"Cézanne and Beyond' post-mortem (4th review)

Extended by two weeks, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Cézanne and Beyond" exhibition closed with the end of May after a three-month run. Frankly, I probably wouldn't have seen it without a last-minute invitation. With due acknowledgment of the financial constraints facing the PMA (and virtually every other arts organization in the city), the admission— $24 per person— was simply over the top, while the relentless advertising for the show that plastered the city was a daily reminder of the tribute that art pays to Mammon.

Cézanne I'd heard of, and some of his illustrious peers too. But who was this fellow "Advanta" who shared top billing with him all over town? Not a painter at all, as it turned out, but, embarrassingly enough, a bankrupt.

Other ironies abounded as well. Also on exhibit was Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic, a work for which the Museum (and the city) had recently paid the stupendously inflated price of $68 million, certainly the largest sum of money ever shelled out in Philadelphia for a work of art. To visit the Eakins, though, one needed to take a lengthy detour caused by Cézanne crowd control to a distant gallery with a half-dozen incurious spectators and nary a guard in sight. Not much of a return there. It's a good enough painting, of course, but not worth Cézanne's hangnail.

The Bathers next door

In the Cézanne show itself, there was a wall of his Bathers series, together with Picasso's sculptural hommage to it, a series of bronze figures that is his largest single artistic composition. A natural extension of this theme, and of the show itself, would have been a visit to the Barnes Foundation, which possesses a superb Bathers along with 68 other works by Cezanne. These (as well as many other works by Picasso, Matisse et al.) would have splendidly amplified and extended the show, and this could easily have been arranged by a shuttle bus.

But such an obvious synergy would have raised the question of why the PMA and the Barnes couldn't be connected by a regular shuttle, and that in turn the more vexed question of why the Barnes "needs" to move to Philadelphia at all, at a cost some now suggest may approach half a billion dollars.

"Cézanne and Beyond" was, actually, a very good show, once of the best the PMA has put on in years. But it could have been an incomparably richer one but for the necessity to pretend that the Barnes is not in fact already next door, but somewhere west of Cleveland.

An undisputed point, well argued

Enough has been written about the show to make an extended review superfluous at this juncture. Its point was that a great deal of the art of the 20th Century, particularly French and American art, was indebted to or inspired by Cézanne. This is certainly beyond dispute, but to see it so well argued and strikingly documented in works gathered from as far away as Moscow and St. Petersburg was to appreciate Cézanne's centrality anew.

Piet Mondrian, one of the artists represented by particularly fine early work, is quoted as saying: "Beauty in art is created not by objects of representation, but by the relationships of line and color." Such a remark could not have been made before Cézanne; after him, it is almost too obvious.

(The same thought of course struck Albert Barnes, which is why he collected more Cézannes than anyone else in the world. It would be decades, however, before Philadelphia caught up with him, an embarrassment for which he has yet to be forgiven.)

Unintentional moments of humor

The only problem with "Cézanne and Beyond" is that the Cézannes are so good that only the strongest art can stand up to them. This causes some unintentional moments of humor, as in Arshile Gorky's 1942 landscape of Staten Island, which looks laughably like Provence. And then there is Georges Braque's comment that he had deeply wanted to paint like Cézanne, but that if he had done so he would never have been Braque. Braque's an admirable painter, but one must wonder in what sense he accounted this a victory.

Perhaps the best room in the exhibit set off two portraits of Madame Cézanne (1877, 1886) against female portraits by Picasso and Matisse, including Picasso's painting of the sleeping Therese Walter, The Dream. Therese's cradled head is bifurcated into two planes, the top one of which, as my wife pointed out to me, represents a languid but expressive penis. I am obliged to say that I had failed to observe this in many years of admiring the work, but the comment was spot-on. I'll never see or think of it again without an enriched appreciation of just what Therese was dreaming about— or at least what Picasso wanted her to.

There's a fine small show tucked away in the Asian arts wing of the museum, by the way: "Peaks of Faith: Buddhist Art of the Himalayas," which includes exquisite pieces from Nepal, Tibet and Mongolia. It was an excellent palate rinse after Cézanne, and a reminder not only of the Museum's broad holdings but also of how satisfying a single well-constructed room can be. â—†


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Victoria Skelly, click here.