Exhibit of Cézanne still lifes 1st of its kind

PHILADELPHIA – Any apple a day may keep the doctor away, but those by Cézanne are treasured apples of the eye.

On view through Sept. 22, "The World is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne" is a well-focused special exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, home to one of the greatest Cézanne (1839-1906) collections in the world.

This is the show's inaugural run and the only U.S. venue before traveling to the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, where it will be seen starting Nov. 1. Although the Canadian museum owns no works by Cézanne, it organized this groundbreaking exhibit to mark its centennial and raise its profile on the international stage.

This singular exhibition of 21 priceless still-life paintings was selected by Dr. Benedict Leca, director of curatorial affairs at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Several years ago, while at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Leca began plans for an exhibit about Cézanne's use of still life and collaborated with Judith F. Dolkart, then was the deputy director of art and chief curator at the Barnes. She is now the director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

The show, with works borrowed from 12 public and four private collections, is modest in size but grand in concept.

First of its kind

Before leaving her position in Philadelphia, Dolkart looked around the museum's Aileen and Brian Roberts Gallery and discussed how the extraordinary pieces "show the artist in a new way." She emphasized the genre of still life gave Cézanne "absolute creative control resulting from a series of creative acts: selection, arrangement, and painting."

The Barnes provides an incomparable context to showcase this late 19th-century master.

According to Dolkart, Dr. Albert Barnes began collecting Cézanne (a landscape and two prints) as early as 1912, just six years after the artist's death when he sent William Glackens on "the foundational Paris buying trip." Later, in December of that same year, Barnes personally bought his first still-life paintings by Cézanne. These three early purchases are now on view in rooms 2, 3 and 9 of the main museum.

Barnes ultimately acquired a distinguished group of 69 works by Cézann but none are in the temporary exhibit. Legally, none of the 16 Cézanne still-life paintings in the permanent collection can be taken out of the wall arrangements that were in place at the time of Dr. Barnes's death in 1951.

Unlike the sensory overload of the museum rooms, the special exhibition gallery is installed more like a gentle whisper with each work given adequate contemplative breathing space on warm off-white walls (Brandy Cream by Benjamin Moore).

Artistic superstar

"I want to astonish Paris with an apple," declared Cézanne, as the artist was gearing up for a groundbreaking and large solo exhibition at his dealer's gallery in 1895.

He deliberately challenged the art establishment by focusing on a lowly subject painted without the pristine rendering associated with academic tradition. Paul Sérusier, a contemporary Post-Impressionist artist, subsequently marveled: "Of an ordinary painter's apple you say, 'I could take a bite out of it.' ... Of an apple by Cézanne one says: 'How Beautiful!' "

In a career that spanned five decades, Cézanne produced nearly 300 still lifes along with hundreds of landscapes and figure compositions.

As a seminal figure of modern art, Cézanne is a revered superstar of art history. With no reservation, Pablo Picasso even referred to him as "my one and only master."

"Cézanne was like the father of us all," the Spanish artist asserted.

Cézanne's work is highly coveted, realizing unprecedented prices whenever a piece happens to surface in the art market. (In 2011, "Card Players" was purchased at a private sale for reportedly more than $250 million, the most expensive painting ever sold.)

"Cézanne gives professional artists and lay artists a license to be themselves," Leca added.

With his animated surfaces, viewers can relate to the painter's visible struggles that Leca described as "willful ineptitude." Back in 1915, Barnes recognized this authenticity and notably remarked: "I love his crudity ... his apparent lack of skill in the handicraft of painting, and the absolute sincerity of the man."

Although Cézanne typically didn't date works, the show is arranged chronologically from around the mid-1860s up to his death in 1906.

One of the earliest canvases on view is "Sugar Bowl, Pears, and Blue Cup," a dark composition of ordinary domestic objects whose thick, relief-like paint surface is rendered with the use of a palette knife not a brush. Cézanne contemporaneously reproduced this small canvas as a compelling detail in his father's portrait (exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.).

Within a decade, his colors lightened as seen in "Apples and Cakes," a rare signed painting. Moreover, the close-up tabletop arrangement of horizontal bands is a familiar ordering of his solidly dense fruit. Although the image is static, the gestural paint application animates the canvas surface.

Leca, in a catalog essay that accompanies the show, discussed Cézanne's "free, imaginative interplay of paint surface, form, and symbolic meaning."

Cézanne composed each still life with shims and other devices to create arrangements that might look deceptively random but were carefully set up. For example, "Vase of Flowers" is a fascinating play on 2-D versus 3-D. Here, levels of representation are blended in spatial complexity. The centrally placed vase fuses with its mirror reflection, while the "real" flowers are similar to those on the patterned carpet covering the tabletop. The artist was "working through formal and representational problems."

Similarly, in "Pitcher and Fruits on a Table," the rumpled drapery, jug, bowl and fruits on the left are a striking contrast to the composition's minimal right side.

His still-life paintings do evoke human presence with their seemingly casual arrangement of inanimate objects. Interestingly, this still life was once owned by Barnes, who had exchanged it for another Cézanne in 1936.

Leca also maintained that "Cézanne gave license to see still life as landscape."

Fred B. Adelson is a professor of art history at Rowan University.

IF YOU GO

"The World is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne" through Sept. 22 at the Barnes Foundation, Ben Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia. Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday; closed Tuesday. Visit barnesfoundation .org/exhibitions/cezanne or call (215) 278-7200.