|
Home
Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Barnes Foundation Museum
Cezanne Exhibit, Philadelphia
Esther Klein Art Center, Philadelphia
Falling Water Frank Lloyd Wright
Grounds for Sculpture Hamilton NJ
Jordan Griska Sculpture
Leroy Neiman Paintings
Postcard Art
|
Cezanne and Friends Exhibit
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Cezanne and Friends
Philadelphia Art Museum
Spring 2009
In this fascinating and whimsical presentation, Cezanne is revealed as the revolutionary he was and continues to be.
Cezanne's diverse body of work is composed alongside his contemporaries as well as subsequent generations of artists who used Cezanne as a springboard for their own interpretations. Each of these artists credits Cezanne with freeing their imaginations and allowing impressionism to be redefined for their own particular age.
Three examples stand out.
The first is Cezanne's Woman in a Red Armchair. Unlike previous generations of artists, Cezanne chose to highlight the form and color of the composition, rather than attempting a precise replication of the subject. Subsequent artists took this idea and ran with it. Picasso's Marie-Therese Walter, in a red armchair (The Dream) and Matisse's Woman in Blue are displayed adjacent to Cezanne's masterpiece and the references to Cezanne, which (to me at least) would not have been at all obvious, jump off the wall.
Other examples are the iconic compositions of fruit, especially apples and pears, so lovingly presented on plain or cloth covered tables by Cezanne. You could get lost looking at this fruit, the more you look at them, the more you see. I never noticed before the curator's audiotape narrative, how most of the glowing idealized fruit are precariously perched on the surfaces, as though they were about to fall off. Is this just an impressive display of perspective, or does it mean that Cezanne thought of all beauty as precarious or about to rot?
Lastly the sculptural paintings of the bathers dominate one whole room of the exhibit. Each of these paintings is instantly recognizable yet remain elusive in their meaning. Why are they all nude, and what are they looking at? The trees and figures are constructed in a triangle like a giant tree-lined arch. The bathers are at once relaxed and intense. How far away is the shore in the background? We can't tell. Our perspective, so clearly is outlined, is lost.
To make matters more confusing, there is the curator's juxtaposition of the playful Picasso sculpture beach scene placed in front of Cezanne's bathers paintings. Each geometric iron figure seems to dance on the metal shore, while Cezanne's beach goers seem to be waiting for the party to begin.
There is much more to be learned in the careful but playful grouping of artists. For me, for the first time, the progression of art from replicative, to impressionist, to abstract forms, over the generations has never been so clear. Clearly, Cezanne passed the brush with aplomb to his students and successors.
Read more about 'Cezanne and Beyond' in the
Wall Street Journal April 9 2009
|
|
|
keywords and tags: art, art sales, art reviews, museum reviews, galleries, gallery openings, modern art, impressionism, moma, museums, music reviews
|
