Under the Influence

Robin Rice on Visual Art: Cézanne and Beyond

by Robin Rice

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My late friend Louis Kapnistos designed corporate office spaces. He sometimes moonlighted, rearranging the furniture and objects in people's homes. He'd analyze what they had, maybe buy enough paint to cover one wall and spend an afternoon moving stuff. Voilà! Everything old would be fabulously new again. The price? Maybe nothing if it was your birthday.

I suspect a practical idea like this was behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Cézanne and Beyond," a bargain to organize, compared to most PMA shows. After all, nearly everything in it is owned by the museum. But, like my old pal Louis, the PMA never does anything halfway. Despite the admission fee, "Cézanne and Beyond" is a gift.

Curators Joseph Rishel and Katherine Sachs were inspired in their selections for a group of intense visual juxtapositions on several topics, conversations between the guest of honor — Paul Cézanne — and clusters of other artists, living and dead, who are equally engaging.

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A kind of awkwardness or harshness strikingly characterizes Cézanne's treatment of the figure. One of the most effective groupings centers around a portrait of Madame Cézanne, stiffly seated in an armchair, barricaded behind clasped hands. In Picasso's related work, the armchair is also red but his curvy woman seems lost in a sensuous dream. Matisse's queenly blonde, one of his iconic works, is formal but vivacious, charming.

Cézanne's kouros-like Bather has always been an enigma: a lot of flesh, chunky and clunky in execution and not really settled into his painted environment. That sense of the figure as distinct from context comes out in many early Picasso paintings, but the fun contrast here is with Marsden Hartley's more overtly erotic, exaggeratedly manly bather (Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, pictured, p. 25).  

One of the most amusing juxtapositions is Jeff Wall's contemporary backlit photograph of middle-aged women playing cards around a table and a version of Cézanne's Card Players (not the bigger one at the Barnes). Wall echoes the human gestures of the players, but the contrasts of masculine and feminine, 20th century and 19th, working class and bourgeoisie, are both hysterically funny and instructive.

Some believe that ambiguous feelings about the human body can be detected in Cézanne's representation of it. In contrast, he shows remarkable grace in dealing with other subjects, like ochre, sun-splashed houses and, especially, trees and fruit. He records the almost downy surfaces of apples with great tenderness and gives his complete attention to bowers of massed foliage or the crags of Mont Sainte-Victoire against a cerulean sky. For me, Cézanne's magnificently modest, workmanlike landscapes are the pinnacle of his oeuvre.Of course, we know that 20th-century French painter Georges Braque was so impressed by Cézanne's landscapes that he visited the fishing village l'Estaque, near Marseilles, where Cézanne had worked. Braque painted the same landscape that Cézanne had, pushing the older painter's warm/cool contrasts and dictum to "treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone." Much of early cubism emerged from these studies.

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A range of subsequent artists, too, owe a debt to Cézanne's landscapes. Piet Mondrian's development of landscape into geometric abstraction is related to Cézanne's obsessive rendering of tree trunks and limbs (more delicate than his treatment of human trunks and limbs).

Jasper Johns' three-dimensional elements and raggedly applied reds, yellows and blues in Painting with Two Balls seem to have little correlation to Cezanne's subtle landscapes, but look again. The relationship is not fanciful. I will now never see Johns' herringbone paintings without recalling Cézanne's brushwork.

It's mind-boggling to imagine Cézanne, who notoriously was socially a bit of a bull in a china shop, conversing so subtly and productively with all these artists, so different in temperament and so various in their goals. But if this show demonstrates one thing, it is that Cézanne's true language was painting — and he could really talk.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Cézanne and Beyond Through May 17, $20-$24, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Ben Franklin Parkway, 215-235-7469, philamuseum.org