Artistic modernism, of course, did not spring fully formed from Cezanne’s head. The French post-impressionist further developed trends already evident in the work of predecessors and contemporaries such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Signac, and Georges Seurat. But Cezanne went further, moving away from the use of line, texture, and color to reflect our visual perceptions and instead using them as tools for representing what he believed to be the inner truths behind these perceptions. We see in the paintings of Cezanne, more clearly than in the work of any other impressionist or post-impressionist, the seeds of Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, and Joan Miro. It is thanks to this revolution that Cezanne helped bring about, a revolution that synthesized Renaissance artists’ interest in mathematical precision with the impressionists’ and post-impressionists’ concerns with subjectivity, that his place in the history of modern art is assured.
Cezanne’s reputation rests on his paintings, including his popular paintings of card players, his famous series of still lifes of apples, and his even more famous cycle of paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire in Aix-en-Provence. Far lesser known yet also rather significant in their own right are Cezanne’s multitudinous drawings. Though they are not all as sublime and splendidly executed as his paintings, their sheer number, and the time and attention that Cezanne clearly devoted to them, mean that it would be a mistake to ignore them when considering his legacy. The Museum of Modern Art in New York’s exhibit “Cezanne Drawing,” on display now through Sept. 25, ensures that no viewer of this show will ever be guilty of this error again.
“Cezanne Drawing” is a methodical, narrowly focused exhibition three years in the making, organized by MoMA curators Jodi Hauptman and Samantha Friedman. From it, we learn that Cezanne drew nearly every day and that he was just as capable of creating compelling works of art with pencil and paper as he was with paints and brushes. Like his paintings, Cezanne’s drawings showcase an artist meticulously observing man and nature while attempting to depict them conceptually rather than representationally. They display the tension, present throughout his work, between representation and abstraction, as well as his pioneering ability to depict the various dimensions of space not through Renaissance-style perspective but through an almost shocking flatness.
In Cezanne’s pencil-and-ink sketch Deux etudes de baigneurs (Two Studies of Bathers, 1872-75), a more conventional drawing from his art school years, we see how he began to break free from the impressionism of his former artistic heroes, such as Camille Pissarro, and move toward proto-abstract ways of depicting the human figure. Although from a distance it appears that these two standing male nudes are drawn in the precise, geometrically accurate manner of much post-Renaissance art, a closer look reveals that Cezanne, instead of using straight, solid, single lines, uses winding, repeating, and multiple lines. Here we see the artist not as confident constructor but as hesitant searcher, probing for a different, more dynamic way of articulating forms and space.
Cezanne’s experimental, investigative nature is also on view here in his 1877-81 sketches Page of Studies, Including a Portrait of Goya. This series of disembodied faces and limbs reveals an artist thinking through drawing, clarifying his conceptions about form and space through repetition, returning again and again to his sketchbook to draw forms and figures he has already sketched before. Cezanne’s style of experimenting through repetition would reach its high-water mark later, in 1904-1906, with his famous series of richly colored oil paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. But it was in sketchbooks such as this one and in other series of sketches displayed here, such as his sensual 1875-78 After the Cupid Attributed to Puget and 1875 miniature At the Edge of the Pond, that he began to cultivate the techniques that would enable him to scale the artistic heights of painting.
“Cezanne Drawing” is advertised as an exhibit on Cezanne’s sketches, so we come expecting to see a good deal of work solely in black and white. Still, the relative paucity of color is jarring, like buying a ticket to a Roger Federer practice session and finding out that he’ll only be working on second serves. Color was crucial for Cezanne in his attempts to help instigate a Copernican revolution in Western art, and an exhibit that gives us only a diminished look at his color cannot help but feel diminished in turn. Nonetheless, “Cezanne Drawing” is a valuable contribution to our understanding of Cezanne’s development as an artist, and therefore of the development of modern art as a whole.
