The Brooklyn Rail

Paul Cezanne occupies a central place in the Fondation Beyeler collection—which is blessed with an outstanding selection of late Impressionist works from France—with a total of seven works (paintings and watercolors). It may therefore come as something of a surprise that the artist was last honored with a major exhibition at this institution at the end of 1999. At that time, Cezanne’s formative influence on numerous figurative and non-figurative artistic positions of the twentieth century was made very clear in a dialogical juxtaposition. The current exhibition now focuses entirely on the late work of the artist from Aix-en-Provence, who was born here in 1839 and also died here in 1906.

This year marks the 120th anniversary of Cezanne’s death. His work has been extensively documented, and exhibitions and publications are so numerous that they are difficult to keep track of. Nevertheless, the sources on his life and artistic method remain incomplete, and facts and legends continue to be mixed up in the discourse. This makes it difficult to contribute new insights. Although the wheel of Cezanne research is not being reinvented in Riehen, a few new biographical details can be added. And the exhibition—which has been carefully thought out and clearly conceived by the museum’s curator Ulf Küster, and is manageable in scope with around eighty works—is convincing precisely because of its focus on the creative phase of the last two decades. In the 1880s, Cezanne found his mature style, which he would continue to develop gradually and consistently until the end of his life.

Once again, the Fondation Beyeler has succeeded in obtaining not only key works from international museums, but also rarely exhibited works from private collections (around half of the loans!). This effort is a hallmark of exhibitions at the Fondation Beyeler and, in times of increasingly difficult loan agreements between museums and collectors and steadily rising insurance costs, cannot be taken for granted.

The exhibition title is kept simple: Cezanne. The spelling without an acute accent has become established in recent years and pays respect to the spelling with which the artist signed his works and which is also advocated by his descendants and the Société Paul Cezanne based in Aix-en-Provence. Visitors can expect to see a representative cross-section of portraits, still lifes, multi-figure depictions such as Group of Bathers (ca. 1895) or two versions of The Card Players (Musée d’Orsay, Paris [1893–96] and Courtauld, London [1892–96]), and, of course, landscapes, including a whole series of variations on Montagne Sainte-Victoire, in eight themed rooms. This diverse kaleidoscope is impressively rounded off in the last room, which hosts twenty-one watercolors. With their rhythmic colors and brilliance, the watercolors are a cosmos unto themselves, not only in Cezanne’s oeuvre, but also in the art of the turn of the century, which was so rich in innovation.

Perhaps the exhibition, with its focus on the last twenty years of Cezanne’s creative life, offers an ideal introduction to the artist’s work and, above all, to his artistic and aesthetic legacy. For in his late work, we encounter a completely different Cezanne than in his earlier years, when the artist’s struggle with color and form, and above all with himself, can be visible in his works. In his dealings with other people, he remained difficult and politically controversial until the end. (During the Dreyfus affair, Cezanne’s anti-Semitic attitude began to show through.) A loner who subordinated everything to art and spared neither himself nor others, he remained his own greatest critic until the end.

His struggles and hesitations in completing a painting are legendary, and this exhibition features works whose motifs appear to have been painted over countless times, such as the relief-like Three skulls on an oriental rug (1904) (from Kunstmuseum Solothurn), or the protagonist in the famous Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1899) (from Petit Palais, Paris), his Parisian gallery owner, who helped him achieve his artistic breakthrough in 1895 with a major solo exhibition. Cezanne reportedly only stopped working on this portrait after 115 sittings! Such anecdotes create a picture of an obsessively hard-working monomaniac, which has been eagerly cultivated in public discourse since his death.

Comparing the pictures, he seems to have gained considerably more confidence in the application of his artistic method in the 1880s. Numerous works can be found that appear light and lively, sensual and joyful, delicate and powerful at the same time, experimental and unforced. This can be seen most clearly in the exhibition when several variations of the same motif (for example, Montagne Sainte-Victoire, Château Noir, or the gardener Vallier) or at least very similar compositions (still lifes or bathers) can be compared side by side. Cezanne worked intensively on some of these groups of works and motifs for many years. A chronological comparison shows how far Cezanne distanced himself from the Impressionist style of his colleagues. Thanks to Camille Pissarro, Cezanne’s palette gradually brightened in the 1870s. However, he never completely adopted the short, comma-like brushstrokes characteristic of Impressionism, which make light and colors on the canvas vibrate and breathe. Cezanne found another method, which he called “réalisation.” If we expect a realistic rendering of an image, his rather broad, sometimes brittle, but deliberately placed, stain-like brushstrokes (“taches”) make the motif appear unfinished in many of his works. The composition and the anatomy of the figures’ bodies are often simply wrong. In Cezanne’s work, however, color, light, painting, and image all take shape at once, so to speak; everything happens simultaneously when viewed.

In quite a few paintings, significant areas of the primed canvas remain visible and unfinished. The same applies to the watercolors, where the tone of the respective paper is sometimes taken into account as a color and light value and integrated into the composition. The individual components of a picture no longer stand out from the background with a graphic, linear contour line, but are accentuated by the subtlest color nuances. Some figures in Group of Bathers blend harmoniously with their surroundings to form a symbiotic unity, for example when the brown tones of tree trunks and hair or the brushstrokes of a naked body merge with the foliage.

This is the fascinating aspect of Cezanne’s oil and watercolor paintings that continues to amaze viewers. One can linger in front of these paintings for a very long time, because the eye never comes to rest here. Even if the idea of the unfinished and fragmentary is not a genuine invention of Cezanne—think, for example, of Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin in sculpture to the great Berthe Morisot—Cezanne had a significant and lasting influence on this central principle of modern art.

Looking at these works, one can recognize not only their highly idiosyncratic and innovative character, but also why Cezanne continues to resonate in contemporary art. The artist tirelessly developed his radical economy—or rather, the sometimes minimalist reduction of form-giving brushstrokes and the nuanced interplay of colors—until his death. It is precisely this consistent, methodical approach that has become so fundamentally important for subsequent artists. Rewarding and insightful comments on these aspects can be found in the catalogue of the 2022–23 Cezanne exhibition organized jointly by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate Modern in London, featuring contemporary artists such as Etel Adnan, Kerry James Marshall, Laura Owens, Luc Tuymans, and others. It is also worth mentioning that Cezanne’s works have repeatedly found their way into the collections of artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, and Jasper Johns.

Cezanne’s restless nature, his doubting eye, and his irritable, highly sensitive perception are both a burden and a blessing to him. However, he does not fail like Honoré De Balzac’s Frenhofer in The Unknown Masterpiece or like Claude Lantier in Émile Zola’s L’Œuvre. These literary examples are repeatedly cited in the reception of Cezanne. In contrast to these protagonists from literature, however, Cezanne is able to develop a method that not only proves convincing for his art, but also provides immediate and long-term impulses for subsequent generations of artists. The various elements (earth, water, air) and organic substances (bodies, buildings, trees, fruits, etc.) form an inseparable unity. This is what makes these images so vivid and dynamic; they are the result of a continuous, lived, and experienced reality, rather than a fleeting emotion. We are confronted with a remarkably unpretentious, curious, and flexible artist who, every day, saw and found something surprising and new in the supposedly familiar surroundings of his immediate environment, with an open mind and an open eye. This is what is timeless and still so refreshing about Cezanne’s great art today.