Cezanne Enriches L.A. Landscape : Art Review: His brilliant, large-scale ‘Sous Bois’ ranks among the most important acquisitions in the history of the County Museum of Art.

It’s hard to get enough of Paul Cezanne. Often described as a modern Piero della Francesca, for the grave and durable monumentality that characterizes the otherwise very different paintings of both, his work can be a perceptual adventure of uncanny freshness--and of decided oddity.

There’s an apparent awkwardness to most everything Cezanne does. He builds shapes through relentless, parallel hatches of paint. Blunt, geometric forms emerge like steel girders beneath organic rhythms of the natural world. A peculiar palette, seemingly narrow and constricted, only slowly dissolves into a broad spectrum of color trembling just below the surface.

Yet, at his best, all these eccentricities are orchestrated into compositions of almost classical power and authority. Cezanne is a painter of weird grandeur and majesty.

“Sous Bois” (“Under the Trees”) deviates from this characterization in one significant but compelling way: This time the visceral sense of stable durability is held in vivid tension, by a volatile explosiveness rarely encountered in Cezanne’s art. Your eye is carefully sheltered beneath quiet pines in this sizable landscape painting, but the forest soon detonates and becomes dramatically alive.

The acquisition of “Sous Bois” ranks among the most important in the history of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Painted by one of the greatest and most influential of all Western artists, the landscape provides the final complement to the small still-life and figure paintings by Cezanne already in LACMA’s collection. An image of the countryside, it also joins LACMA’s great, slightly later urban landscape, “Place du Theatre Francais,” by Cezanne’s crucial mentor, Camille Pissarro. And within the artist’s stupendously challenging oeuvre, this rarely exhibited painting holds a very high place.

The vertical canvas is relatively large for Cezanne--nearly four feet in height and more than two and a half feet wide--and it’s in apparently excellent condition. The picture may have been painted in Aix-en-Provence, the southern town where the artist lived all his life, or perhaps in the Fontainebleau forest along the Seine south of Paris, where he frequently traveled.

Its exact date is unknown, although a painting of this brilliance is obviously a mature work. The museum currently estimates it at 1893, but there’s no question it was painted between 1882 and 1894. (Cezanne was born in 1839.) The earlier date marks the first time he showed at the Paris Salon, while his father’s death four years later had left Cezanne an estate sizable enough to allow him to concentrate solely on his painting, without regard for public reception to his art. “Sous Bois” is known to have been shown in an important 1895 exhibition organized by his legendary dealer, Ambroise Vollard.

The view Cezanne painted in “Sous Bois” is intimate but grand, a natural vista that seems paradoxically hammered together, as if a piece of architecture. Compositional elements are held in place by pitting structural forces against one another. Pine trees grow on a rather precipitous slope, which descends sharply to the right, in distinct counterpoint to the towering trees; they typically bend and lean to the left. At the top, branches of tall pines are knitted together, while their slender trunks carve out a radiantly palpable space below, as if forming the nave of a woodland cathedral.

In typical manner, Cezanne paints flat shapes, planes of color and linear elements that echo one another across the surface of the canvas. Visually, the shallow, lazy S-curve of a branch at the lower right metamorphoses through other limbs across the field, finally “growing” into the more dramatic, climactic bend of the largest tree at the left. This latter pine is flanked by ramrod-straight saplings, which create a perceptual cylinder of space around it.

The whole picture is assembled from complex arrangements such as this. The strangest device is a pair of crossed branches located smack in the visual center of the painting--a kind of X-marks-the-spot that rivets the wandering eye. It turns out to be a pictorial blast-site, around which explodes a dynamic, hatched cloud of greens, yellows, ochres, rusts, violets and silvery blues. Undulating shock waves ruffle outward through the overhead bower, while a centripetal rotation of visual force spins around the core.

It’s hard to think of another Cezanne landscape that is quite this powerfully energetic in its pictorial dynamism. “Sous Bois” shows nature, painting and individual perception to be an immensely intricate and lively trio, worthy of being valorized. Go see it for the intoxicating pleasures it yields, as well as for an incomparable indication of the foundations on which the volatile art of the early-20th Century would be built.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Building, 2nd level, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000. Closed Mondays.