Cezanne at Tate Modern
Paul Cezanne. The Basket of Apples, c. 1893.
In 1933 the young Kenneth Clark was travelling in France and was offered about fifty drawings and watercolours by Cezanne by a Paris dealer, on behalf of Cezanne’s son. “They cost me much less than a modest motor car,” he wrote to the American writer Edith Wharton. Nearly 90 years later, Tate Modern’s Cezanne exhibition has just opened this week, confirming his reputation as one of the great artists of the late 19th century. Fifty drawings and watercolours today would cost rather more than the £350 that Clark spent (equivalent to almost £28,000 today).
The exhibition (curated jointly with the Art Institute of Chicago) opens with two paintings: a self-portrait from the 1870s and a basket of apples from c. 1893. The next room is called, “Becoming ‘Cezanne’.” We immediately know what this means. How did Cezanne’s work become so recognisable: those colours, the distinctive shades of green, blue and brown; the distinctive landscapes, still-lives and bathers; and, above all, that place in art history, the bridge between Impressionism and Cubism?
Perhaps just as interesting are the hints of the other artist Cezanne might have been. There’s an early painting, The Murder (1867-60), which in subject matter is more like something from a novel by his schoolfriend Zola than what we think of as a Cezanne: in style it is completely unrecognisable, with its dark sky and large violent figures. It is a reminder of an even earlier painting, The Autopsy (1869) – in the catalogue but not in the exhibition — also with three large figures against a black background and a grim subject. There is nothing else like these paintings in the exhibition.
There is yet another painting by Cezanne which looks quite unlike the paintings that made Cezanne so famous. It’s also from the late 1860s, a still life called Sugar Bowl, Pear, and Blue Cup (1865-70), and unlike the other still lives from that period, the paint is remarkably thick and shiny with varnish. It’s the only painting of its kind in the exhibition. Another direction Cezanne didn’t take.
Room 3 is called “Radical Times” and includes an early painting with a small, almost imperceptible detail – the French flag, red, white and blue. It is a reminder of the politically volatile times the young Cezanne was living through in Paris in the 1860s: the run-up to defeat in war, the end of the Second Empire and the Paris Commune. Might the artist have taken a more political turn during the Third Republic?
There is another turn Cezanne might have taken. In 1861 he moved from Aix-en- Provence, where he grew up, to Paris where he became a close friend of Camille Pissarro, with whom he regularly painted during the 1870s, and exhibited with the Impressionists. They were all contemporaries, from the generation born in the late 1830s and ’40s: Cezanne and Sisley were born in 1839, Monet in 1840, Renoir in 1841, Pissarro, Manet and Degas all born in the 1830s. More important, Cezanne took part in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and in the third in 1877. And most important of all, he won their admiration. Monet, who collected the largest body of Cezanne’s works by any artist-collector, said, “Cezanne, he’s the greatest of us all.” Cezanne might have become an Impressionist — but he didn’t. He struck out in a very different direction. Instead, Cezanne became Cezanne.
His palette is immediately distinctive. Rilke noted that Cezanne used sixteen shades of blue that he mixed himself and one of the most interesting rooms in the exhibition shows the palettes he used. One of the chapters in the catalogue, “‘A Harmony Parallel to Nature’: Color, Form, and Space in Cezanne’s Watercolours and Oil Paintings”, is particularly interesting about Cezanne’s techniques and use of colour, the ways in which he laid down paint, graphite, and watercolour. “In the works we analysed,” the authors write, “Cezanne’s method of building volume and space through patches and strokes of colour was distinctively methodical and cumulative. He densely layered watercolour to gradually develop colour and form, allowing layers to dry before superimposing more paint.”
It’s not just the distinctive colours Cezanne used that define his work, the authors write. It’s also the very distinctive use of brush strokes. As they point out about one still life, “The artist applied the red lake in quick, zigzagging and linear strokes that animate the space around the apples…” Similarly, they write about his use of blue paint in his late watercolour, Pistachio Tree at Chateau Noir (c.1900), “the artist added a network of short, narrow strokes of cobalt blue, along with yellow ochre, to convey the volume of the limbs [of the tree].” As the Director of Tate Modern and the President and Director of the Art Institute of Chicago write in their Foreword to the catalogues, the “seemingly unsophisticated approach to colour, technique, and materials” is anything but. It was his fellow artists who were among the first to appreciate what Cezanne was doing with colour and form that was so original.
This is what fundamentally distinguishes Cezanne from the Impressionists and their fleeting effects of light. The patches of colour, especially greens and browns, are not figurative. They are almost abstract. This is what makes Cezanne’s late work such an important link between late 19th century Impressionism and early 20th century abstraction and why he had such an impact on artists like Picasso and Matisse. It was his innovative use of colour and composition that astonished them. That’s why Picasso called Cezanne, “my one and only master…He was the father of us all. He was the one who protected us.” Matisse owned one of Cezanne’s paintings of bathers. “In the thirty-seven years I have owned this canvas,” he said, “… it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist.” This language is astonishing and suggests how important Cezanne was for the generation of great Modernist painters who followed him. In the Tate Modern catalogue there is a fascinating list of the Impressionists who bought Cezanne’s work, from Degas, Gauguin and Manet to Monet and Renoir, followed by later artists such as Picasso and Matisse, Henry Moore and Jasper Johns.
Perhaps this is the finest tribute of all to Cezanne. He was the artists’ artist, recognised as one of the greatest figures in modern art by the people who really matter: other great artists.
Cezanne will be shown at Tate Modern from 5 October until 12 March 2023.
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