Cezanne Exibition in Paris
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Maurer) wrote:
> Hello,
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>
> Someone has seen the Cezanne exibition in Paris ?
> Comments will be appreciated.
>
>
> Olivier Maurer
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> Olivier Maurer oma...@ibm.net
> IsabelDeco Gallery - http://www.pandemonium.fr/isabeldeco
> (Old Master and Impressionist Reproduction Oil Paintings)
Subj: Cezanne Exhibit in Paris, 9/95 95-09-28 11:45:40 EDT
From: Laura Mars
Subj: A century later, Cezanne takes Paris by storm
Date: Thu, Sep 28, 1995 8:43 AM EDT
From: News...@aol.net
By Paul Taylor
PARIS (Reuter) - A century after the French art
establishment belatedly discovered him, Paul Cezanne is about to
take Paris by storm in a riot of color.
A sense of guilt surrounds the giant retrospective of 109
paintings, 42 watercolors and 26 drawings opening Saturday at
the Grand Palais, which runs until Jan. 7, when it moves on to
London's Tate Gallery and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Guilt that Cezanne received so little recognition during his
lifetime; guilt that the last full exhibition of his life's work
dates back to 1936; and guilt that Cezanne has been admired less
for his own genius than as ``the father of modern art.''
``Too often, we have forgotten that he was not just a
precursor but a great artist in his own right. We have become
too accustomed to seeing him through Picasso, Matisse and the
many others who claimed to be his heirs,'' said Francoise
Cachin, curator of the exhibition.
Heralded by fanfares of magazine supplements, posters and
documentaries and accompanied by a multi-media merchandising
campaign, the Paris show should finally lay to rest the cliche
of Cezanne as a pre-Cubist painter of apples and oranges.
On display are not only those all-too-familiar still lifes
and celebrations of the rugged landscapes around his native
Aix-en-Provence, but also dark, brooding early images of murder
and rape and uncompromising portraits and self-portraits.
They illustrate not only the breadth of Cezanne's subject
matter and constantly evolving style, but also the perfectionism
with which he wrestled to depict the essence of nature.
``The limitless beauties of nature attract me,'' he wrote to
a friend. ``One must see nature as no one has seen it before.''
In another letter, he talked of wanting to portray nature
through the eye of a child.
He pursued this single-minded, lonely quest to his death in
1906, striding out each day to set up his easel in the quarries
and mountains of his youth.
As his art progressed, his compositions became increasingly
geometrical and symbolic. He tore out of the strait-jacket of
perspective, his subjects merging with the drapes, frames and
wallpapers of the artist's studio.
Poplars became vertical force lines, quarries bristled with
the raw power of hewn ochre stone.
In his latter years, Cezanne deserted the soft, domesticated
countryside of Auvers-sur-Oise in northern France entirely for
the starker, more dramatic Provencal landscape of his youth.
He painted and repainted the jagged rock of the Montagne
Sainte-Victoire, reduced to a primitive, triangular mass,
towering over a Provencal scene of cypress and pine trees, roofs
and roads chiselled into dazzling patchworks of color.
<continued in the next post------->
> ----------------------------------------------------------
Subscriber
> Hello,
>
>
> Someone has seen the Cezanne exibition in Paris ?
> Comments will be appreciated.
>
>
> Olivier Maurer
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> Olivier Maurer oma...@ibm.net
> IsabelDeco Gallery - http://www.pandemonium.fr/isabeldeco
> (Old Master and Impressionist Reproduction Oil Paintings)
> ----------------------------------------------------------
His giant canvases of nude bathers became thickly textured
near-abstract compositions of chunky female bodies sloping in
rhythm with diagonal tree-trunks beneath blue-grey skies.
The Paris exhibition offers 13 versions of bathers and seven
of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, enabling visitors to follow the
development of his art.
In Cezanne's writings and in the words of his admirers, the
search for purity is a constant theme.
Quotations line the corridors between exhibition rooms.
In 1903, he wrote with characteristic humility: ``I have
made some progress. But why so late and so painfully? Is art
some sort of priesthood that demands total devotion from the
pure?''
Paul Gauguin called his works ``marvels of a fundamentally
pure art which one never tires of looking at.''
A banker's son who dedicated his life to painting despite
the disapproval of his father and the derision of most of his
contemporaries, Cezanne painted himself with an unindulgent eye.
His self-portraits stress the glaring, red-rimmed eyes,
quizzically arched eyebrows and unruly, pointy beard.
The American artist Mary Cassatt, who met him in 1894,
described his frightening appearance as ``like a highwayman.''
The historical pretext for this year's exhibition is the
centenary of Cezanne's first Paris show, when the art merchant
Ambroise Vollard recognized the grumpy recluse's achievement at
the age of 56, only a decade before he died.
Although Cezanne was admired by some of the great literary
and artistic figures of his age, he managed to fall out with
many of them and remained a confirmed loner.
His works were repeatedly refused entry to Paris art fairs.
As late as 1902, France refused him a legion d'honneur medal.
The writer Emile Zola was a childhood friend and figured in
one of Cezanne's early paintings, but they quarrelled when the
artist was offended by a transparent depiction of him as a
failed painter in the 1886 novel ``L'Oeuvre.''
Cezanne frequented the Impressionists but refused to let
them tame him. He was a good friend of Camille Pissarro, whom he
had met as a 22-year-old art student at the Academie Suisse.
Impressionism lightened his palette but he soon found it
unsatisfactory, superficial and ephemeral.
He cited Monet and Renoir as the only living painters he did
not despise, but he grumbled: ``Monet is only an eye.''
After Cezanne's death, the artist Maurice Denis quoted him
as having said: ``I wanted to make Impressionism into something
solid and durable, like the art in museums.''
In an effort to reduce the expected stampede to see the art
event of the year organisers have reserved the first four hours
each day for prior bookings.
Visitors can book by telephone, on France's Minitel computer
network or through travel agents.
^REUTER@