Philadelphia Museum Exhibits Cezanne's Impact On Artists

Cezanne & Beyond (through May 17, 2009) will examine the seismic shift provoked by this pivotal figure, examining him as form-giver, catalyst, and touchstone for artists who followed. It will survey the development of an artistic vision that anticipated Cubism and fueled a succession of artistic movements, and will juxtapose Cezanne’s achievement with works by many who were inspired directly by him, showing a fluid interchange of form and ideas.

It will place his work in context with more recent artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Brice Marden, who in quite different ways came to terms with the master of Aix-en-Provence. His profound impact on successive generations endures to the present day. The exhibition will present more than 150 works, including a large group of paintings, watercolors and drawings by Cezanne, along with those of 18 later artists.

The works will be drawn from public and private collections around the world, including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It will be seen only in Philadelphia.

Cezanne and Beyond is made possible by ADVANTA.

Additional funding is provided by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, The Florence Gould Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Fund for Scholarly Publications, the National Endowment for the Arts, and an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Promotional support is provided by NBC 10 WCAU, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, Philly.com, Amtrak, the Philadelphia Visitors and Convention Bureau and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation.

The artists included, in chronological order, are Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Marsden Hartley, Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Charles Demuth, Max Beckmann, Liubov Popova, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, and Jeff Wall, Sherrie Levine, and Francis Alys.

The exhibition is organized by Joseph J. Rishel, The Gisela and Dennis Alter Curator of European Painting before 1900, in collaboration with Philadelphia Museum of Art colleagues, including the late Director Anne d’Harnoncourt, and Kathy Sachs, Adjunct Curator, Michael Taylor, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, and Carlos Basualdo, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art. They are joined by a group of international scholars who have both advised on the selection and contributed to the catalogue. “The exhibition is about the pleasures of experiencing the interaction of artistic ideas in a creative dialogue across a continuum,” Rishel said. “The installation will juxtapose works from the past and present, with Cezanne as the generative pivot. Rather than charting a chronology of influence, we are especially interested in examining artistic ideas in motion, extended, reformulated, and transmuted by the hands of different artists. I’d like to think that the viewer will be able to experience it in a completely non-linear way, always circling around to Cezanne.”

All of the artists in the exhibition have acknowledged Cezanne’s profound impact on their work. When Henri Matisse (1869-1954) donated his Cezanne painting of Three Bathers to the Petit Palais in 1936, he wrote: “in the 37 years I have owned this canvas, I have come to know it quite well, though not entirely, I hope; it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance…” Picasso (1881-1973) in his long and varied artistic career often used Cezanne as a lever in his critical shifts, from his Self-Portrait with Palette, through to the lyricism of La Reve, and onto his later examination of bathing subjects both as painting and sculpture. Braque, who with Picasso used Cezanne as his principle touchstone early on, spent time at several of Cezanne’s painting locations. For him “it was more than an influence, it was an initiation.”

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), who was drawn especially to the formal structure achieved by Cezanne, brings an analysis of Cezanne to an abstract conclusion, as reflected in his own words “... that beauty in art is created not by the objects of representation, but by the relationships of line and color.” “Cezanne taught me the love of form and volumes,” Fernand Leger (1881-1955) once remarked, and “the power of Cezanne was such that, to find myself, I had to go to the limits of abstraction.” In Russia, Liubov Popova (1889-1924) discovered Cezanne in the Moscow collections of Morosov and Shchukin and drew from him the pleasures of geometric fragmentation, which swiftly moved to pure abstraction.

In the United States, as modernism gathered force, members of the Stieglitz circle, especially Charles Demuth (1883-1935) and Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), became fascinated with Cezanne. Demuth’s still life compositions in particular show a deep connection to Cezanne’s bold late watercolors. In his autobiography, Hartley noted that Cezanne offered “ideas that were to make the world of painting over again and give modernism its next powerful start,” adding that “there is no modern picture that has not somehow or other been built upon these new principles.” Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) studied Cezanne closely, and the exhibition reflects his keen engagement with Cezanne’s style, especially in the mid to late-1920s. Gorky affectionately referred to the French artist as “Papa Cezanne” and even in his later abstractions there is a profound sense of the lesson of Cezanne.

Later, looking back on his career, Max Beckmann said: “my greatest love already in 1903 was Cezanne.” He “revere[d] Cezanne as a genius” throughout his life, looking particularly at the dark, emotional early works and the heavy black outlining of some of Cezanne’s figures. In Italy, Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) first saw Cezanne images in books in 1909 and then in person in exhibitions in Venice and Rome. His path as an artist of both still lifes and landscapes was set. Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was introduced to Cezanne by his painter father, but had to wait until the Venice Biennale of 1920 to see his work face-to-face. For him the attraction was the sense of process rather than arrival. Cezanne is firmly linked to an existential sense of doubt and anxiety that permeates Giacometti’s explorations of objects and people in space through two or three dimensions.

In this sense Giacometti is akin to Jasper Johns (b. 1930), for whom Cezanne has been a continuous point of reference and has served over the years as a sort of eminence. The exhibition presents numerous works by Johns that make overt and oblique references to Cezanne, including drawings inspired by Cezanne’s bathers and paintings of figures that are referenced in Johns through such works as the Seasons and In the Studio. Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923) first discovered Cezanne as a student in Boston and is quick to explain that Cezanne is often at play in his art making. Kelly’s exploration of the relationships between form and color, figure and ground, take on an immediacy and constancy for our understanding of both artists. Brice Marden (b. 1938) commented “that Cezanne almost made the perfect painting.” In Marden’s own works, Cezanne’s pursuit of an essentially unobtainable goal of distillation, often through repetitions on the same motif, is a shared journey.

The exhibition places substantial emphasis on artists of the present day, including long established masters such as Kelly, Johns, Marden, and Jeff Wall (b.1946), and younger artists responding to the idea of the show such as Francis Alys and Sherrie Levine. Wall’s magnificent light box photographs show that Cezanne’s influence transcends the medium of painting. While working in an entirely different medium, the photographer Wall is a life long admirer of Cezanne either through direct quotations or more often through implied transgressive references.

“Our purpose is first to display the continuing vitality of Cezanne as an artistic resource five generations on,” added Rishel. “Of equal importance in our endeavor is to illustrate the unfolding reality that a different Cezanne has evolved for each generation, defined by what artists have made of him and passed along to those who came after. It is a continuing story.”

During the preparation for the exhibition, Anne d’Harnoncourt, the Museum’s late Director, said: “Cezanne is a rare artist whose work touched so many artists and contributed to shape a broad spectrum of talents and who, remarkably, continues to find fresh resonance today. Philadelphia, like Aix, has long been a major destination for Cezanne lovers because the Museum and the Barnes Foundation hold such comprehensive collections of his work. This exhibition presents an opportunity to fully appreciate both Cezanne’s art and its impact over time, offering visitors the experience of participating in the extraordinary conversation among artists that has engaged many of the major talents of the last century.” -- www.philamuseum.org