natural world. "It's awful for me," he told a young friend, "my eyes stay riveted to the tree trunk, to the clod of earth. It's painful for me to tear them away." He could often be found, according to one contemporary, "on the outskirts of Paris wandering about the hillsides in jackboots. As no one took the least interest in his pictures, he left them in the fields."
Yet by the end of his life, Cézanne had been recognized, at least by some critics, as a true revolutionary who overturned the rules of painting and upended conventional theories of color. "I don't think you can find any artist who compares with Cézanne in the whole history of painting," declared Renoir.
From this months Smithsonian Magazine
Smithsonian is a fine magazine. I haven't read it in too long. (We used to subscribe and there was always a fine art article.)
I didn't manage to see the Pisarro/Cezanne show. It sounds like a fine one.
I've been rather busy lately and not as good a Freeper as I would have liked. I only now made a belated post onto the Fountain smashed thread.