A Father of Modern Art and His Many Progeny

APRIL 8, 2009

By MARY TOMPKINS LEWIS
The Wall Street Journal

(Philadelphia) For many modern artists Paul Cézanne was a talismanic figure, the shadow of his painting as impossible to escape as his achievement was to define. Throughout the 20th century, as scholars labored to construct a viable history of modern art, Cézanne (along with Manet, Courbet and a handful of transgressive others) was posited as its fountainhead, the protean begetter whose countless artistic progeny shaped a new aesthetic that placed vision and touch above traditional formal and narrative concerns.

'Cézanne and Beyond'
View SlideshowMuseum of Fine Arts Boston

Both Matisse and Picasso would claim Cézanne as a father, and almost every variant of 20th-century art could trace some aspect of its origins to his painting. Cézanne's effect on later artists has become the stuff of exquisite exhibitions, heated debate, and a linear notion of modernism. Without thoroughly disrupting that tidy critical trajectory, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's current exhibition, "Cézanne and Beyond," moves it onto more fluid and fertile ground, and the results are highly satisfying and visually thrilling. Even in his own day Cézanne was, perhaps above all else, a painter's painter, receiving his first, most unfailing and most perceptive expressions of support from fellow artists. And artists again lead us through this revelatory exhibition, one whose thematic, rather than chronological, display allows a richer reading of both Cézanne's art and their own. In the opening gallery, for example, the photographer Jeff Wall's "The Crooked Path" (1991) is paired with Cézanne's "Turn in the Road" (c. 1881) to argue that both the unique visual sensations that Cézanne sought to capture and the ideal pictorial tradition this landscape embodied can resonate as one in a contemporary photographic tableau. A second room finds Cézanne's late canvases of peasants and his "Cardplayers" sharing space with figures by Fernand Léger, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and the American modernist Marsden Hartley. Their visual affinities are unmistakable, but the later works share as well a sense of the magnetic vitality Cézanne brought to his depictions of these stolid rural types. The massive accompanying catalog, whose heft is scholarly as well as literal, explores all of this in depth. While Cézanne is hardly diminished by the company he keeps here, it is clear that his example seems to have spurred artists in every medium and era to heroic feats. Questions of influence, long key to modernist chronologies, recede as one discovers that the best "students" of the Aixois master can hold their own in his formidable presence.

Cézanne's acute sense of his place in history -- in the late Impressionist moment but also in the grand tradition of French art -- brought to his painting a profundity that belies its seemingly familiar subject matter. In a gallery devoted to still lifes, Cézanne upends that implicitly stable genre to embrace questions of precarious balance, lack of finish and fragmented form and so reveals its renewed relevance for 20th-century artists, as witnessed in works as disparate as Matisse's monumental, flattened "Bowl of Apples on a Table" (1916) or Charles Demuth's smaller, delicate watercolors. (A separate gallery, distant from the rest but not to be missed, draws together admirers of Cézanne's still lifes of skulls.) Yet, though his painting offered limitless avenues for experimentation, it could also provide a lens through which artists could see their storied past: Giacometti's "Still Life With Apple" (1937), for example, summons not only Cézanne but his revered 18th-century predecessor, Chardin. The thematic organization of the show consistently underscores the fact that Cézanne conceived of his art as falling into distinctly different genres, each demanding its own ingenious mode. Alone among his contemporaries, he tackled them all. Among his many portraits, those of his wife, Hortense Fiquet, occupied a special place. In a niche befitting her iconic status here, "Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair" (c. 1877) presides, queenlike, over her varied offspring: Picasso's 1932 portrait of his lover Marie-Thérèse and Matisse's "Woman in Blue" (1937) reflect the persistent presence of Cézanne's inscrutable muse in early modernist circles. Even more potent, however, was the lingering memory of his bathers, those rare, hybrid creatures marked by a primal awkwardness and also an incipient classicism. Emulated and acquired by many of the artists assembled here, they would transform the modern conception of the female nude. Matisse, for example, always treasured the small canvas he bought in 1899 of "Three Bathers" (c. 1879-82). He would reflect in his own lyrical "Le Luxe I" (1907) and far more forceful "Bather" (1909) not so much an influence felt as an homage owed to the possibilities that Cézanne's nudes allowed.

Just beyond the dark, imaginary thickets inhabited by Cézanne's bathers, a long gallery of his sunlit Provençal landscapes aligns Cézanne's work with that of more recent artists. Their responses to his example again enhance our reading of both sides of this illuminating, and still evolving, dialogue. Jasper Johns's paintings of "Maps" evince both the obsessive repetition of known motifs that make Cézanne's views of his native Provence so recognizable to modern viewers and Mr. Johns's fascination with Cézanne's encrusted, tactile surfaces, which Mr. Johns would refer to in his own work by employing the wax-based medium of encaustic. Likewise, Ellsworth Kelly and Brice Marden found huge formal impetus in his landscapes. In their abstract, flattened canvases of dense color planes, they acknowledge the brilliant passages of pigment that lend a material "airy weightiness," as Mr. Marden has described it, to Cézanne's views of the Mediterranean. Although a few artists, such as Marcel Duchamp and Willem de Kooning, would also be welcome here, it seems pedantic to complain of absences in the presence of such a deeply distinguished cast. The good news from Philadelphia, home to so many Cézannes both here and at the nearby Barnes Foundation, is that the painter was a greater wellspring for artists than almost any of us had imagined, and that well is not about to run dry.

Ms. Lewis, who writes frequently about the arts, teaches art history at Trinity College, Hartford.