Cezanne's Legacies
RAYNOR, VIVIEN
On Art CEZANNE'S LEGACIES BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Like commercials, where the product is never merely itself, museum shows these days are much more than the sum of the objects displayed. The trend in...
...In his catalogue essay, "The Logic of Organized Sensations," Gowing acknowledges that the late subject matter and overall brush-work recall Impressionism, but contends that the technique is actually a refined version of the old palette-knife method...
...One can see how they must have been a godsend to those who were unwilling to journey to Tahiti for esthetic rejuvenation...
...Cropped of Cezanne's stumbling and often weird beginnings, as well as the middle Impressionist period, the works on display here appear less as the end of Cezanne and more as the beginning and vindication of modernism...
...While Van Gogh admired Cezanne's art, incidentally, Cezanne was of the opinion that the younger man's pictures were the work of a lunatic...
...Thus, according to Gowing, far from being-as the Cubists thought-an attempt to express form sculpturally, Cezanne's patches of color do not even "represent materials or facets or variations of tint...
...In themselves, they do not represent anything...
...From this we might conclude that Cubism's reading of Cezanne was the first in a long line of creative misunderstandings in this century...
...Aside from the geniuses he influenced, Cezanne has been a magnet for mediocre talents-largely, one suspects, because his life might seem to suggest doggedness can compensate for facility...
...If so, the artist himself, with his often conflicting axioms, must share the blame...
...History has proved that it was not too late, yet the final works on view at the moma project as strong a sense of energy sublimated as the early realist ones...
...Nevertheless, his Impressionism was even less successful than his colleagues': He was still being rejected when the tide was beginning to turn for Monet and Renoir...
...A painter as well as a scholar, Gowing takes a fairly relaxed view of Cezanne...
...As such, they constitute a reviewer's nightmare...
...Cezanne's career, however, was deformed less by lack of talent than by the constricting circumstances of his family life, including financial dependence on a tyrannical father...
...Certainly his "Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the cone, the sphere" did much to compound the confusion aroused by his work...
...The diagonal placing of Joachim Gas-quet's figure, for example, reminds one of the way Modigliani posed his models...
...More general impressions have to do with the rather contradictory nature of Cezanne's oeuvre...
...He was a crude (albeit not uneducated) Provencal who could not have fitted easily into the Paris milieu: His strangely proportioned figure paintings, heavy with knifed-on pigment and at times both violent and erotic in theme, found no favor with Salon juries...
...In each case the touch is at least as important as the subject...
...Understandably, then, one initially looks at the works in terms of their influence...
...Otherwise, viewers are left with the theoretical hardware they themselves bring to the 122 oils and watercolors painted between 1895 and Cezanne's death in 1906...
...Thereafter [his] influence did not so much wane as become fused with that of artists deeply affected by him...
...The sense of detachment is reinforced by his obsessive handling of subject matter...
...Born in 1839, Cezanne was of the same generation as the Impressionists-younger than Manet, older than Monet-and he too started out following the path blazed by Delacroix and Courbet...
...Pioneer Cubists such as Matisse, De-rain, Picasso and Braque," he writes, contra Gowing, "experienced Cezanne largely in Cezanne's own terms...
...The orientation process has been confined to one room of explanatory texts with reproductions, plus an extensive, beautifully produced book/catalogue...
...It is the relationships between them-relationships of affinity and contrast, the progression from tone to tone in a color scale, and the modulations from scale to scale-that parallel the apprehension of the world...
...The democratic brushstroke, modulating flat surfaces as carefully as spherical ones, conjures visions of generations of students doggedly expressing everything in little patches of color, and recalls the young Robert Rauschenberg's declaration that the painting of apples was a dead enterprise...
...Feeling that Cubism's relationship to its antecedents has yet to be fully clarified, Rubin goes on to argue convincingly that Braque, not Picasso, was actually the guiding spirit of the movement...
...especially in the landscapes, it consists of variations on the theme of orange, green, blue, and purple...
...William Rubin, in his catalogue essay "Cezannisme and the Beginnings of Cubism," takes the opportunity provided by this exhibit to present an entirely new theory about Cubism...
...He demonstrates that Cezanne was also explaining forms by color used in prismatic progression yellow, green, blue-instead of complementarity, as the Impressionists did, with yellow next to purple, green beside red, and so on...
...He proves this by pointing to the link extending from Michelangelo, through Rubens, to Delacroix and then to Cezanne, and showing how each pupil distorted his hero...
...Indeed, in his own way he seems to have followed the same muse that inspired Seurat and Van Gogh...
...All three reconstructed reality by means of very personal, and therefore expressive, techniques-seurat with dots of color, Van Gogh with ribbons, and Cezanne, in this late period with overlapping squares...
...Only those privy to the lesser-known early work will fully appreciate how these landscapes, portraits and still-lifes relate to the rest of the artist's career...
...And, though his art is not subjective in the usual expressionist sense of the word, he talked a good deal about the "sensations" he experienced from color...
...When, with the death of Cezanne pere, freedom and fortune at last arrived, the artist was 47...
...It appears that the strategy his psyche developed to combat the frustrations of youth served him again-and better-with the sorrows of age...
...It was not until the '70s, when he began spending time with Pissarro, who was convinced Cezanne had the potential for greatness, that his palette and technique lightened...
...For besides the time it takes to adjust to the physical presence of so many Cezannes, it is hard to "see" painting that for so long has been taught and understood in terms of the theory behind it and its effect on 20th-century art...
...He worked constantly from nature and counseled others to do the same, but he neither photographically copied his subjects nor, in fact, approximated their character...
...I particularly liked his proposition that the history of art is a sequence of "inveterate misunderstanding...
...Individual as Cezanne's method is, there remains an impersonal quality to what he produced...
...And among individual artists, none is more open to interpretation than Paul Cezanne...
...he was long ago elected the father of 20th century art, yet his work continues to lie there like a boulder, simultaneously demanding and resisting explanation...
...Happily, the Museum of Modern Art, in mounting Cezanne: The Late Work (through Jan.3), has avoided the didactic excesses committed earlier in the decade by the Metropolitan Museum...
...In a Foreword to the catalogue, Rubin claims that this is the first exhibition to make "sufficiently clear the marked change that took place in Cezanne's work after 1895 and reached fulfillment in his paintings of the 20th century...
...Actually, Cezanne, the fruit of sometimes arduous negotiations with public and private collectors here and abroad, demonstrates the results of the change rather than its process...
...Cosponsored by IBM and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the show is a personal triumph for director William Rubin, head of moma's Department of Painting and Sculpture, who has had it in mind ever since attending a doctoral seminar on the artist 25 years ago...
...In part, this is a product of the color...
...Theoretical questions aside, the paintings remain...
...Yet," says Gowing, "this succession of creative misunderstandings was as nothing by comparison with the way that the 20th century used Cezanne...
...British critic Lawrence Gow-ing quotes Cezanne reminiscing, in 1906, about Pissarro and Impressionism: "How far away it all seems, and yet how near...
...Which is rather remarkable when you consider all that they have been through...
...Whatever the ultimate significance of this, it is clear that art history in general is well-suited to the approach...
...The trend in both fields probably derives from Romantic notions of the ineffable, but its acceleration in official esthetics has coincided noticeably with the growth in corporate patronage of the arts...
...Victoire had little to do with the varying moods of nature, hence the several versions here cannot be considered parallels to Monet's Haystacks...
...Everything and nothing is known about him...
...Now a foundation for critical theory instead of for the practice of art itself, they still look raw, powerful and enigmatic...
...Whatever it was that transfixed him about Mt...
...Turning to the monolithic portraits with their masklike faces, one is again struck by their remoteness: The dealer Vollard and the gardener Val-lere each sit waiting for the identical end...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 22
