Cézanne’s influence was strongest during the generation after he died, but it has proved remarkably persistent. Only now, a century later, when electronic media such as photography and video have wrested control of the vanguard from painting, is Cézanne’s shadow beginning to fade.
However, until mid-May he continues to display his authority at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has mounted an enchanting exhibition designed to validate the claims of Picasso, Matisse and 14 other legatees whose art has been shaped by Cézanne’s example.
“Cézanne and Beyond”juxtaposes about 60 paintings and watercolours by the French master with roughly twice that many by the others: Europeans such as Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Max Beckmann and Alberto Giacometti, and Americans—Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly.
The aim is to illuminate stylistic similarities and show how Cézanne expanded the way artists think. Confronted by such iconic subjects as Mont St Victoire near Cézanne’s home in Aix-en-Provence and his magisterial still lifes of apples, they could no longer simply reproduce nature, they had to deconstruct it. The cubists provide the most vivid examples of this transformation but the most contemporary of the 16, especially Mr Kelly, Brice Marden and Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, have devised more subtle ways of incorporating Cézanne’s principles into their work.
“Cézanne and Beyond”is a beautiful and powerful collection of modern and post-modern art by some of the most talented painters of the past 100 years. It is also the most impressive survey of Cézanne’s painting in America since a 1996 retrospective, (also in Philadelphia as well as London and Paris). This time it is three exhibitions in one, courtesy of the last old Master.