Last week I attended “Cezanne and Beyond” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I have been thinking about it ever since.  It is only now that I’m beginning to see the deeper message of this exhibition – That in opening our eyes to see things differently, art can free us to be truly ourselves.

 

At the exhibit, I ran into three of my friends, including one professional artist and one talented amateur.  This is actually not so much of a coincidence as you might think.

 Paul Cezanne has often been called “an artist’s artist.”  A posthumous retrospective of his work at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 was a watershed event in the history of art. The immediate impact of this large presentation of his work on the young artists of Paris was profound, and his influence continues today to contemporary artists like Jeff Wall.  Cezanne is known for his use of the cylinder, sphere and cone, the weighty, almost sculptural look of the paint.  Rejecting the single-viewpoint perspective of previous artists, Cezanne often incorporates more than one point of view into the same painting, tipping up the floor, or showing people out of proportion to their surroundings.  Both Picasso and Matisse have been credited with the remark that Cézanne "is the father of us all."  The 20^th century Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky called him, “the greatest artist, shall I say, that has lived.” Over the years, Cezanne has become something of a specialty for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  PMA, which hosted a blockbuster Cezanne retrospective some years ago, is the home of several important Cezannes, including the large Bathers (another version of which hangs in the Barnes Foundation in Merion PA, only a few miles away). 

  

 

 

 

This year, PMA returns to the subject of Cezanne to explore the master’s influence on artists as disparate as Picasso, Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Liobuv Popova, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Wall, Jasper Johns and others, many of whom expressed their admiration for Cezanne and several of whom actually owned paintings by Cezanne. According to PMA, “This exhibition features forty paintings and twenty watercolors and drawings by Cézanne, displayed alongside works by several artists for whom Cézanne has been a central inspiration and whose work reflects, both visually and poetically, Cézanne’s extraordinary legacy.   Based on the remarkable resources of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, both in its holdings of major works by Cézanne and in its large collections of early modernist works—thanks to A. E. Gallatin and Louise and Walter Arensberg—this show is a unique occasion to experience the continuing impact of this influential painter.” Many artists imitated Cezanne’s subject matter and composition.  Many learned to see differently, to see in shapes and forms, to play with perspective, shading, and point of view, so that while many artists may be influenced by Cezanne, they each paint in their own unique way. 

  

 

  In this portrait of his wife, Cezanne placed her in a red chair.  Having sat for this portrait for many hours, she appears still and resigned, leaning against the arm of the chair.  Her dress appears as flat as the wallpaper behind her, but her head is a sphere, and she sits in the deep cave-like hollow of the chair. 

 

 

 

 

Matisse painted a similar subject, a woman in a red chair.  This image feels lighter and flatter, an impossibly fantastic dress with the face of a woman on top.

   

In The Dream, Picasso also places a woman in a red chair, but this woman is all curves, her dress sliding off her shoulder in a languid manner. Each of these three great masters has re-imagined Cezanne’s woman in the red chair. Here’s another comparison: 

 

 

According to my reading, Cezanne owned a photo of a male bather.  This photo (above, not in the PMA exhibition) became the model for male figures that appear in many of Cezanne’s paintings, most importantly this Large Bather.  Cezanne’s male bather is like a mythical creature, a giant stepping over the landscape.  His body has weight and muscles but his torso is distorted, his feet huge, one nipple out of proportion. 

  

 

This painting had a huge influence, including on Marsden Hartley, who painted this Yankee Lumberjack.  Hartley’s bather is an obvious homage to Cezanne, same pose, hands on hips, also monumental in comparison to his surroundings.  But this is a more sensual male bather, a happy man on a pink beach surrounded by playful clouds. 

  

 

 

 

Lastly here’s my favorite comparison, and perhaps the one that touched me the most deeply.  In The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque from 1885, Cezanne shows a view of the bay from above the slanted roofs of the village.  The bay itself is a flat blue shape, nearly triangular and seemingly vertical in front of us. 

 

 

   

The contemporary artist Ellsworth Kelly (born 1923) gazed at Cezanne's painting many times in the Art Institute of Chicago.  He painted this homage to the painting, in which he has distilled that simple shape of the bay to its essence.  Gone are the roofs and trees and even the mountains in the distance -- The triangle of the bay is all that matters.

      

Ellsworth Kelly has said, “Cezanne tackled and conceptualized the three-dimensional world in terms of its underlying structure and out uncertain relationships to it.” Looking at these two paintings side-by-side, I began to see how Kelly got from the landscape to his blue canvas.  But it wasn’t until I got home and pondered, that I thought about how Cezanne – simply by leading them to perceive the world in a different way -- freed so many artists who came after him, not to imitate, but to take Cezanne’s sense of binocular vision, shape and shadow and re-imagine the world, each in their own way. 

And maybe this applies not just to the visual arts but also to literature, music, and philosophy – even interpersonal relationships.  That imitating others whom we admire is not enough.  That only if we can ask questions, look at things from another perspective, see deeply, can we be free to be truly ourselves.