Cézanne Drawing
Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through Sept. 25
“I don’t think people sufficiently appreciate Cézanne’s weirdness,” said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. Often described as the father or grandfather of every modernist who came after him, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) “pushed himself to such extremes of focused attention that, almost by accident, he invented modern art.” A new show at MoMA, which gathers some 280 drawings and watercolors that the French artist created mostly in preparation for his oil paintings, puts viewers “almost behind Cézanne’s eyes” as he works out how to transcend the ephemeral nature of impressionist imagery by discerning structure in everything he looks upon. He rejected the idea that it was enough for an artist to capture what the eye sees, and “his willingness to transform objective reality into something stratified, ordered, and apparently impersonal led the way into cubism.” Yet Cézanne’s art was never impersonal. “It trembles with powerfully contained emotion.”
Cézanne’s drawings offer full access to
“the depths of his fearless imagination,” said Mary Tompkins Lewis in The Wall Street Journal. In “Study for The Eternal Feminine,” you can almost hear him thinking aloud as “patches of shadow and light rehearse the role of color” and figures tumbling through space generate a chaotic maelstrom. He also drew to process other works of art, particularly sculpture. In his studies of Pierre Puget’s Hercules at Rest, he found a rhythmic vitality in the sculpture’s shadows and rippling musculature that informed his later paintings of bathers. But drawing wasn’t merely a way to learn for Cézanne. This show proves that he “produced his most radical work on paper.”
You don’t just regard a Cézanne, “you study it, registering how it’s done—in the drawings, with tangles of line and, often, patches of watercolor,” said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. This type of viewing isn’t for everyone: “I tire of being made to feel smart rather than pleased.” Still, there is no denying Cézanne’s genius or the effect his painting had when, a year after his death from pneumonia, a retrospective of his work was shown at a 1907 exhibition in Paris. “It may be too much to say that he changed everything in the course of art history. But he was bound to make artists whom he didn’t directly influence more than a little nervous.” In his insistence on imposing order on the visual world, he erased the difference between figure and ground, and “made pictorial vision the exercise of an artist’s concerted will and a challenge to a viewer’s understanding.” Whether you cheer him for that achievement or not probably depends on how you feel about modernism in general.