Paul Cezanne conquers the art world in Paris

By Kunang Helmi-Picard

PARIS (JP): A century ago Cezanne had to fight to gain recognition. Today people are fighting to get into his big retrospective show at the Grand Palais in Paris, the city where he spent part of his time barely subsisting on the allowance his father in Aix-en-Provence sent him.

Paul Cezanne did not dare to tell his rich father, who was a banker, that he already had a wife and a Paul Cezanne Junior in the capital city, where artists towards the end of last century were changing the face of painting in a radical fashion.

Born on Jan. 19, 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cezanne earned nothing substantial for years -- although he was forced to study law -- before making a modest break-through exactly one hundred years ago in the Galerie d'Ambroise Vollard.

Cezanne would have been most surprised to see how journalists as well as people who think they are VIPs -- and people who know they are VIPs -- wanted to be seen, and perhaps even glimpse a tiny bit of his work, at the gala opening that Princess Diana attended. He would perhaps remember how his first three paintings at the first joint exhibition of the impressionists in 1874 were pointedly ignored and he was comforted by Emile Zola, the famous writer and his best friend for a long time.

Although Cezanne was previously even refused entry to the School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1861, he is now considered the father of modern art, to whom Kandinsky, Leger, Picasso, the Fauves and the Cubists so assiduously paid homage. Picasso even stated: "Cezanne was my only and unique teacher; he was like a father for all of us."

The private viewing of his works on Monday became the event of the retrospective sponsored by a number of companies which includes Moet Hennesy, Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, and marked the beginning of the fall/winter season in this elegant city of the arts. How far removed it appears from Cezanne's beloved Provence with its sparse gray-green olive trees punctuating the landscape around mysterious Mount St. Victoire, which still towers over the various sites where the painter loved to work. As he described it to a friend in a letter: "Always the sky. In nature, things without boundaries never fail to attract me."

Covering 109 paintings, 42 aquarelles and 26 sketches, this show does not pretend to offer a particular interpretation or a novel vision of Cezanne's work since his last retrospective in 1936, yet it permits us to follow his evolution through five decades of creative work, from 1860 until 1900. Two major themes of the show are that of Mount St. Victoire seen from Lauves and The Bathers, with the exceptional presentation of two Grandes Baigneuses, one from the National Gallery of London and the other from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. the third version of the bathers, belonging to the Barnes Foundation, was exhibited at the Orsay Museum in 1993.

These works of art could be considered an essential part of Cezanne's artistic legacy, although they still appear enigmatic to on-lookers, as though they have yet to be completed by other paintings. Unfortunately, Cezanne died on Oct. 23, 1906, after catching a cold during a storm while painting outside Aix-en- Provence.

Flamboyant

The colors of Cezanne most frequently utilized to portray the landscape, and indeed, all other subjects were reduced to a palette of yellows (brilliant yellow, Naples yellow, chrome yellow, ochre yellow, Sienna earth color), reds (vermilion, ochre red, Sienna burnt earth, lacquered madderwort red, lacquered carmine, burnt lacquer), greens (Veronese green, emerald green, earth green) and blues (cobalt blue, sea green, Prussian green and peach black). This artist learned through copying old masters, as did most painters of his day, but then he discarded most of the accepted motifs and methods of paintings. He painted landscapes in the company of Pisarro in 1872 and 1873 and only the feeling counted while doing so. Thus even when painting apples, a favorite and recurrent theme, Cezanne's approach was bold and flamboyant, never academic.

However, he painted slowly and painfully, even, it was rumored, replacing real flowers with artificial ones because of this habit. Pisarro had influenced him to the extent of lighting up his palette of colors as mentioned above and also inducing him to observe the play of light and shadow more intensely.

Cezanne was never content with the results of his work and continued to treat nature in the landscapes by composing his future painting using the elementary forms of cylinders, spheres and cones, or changing his still-lifes by rearranging the elements, an architectural approach to painting. When painting even his wife, she lost all individuality and was reduced to Madame Cezanne in a striped skirt, Madame Cezanne in the yellow chair, or The Woman in Blue. He also painted at least 200 nudes in landscapes. Later on his nudes were structured even more so like geometric masses where it was difficult to recognize that he was painting human bodies. Paring down the motifs to the essential, he was thus announcing the later arrival of abstract expression in art.

For the curator of the show, Francois Cachin, the director of French museums, the six years taken to assemble the works after the final choice were necessary to understand the genius of this ever-improving creator and to realize that he not only announced future trends and movements in art, but that he was an artist in his own right.

"One is too used to regarding Cezanne's art through the eyes of Picasso, Matisse and many others who also claim to have been influenced by him," said Cachin.

For Cachin, it is evident that Cezanne was a perfectionist who cultivated a strong dislike for those who searched for easy success and for those who made a "career" out of painting. Treating this exhibition chronologically proved to be the most just way to expose his genius and the evolution of his work. It was fascinating to see his self-portraits, because he looked at himself without sentimentality, pleasure or interest. He observed himself as if he was looking at nature. Cezanne described himself as "an unhappy painter who was never capable of achieving anything at all."

Since it is now very rare for any painting of Cezanne's to reach the art market, it is obvious that we should seize this opportunity to see such a large selection of his work in Paris. We have until Jan. 7, 1996. Most of his oil paintings now hang in museums scattered all over the world or rest hidden in private collections. At a Christie's auction in London in November 1992, the oil painting The man with the Pipe topped 28 million francs and the watercolor Mount Sainte-Victoire seen from Lauves reached 11.4 million francs. At a Sotheby's auction in New York in March 1993, the Cezanne still-life The Big Apples fetched US$26 million.

Even for those among us who are able afford such prices, it is still difficult to find Cezanne works for sale. Others may be able to afford Gianfranco Ferre's creations for Dior, inspired by Cezanne, from the Autumn-Winter collection 1995-1996. These are more readily available. However, the easiest way is to book a flight to Paris together with a request for entry tickets to the show. Should that fail, there are at least twenty new books printed on Cezanne besides the catalog of the exhibition.

A trip to Aix-en-Provence in the sunny south of France next summer might also complete our understanding of this great painter who studied law but, luckily for us, never managed to practice it. There are several summer painting courses to be booked in the surroundings of Aix-en-Provence and summer residences are also available. The clear light and special vegetation covering the landscape of Provence were Cezanne's favorites and you are able to understand the origin of his art once you have observed and enjoyed it yourself. Although it is almost a century since Cezanne left this world, his paintings, water colors and drawings are a living testimony to his vision and genius.