'Cézanne and Beyond' at the Art Museum (3rd review)

"Cézanne destroyed the old picture system," the painter Piet Mondrian once remarked. The Art Museum's new exhibition, "Cézanne and Beyond," is organized under this assumption. Mondrian referred, of course, to Renaissance traditions of perspective and classical ideals drawn upon in the creation of art. But I'm inclined to disagree, however, that the old master is wholly responsible for this busting of academic ideals.

Many of the artists represented in this exhibition— including Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Max Beckmann, Arshile Gorky, Brice Marden, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns and others— made leaps farther beyond Renaissance technique to modernism and postmodernism than Cézanne did in his work. Didn't Impressionism usher in a much greater break with tradition?

Under Impressionism, images (for a variety of reasons) became flatter, forms in painting started to dissolve and subject matter shifted from classic themes to those of more common interest. Cézanne and his contemporaries inherited this new way of seeing and then forged their own personal expressions, all well before the advent of abstraction, cubism, dada, conceptualism and other modern forms. Thus from a strictly visual standpoint, many of the promised harmonic "conversations" between Cézanne and the artists included in this exhibition simply don't pan out.

Some very loose linkages to Cézanne

Instead of conversations, we have what strike me as some separate spirited voices embracing rather individual views— views that happen, for the moment, to cohabit the same walls. And what a variety of expressions there are to see in this exhibition! Most are what I would call rather loose linkages to Cézanne, but consider a few of the more tenuously paired.

A Brice Marden abstraction, Red Rocks (1) (2000-2002), is juxtaposed with Cézanne's well-known Great Bathers (1898-1905). There are absolutely no similarities in the colors, the line, the shapes of these two works. Yet because Marden kept a postcard of The Bathers in his studio, it is postulated that Cézanne influenced this particular work. On the contrary, I would say, Marden was such a modern fellow that he used The Great Bathers only as a point of departure for what ultimately became a very different picture from Cézanne's style. For this artist, Cézanne served as muse rather than guide.

Kelly and Picasso: Contrived connections

Similarly, Ellsworth Kelly's bronze sculpture, Untitled (1987), resembles an acorn shape but without the hat. Kelly has said that the idea for this sculpture came from a photo of a bridge in Paris. Cézanne's Pont de Maincy (1879) is juxtaposed to this smooth surfaced bronze plating that bears little visual resemblance to water or bridges. How, then, does Untitled converse with this specific work of Cézanne? Does it relate in a conceptual way? The exhibit offers no clue.

Pablo Picasso's The Bathers (1956) are wrought metal figures that are here positioned in front of Cézanne's The Great Bathers painting. Stylistically, these two works seem to have little in common other than some reference to African sculpture. Cézanne's painting features curving lines, while Picasso's line is angled and geometric. The theme of "bathers" in art extends back to Classical times, so that can't be the connection either.

The several cool still lifes of Giorgio Morandi in this exhibition are connected to Cézanne (who also painted still lifes) by quoting the artist in a 1957 interview: "What interests me the most is expressing what is in nature, in the viable world"— a view that Cézanne also shared.

Does history really work this way?

I could go on with this. Instead, let me make a modest suggestion: History just doesn't proceed in the way that "Cézanne and Beyond" suggests. There never occurred a certain "day the universe changed"— when all artists tossed out Renaissance conventions and embraced modernism as Cézanne practiced it. The influences upon these artists were many, including the art of non-Western cultures, as this exhibition amply testifies. Ultimately, I submit, modern art is about the individual vision.

Cézanne was perhaps iconic to many artists due to the single-mindedness of his focus. He had no patience for time-wasting diversions, superfluous relationships or addictions. There was no restless hopping from medium to medium, style to style in the continuum of his work. That single-minded focus ultimately produced the stunning accomplishment of his mature still lifes, landscapes and yes, his portraits. If one must choose a father, a god, a muse to invoke to keep steady on the artistic course, why not choose Cézanne?

Celebrating Cézanne in this way— conjuring him as an artistic deity and major milestone marker in the artmaking continuum— may serve as a convenient historical device, especially for scholars and art lovers desperate to get their arms around this messy confusion that we call art. But when we analyze, categorize and synthesize a field that deals with our deepest needs and emotions, can we at the same time do justice to the truths about the artistic process?

I suspect this show was driven above all by the Art Museum's need (once again) to come up with blockbuster material, preferably using any painting from friends or the basement or wherever to assemble a revue that would be relatively cheap to produce. On top of that, this show must be "accessible" to the tourist hordes whose fickle money the Museum now so desperately needs to meet its huge deficit. We've seen far more intelligent programming from the Art Museum's staff, so clearly they are quite capable of better than this. Until the Museum is out of the woods with its money problems, however, perhaps its curators should stop focusing on blockbuster programming and start planning some smaller shows with tighter thinking.

A witty response to Cézanne mania

None of the above ruminations are cause to miss this exhibition, however. There is much to see here, to learn. There is also a subtle acknowledgement of these aforementioned difficulties in the inclusion of the exhibit's last piece, constructed in 2009 (this year!) by Francis Alys.

Alys's work is a bubblewrapping of Cézanne's Still Life with Apples and a Glass of Wine (1877-79). This painting happens to belong to the Art Museum, so Alys's "work" in bubblewrapping it was probably a spontaneous act. Here, the artist declares that the wrapping acts as a sort of cataract for the viewer, as one can no longer (because of Cézanne) see painting with a virginal eye. The artist mocks the cascade of art theories and manifestos that formed in the wake of Cézanne's oeuvre. Further, Alys advises us that wrapping is not an act of disrespect to the Master but is rather a "homage" and a "surrender."

It is possible, I suppose, to be discouraged, to feel so outdistanced by Cézanne, but Alys in his witty Duchampian allusion thoroughly trumps Cézanne mania.

But when we are done with wit and wish to return to the consideration of the achievement of Cézanne, we, of course, will need to travel to the Barnes collection in Merion, where so many of his masterworks reside. From this Art Museum assemblage of paintings alone, it is difficult to understand why Cézanne was and is so revered. His masterworks are the epitome of his particular style. He weeds out extraneous decorative detail, "sculpts the bare bones of things, toning down all color to accentuate that eye popping color in pieces of fruit. He perfects that hatched brush stroke in his landscapes to yield a field and a mountain of geometrics that "glitter" like the Provencal sun. Cézanne composes in such a way as to tilt and balance planes in the picture, creating such an arresting tension for the viewer, including tablecloths that are perked alert with apples that somehow fail to roll down off the canvas and onto the floor. With painting like this, you may wonder, who needs Renaissance convention?

Well, I for one am glad for it, because some really great work came out of the Renaissance. The real "beyond" of this "Cézanne and Beyond" theme, however, is, goodness: the Renaissance again. A new generation of artists has demonstrated fresh interest in the study of drawing in the spirit of Leonardo and Michelangelo. Now, how modern is that?





To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.