A once-in-a-generation retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago invites us to contemplate the reasons for Cézanne’s profound and ongoing influence.
By Rebecca Allan
In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George, the character of Dot, an artist’s model, sings to the painter Georges Seurat, “Give us more to see!” Dot’s understanding of her companion’s creative process and her urgent plea to the artist—for whom she endured the punishing physical rigors of her work—applies equally to the painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), one of the most influential artists of the past two centuries.
Cézanne’s world, geographically anchored in the villages and cities of southern and central France—from his birthplace at Aix-en-Provence to the artistic locus of Paris—provided diverse and compelling subjects for an artist who became a transformative force in the development of modern art. Essentially self-taught, Cézanne lived solely for painting, choosing its isolation and inscrutable demands over a comfortable existence in a society whose rules he firmly rejected. He was compelled to pursue and reinvent the drama of the visual world on canvas—the atmosphere of changing weather surrounding his beloved countryside of Provence, patterns of light and shadow against a tumble of citrus fruits, or the affecting presence of his sitters.
Paul Cézanne, Apples, 1893–94.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Seated Man, 1905–06.
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
This spring, The Art Institute of Chicago presents “Cézanne,” the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States in more than 25 years, and the first Cézanne show presented by the museum in more than 70 years. Organized in collaboration with the Tate Modern in London, the exhibition features 90 oil paintings, 40 watercolors and drawings, and two complete sketchbooks. Encompassing Cézanne’s full range of media and subject matter, the artworks include Impressionist landscapes, paintings of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, still lifes, figurative works, and early allegorical paintings from public and private collections in North and South America, Europe, and Asia.
The exhibition was organized by an international team of curators: Gloria Groom and Caitlin Haskell of The Art Institute of Chicago; and Achim Borchardt-Hume and Natalia Sidlina of the Tate Modern. In tandem with the curators’ perspectives, several contemporary artists have contributed essays to the exhibition catalogue. This rich collaboration between historians and artists highlights the enduring impact of Cézanne’s discoveries on contemporary art, more than one hundred years after his death.
The Bather, 1885.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Collection. Conservation was made possible by the Bank of America Art Conservation Project Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, Paul Cézanne was the only son of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, a prosperous milliner and later a banker. Initially bending to his father’s wish that he study law, Paul eventually abandoned his studies and in 1861, prompted by his boyhood friend, the novelist Émile Zola, he made his first trip to Paris, returning many times over the next 12 years. When Zola became prosperous, and Cézanne’s father cut his allowance, Zola financially supported the painter. At the Louvre, Cézanne absorbed and copied works of the Classical past, and at the Salon he saw the works of his contemporaries, although he was never included in its exhibitions. His unconventional style, characterized by broad, unmodulated planes of paint applied with a palette knife or brush, was considered too radical and unrefined. By the mid-1860s, however, Cézanne had become an established artist. While not financially or critically successful, he commanded the admiration of his friends, including James McNeill Whistler, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, who was particularly influential in the artist’s life. To this day, Cézanne is thought of as an artist’s artist. He was willing to risk rejection, to pursue an independent path that is the ultimate mark of artistic courage.
The Chicago exhibition and accompanying catalogue explore two key questions that Cézanne pursued in his lifetime. Can the artist produce a painting one “sensation” at a time? And, if so, would such paintings reflect a quality that was more real, more true to life? Cézanne’s search for a sensory, physical approach to painting that could express his own personal truth set him apart from other artists in his milieu, as he moved in a slightly different direction from the Impressionists’ experiments in capturing the fleeting nature of vision. Unlike the dots of Seurat, Cézanne composed his paintings with facets or planar blocks of color.
In his Self Portrait on Rose Background (1875–77), Cézanne appears older than his 36 years. Nearly half the canvas is occupied by the weighty, triangular form of his jacketed torso, a form that evokes an old mountain. Turning to look at the viewer from eyes that are partially hidden in shadow, his expression suggests self-possession, even caution. Rendered in pale cream, gray-green, and peach-colored hues with paint that resembles a slurry of wet clay, the brushstrokes of the head merge with the patterned wallpaper. In 1875, when this portrait was begun, Cézanne had been rejected by the Salon, the official, government-sponsored exhibition of French art, which championed artworks representing historical, mythological, and allegorical subjects painted in a realistic style. And yet at that time, Cézanne was encouraged upon meeting Victor Chocquet, who became one of his most important collectors.
Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), about 1894–1905
The National Gallery, London, purchased with a special grant and the aid of the Max Rayne Foundation, 1964
Cézanne’s unconventional use of perspective and his faceted modeling of three-dimensional forms set him apart from his contemporaries. He applied paint in broad, often unblended patches of color that reveal the shape of his brushes and the velocity of his stroke. Tables with a patina of age and use are punctuated with kitchen implements, plaster casts, fruit, and draped fabrics. In The Vase of Tulips (circa 1890), the position of each humble object demonstrates the degree to which Cézanne played with placement, to maximize the tension and balance in each vignette. Notice the doubling of viewpoints—we simultaneously view the top, front, and side of the table. This multiple perspective was Cézanne’s invention, taken up more than 30 years later by Picasso and Braque in their Cubist collages and paintings. Cézanne began painting flowers in the 1870s alongside Pissarro, but he rarely painted tulips. Here, the presence of white narcissus with the tulips signals Spring, and it is likely that the artist made this work in Paris while visiting his wife, Hortense Fiquet, even though the terra-cotta pot was from his native Provence. Did he carry the pot along in his mind or was it actually in front of him?
A highlight of the Chicago exhibition is the scientific analysis of Cézanne’s technical approach to color mixing, mark making, and compositional construction, which illuminates the artist’s singular contributions to the traditions of painting he drew upon. Fluent in both Greek and Latin, Cézanne made repeated visits to the Louvre, where he made drawings from Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque figurative sculptures as well as the works of Rubens, Michelangelo, and Poussin.
In The Bather (1885–87), the anonymous boy, an adolescent, steps forward as he looks down, directing the viewer’s gaze toward his rudimentary, clothespin-shaped fingers and knobby toes. His limbs seem chiseled from Carrarra marble, and yet the black contour line that defines his shape pins him to the canvas. The progress that Cézanne makes in this painting is expressed in its juxtaposition of Classical sculpture with the artist’s sensations of the ephemerality of clouds, sun, and youth. Compared to the accepted art of his time, the painting’s newness has to do with the fact that Cézanne is not telling a story or teaching. Rather, he expands upon the Impressionists’ exploration of vision and light while also working from a photograph of a model, reflecting the modern influence of photography. Paul Chan, in his catalogue essay “Between the Bathers and Us, the Living,” captures the pleasurable impact of these dualities. “Cézanne’s bathers seem at ease with themselves. They look pleased by simply being, enlivened by their surroundings and by each other, enjoying themselves without guilt, aggression, or fear.”
Paul Cézanne, Portrait of the Artist with Pink Background, about 1875.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, donation de M. Philippe Meyer, 2000. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Adrien Didierjean
By 1890, Cézanne was spending most of his time in Aix, though traveling often to Paris. Overlooking the city is the 3317-foot Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the subject of 30 oil paintings and watercolors made over the course of the artist’s life. Montagne Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine (circa 1887) exemplifies Cézanne’s intention to convey what he referred to as sensations colorantes—visual sensations that yield color. The plane, to Cézanne, was a small, unblended, flat unit of color out of which each object, mountain, or figure was constructed. In this way, the entire two-dimensional surface of the painting is right up against our eyes. Of the many moods and atmospheres and vantage points conveyed in Cézanne’s mountain paintings, this is the work that captures the wind most effectively. Using the swaying branches to frame the mountain’s contours, Cézanne builds the structure of the town with a scaffold of vertical, diagonal linework that is softened by the ochres, blues, and greens of the living earth. The railway viaduct and trail of steam indicate the time period.
One of the few paintings that Cézanne signed after 1880, the work was derided when it was first shown in Aix at an exhibition of amateur artists. By 1895, with a one-person exhibition in Paris at the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, Cézanne’s critical fortunes had changed and he later gave this painting to an admirer, the writer Joachim Gasquet. In the 1920s, British businessman and philanthropist Samuel Courtauld, whose wealth came from textile production, was forming an exceptional collection of modern French paintings. In 1922 he encountered Cézanne’s work at an exhibition at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London. He wrote later of his epiphany, “At that moment I felt the magic, and I have felt it in Cézanne’s work ever since.” Between 1923 and 1929 he assembled one of the most important collections of works by Cézanne, helping to bolster the artist’s fortunes during a period when the British art establishment still regarded his work with hostility.
The challenges and revelations that are made possible by a comprehensive exhibition such as “Cézanne” inspire us to once again consider questions that we have asked ourselves, and our societies, across cultures and centuries. What does it mean to re-form the world that we perceive using the physical materials of our art? Where do artists acquire the conviction and resilience to continue working regardless of critical or financial success? And how does a work of art deepen our empathy by giving us so much more to see?