Now Vol.5
Paintings That Changed the Ways Of Seeing
Cezanne
The Art Institute of Chicago, May 15–September 5, 2022
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A quick three-line summary
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A large-scale exhibition of Cezanne’s pursuit of the artist’s eye to capture and distinguish objects with color is being held at the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Cezanne’s extensive influence on later artists is referred to as the “artist’s artist.”
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He was a true stylist who discovered shape through color, painting the same material over and over all his life.
Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Apples and Peaches, 1905 © National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Here we have someone who pursued a pair of questions for most of his life: Could a painter create artworks one sensation at a time? And, if so, would pictures made this way somehow be truer to life than those made by other means? The person is Paul Cezanne (1839–1906), the man often referred to as the “the greatest of us all” by fellow artists and admirers in the 20th century and even now in the 21st century.
Apples, water bottles, peaches, tables, tablecloths—these are the still life objects that are endlessly repeated in Cezanne’s paintings. What in the world did Cezanne see in what was so familiar to us all and not in the least bit new to people’s eyes? If indeed his special talent gave birth to some of the most notable works of the century, the talent would certainly have been his steady exploration and experiments in art, none of which he was ever satisfied with. Cezanne’s repetition of painting the same elements throughout his life was a huge innovation in art history. He started as an Impressionist, but veered from this path and went on to pioneer the realm of painting to come in the future. The art historian and art critic Barbara Ellen Rose got it right about the uniqueness of Cezanne when she said that the old masters’ starting point was, “This is what I see,” whereas Cezanne’s was, “Is this what I see?”
Cezanne completely overhauled the view of the art world, though today’s art world is still inundated with competition between individuals and their styles as well as their political and social agendas. While we may ask the question “Can Cezanne still capture the attention of people nowadays?” the Art Institute of Chicago believes they have the answer: Yes, he most certainly can. Even though they could have added any number of superlatives to the title, the Art Institute of Chicago decided to forego a single splendid modifier and simply called their most recent exhibition Cezanne. This is the first major retrospective of Cezanne’s work in the United States in more than 25 years, and the first exhibition on Cezanne organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in more than 70 years. It explores Cezanne’s work across media and genres, featuring 80 oil paintings, 40 watercolors and drawings, two complete sketchbooks, and painting tools that Cezanne used in his lifetime. Cezanne could, in fact, be an exhibition that will not be seen again for the rest of this century.
Focusing on the elements that make Cezanne uniquely Cezanne, the exhibition was organized by three renowned curators: Gloria Groom, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Chair and David and Mary Winton Green Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe; Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago; and Natalia Sidlina, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern. It is not very surprising that Groom, a curator who has played a central role in major exhibitions dealing with masters of Impressionism such as Claude Monet and Edouard Manet in recent years, took part in the joint project.
However, Haskell and Sidlina’s participation was a bit unexpected. That is because collaboration between departments is not common at the Art Institute of Chicago, and strictly speaking Cezanne is not a contemporary painter. But that, some say, is the point. Cezanne is what fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan calls “the essential link between the once-radical experimentation of 19th-century Impressionism and 20th-century modernism.” MacMillan went on to observe that the show is “seeking to show his [Cezanne’s] expansive impact on modern art of the 20th century and make clear his continuing resonance right through 2022.”
Haskell herself added to this conversation when she said, “For me so much of what I understand about painting, modern painting and what modernism became in the 20th century grows out of the discoveries and challenges to traditions of painting that Cezanne made. So, I see him as the fundamental figure to the avant-garde material that I work on in our modern collection.” From Caitlin Haskell’s point of view, Cezanne’s works were part of a “rupture of the picture plane” and full of elements that suggested a “faceted” approach to composition, something that would soon become the foundation for Cubism and emerge through the works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from 1907 to 1908.
“May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed toward a central point. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.”
— Cezanne’s letter to Émile Bernard dated April 15, 1904
Let us ask ourselves in what part of Cezanne’s works this idea can be found, shall we? Still Life with Apples (1893–94), which is today housed at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, is a good example of how to address this curiosity. In this painting, the standard rules of perspective are broken and even become somewhat inept. From the vantage point of looking at a vase from the side, one sees too much of the entrance of the vase. The plate holding the apples is definitely still, but for some reason it is tilted to such a degree that the apples appear as if they are about to pour off the table. The various objects in the painting feel like their images—when looked at from different angles—are all mixed up. What was important to Cezanne, who was expressing a variety of viewpoints in one painting, was, as he himself put it, “not to paint the object, but the effect it produces.”
Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Apples, 1893–94 © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
From 1880 onwards, Cezanne experimented with forms and became increasingly at odds with the establishment of the day. Ignoring perspective and scale, his forms became more and more fragmented. Drawing and color were separated, and abstracts were introduced for composition, raising the question of what the result of Cezanne’s experimental spirit was in the end. Cezanne had long fascinated fellow artists with amazing attempts to break with the traditions of Western painting established after the Renaissance and create new spaces. Cezanne was a “new artist” not only for Henry Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Henry Moore, artists we are all familiar with, but also for masters of the late 20th century, such as Jasper Johns and Lucien Freud. Above all, even contemporary artists in the 21st century cannot escape Cezanne’s influence. The three curators of Cezanne asked 10 contemporary artists, including Lubaina Himid, Kerry James Marshall, and Luc Tuymans, to write an interpretation of Cezanne’s individual works as well as his influence on their respective works. Commenting on Cezanne’s lingering impact, Groom has said, “It is kind of amazing that he matters so much today,” a statement that breaks the stereotype that he was only influential in the past and instead reveals the great French artist’s contemporary spirit.
Paul Cezanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire With Large Pine, about 1887 © The Courtauld Gallery, London, Photograph of Paul Cezanne (1839–1906): Cezanne around 1875 © Universal Images Group
Cezanne continued to return to certain subjects. Examples include still lifes with apples, Sainte-Victoire Mountain, bathers, and card players. In fact, Cezanne went on to paint Sainte-Victoire more than 40 times, including as oil paintings and watercolors. The number is actually much higher if you count works where the mountain is simply in the background of other paintings. Although it is difficult to understand the meaning of repetitive motifs, one thing is clear—you can imagine how obsessively he clung to one issue, agonizing over it again and again. Now that is style. Cezanne was someone who spent 30 years in the studio, until 1906, trying to create his own painting style. After his third Impressionist exhibition, none of his other works would be released for another 20 years.
Paul Cezanne made efforts to change his style all the time, painting the same subjects over and over throughout his life. The results of compressing repeated and evolving experiments can be seen—albeit in a hidden way—in Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), a series that Gloria Groom referred to as “abstracted, simplified ciphers in the landscape.” As the highly respected curator went on to explain about Bathers, “It’s a culmination of his thinking and abstracting. You can’t help but see Picasso and a little bit of Matisse in it. It’s moving into the future, so that’s exciting.” That is probably why the exhibition displays a work belonging to the Bathers series for its epic ending.
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Paul Cezanne, Les Grandes Baigneuses [Bathers], ca. 1894-1905 © The National Gallery, London
Another reason why Cezanne continued to use the same motif in paintings was color. He worked hard to express the essence of the object using color his entire life. He did not mix warm and cold colors, for example, but instead placed them side by side or overlapped them. He persistently made efforts to express the intrinsic depth of the object while finely mixing contrasting colors. For Cezanne, color was “the place where our brain and the universe meet.” Or, as he once put it, “We need a painter’s eye to capture things only by color and distinguish them by color.” So much so, it turns out, he tried to discover forms through color. Although the same motif appears like an obsessive repetition, for Cezanne each painting was an attempt at a new start in search of a consistent depth, and his attempts forever changed the way we see objects. How do we look at scenes that seem to be repeated every day in front of us? Ultimately, it is up to us, a choice to change or maintain the way we see the world around us.
“These artists had not yet discovered that nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces. I can tell you, you can do things to the surface...but by going deep you automatically go to the truth. You feel a healthy need to be truthful. You'd rather strip your canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know.”
— Paul Cezanne, Cezanne: A Memoir with Conversations (1897–1906)
Words
Suzy Park
Suzy Park is an independent curator based in Seoul. She runs an exhibition agency called “AGENCY RARY”. She has worked as a curator at the independent culture space Agit; as editor-in-chief for B-art, a critical journal on arts and culture; a coordinator of the curatorial team of the Jeju Biennale 2017; and a curator for BOAN 1942, an art space in Seoul. She has curated exhibitions such as Seven Intellectuals (2020), Zoom Back Camera (2019), Siren Eun Young Jung: Foolish or Mannish (2018), Kim Jungheun X Joo Jaehwan: Pleasantly Bluntly (2018), and Minjung Art 2015: Freundschaft (2015). Park was also selected for the Korea Research Fellow 10x10 project (2018, 2019) and the Doosan Curator Workshop (2019).
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