Return of the Master : Cezanne Retrospective in His Homeland Is the First of Its Kind in Nearly 60 Years

Paul Cezanne was already 56 years old, laboring in obscurity, when a gallery owner here took a chance a century ago by staging a major exhibition of his work. The art expertssniffed in disdain. One said the paintings showed “an empty soul.”

But the young artists of the day were thunderstruck. “He is a sort of good God of painting,” Henri Matisse would later say. “It is his work that gives me faith.”

Now, almost 90 years after Cezanne’s death, the man known as the father of modern painting is at the center of the art event of the Paris season: A retrospective--the first of its kind in the world since 1936--of 109 Cezanne paintings, 42 watercolors and 26 drawings. It opens Saturday.

French officials estimate that 600,000 people will see the show at the Grand Palais before Jan. 7, 1996, when it moves to the Tate Gallery in London, and, later, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

That attendance would rival the two most popular recent Paris exhibitions--works of Renoir and Manet.

“This exhibition is important for the entire world,” said Francoise Cachin, director of French museums and organizer of the show. “He’s the last of the great artists of this period who has not had a retrospective for more than half a century. It was urgent to do it.”

The exhibition has been greeted with the kind of anticipation and attention reserved for only the most spectacular Paris events. Dozens of magazines and newspapers have devoted page after page to the exhibition, celebrating Cezanne’s work and his influence on later artists. The articles also frankly remind the French of the way Cezanne was ignored and unappreciated through most of his life by the art experts, intellectuals and critics of his time.

“Cezanne, the Misunderstood,” read a headline this week on the front page of Le Figaro, the largest Paris daily newspaper. Referring to the hoopla surrounding this exhibition, the paper wrote: “So much noise around this man who so much loved silence, so many commemorations celebrating the most discreet of painters. Cezanne would never have asked for this.”

The exhibition will bring together paintings from Russia, South America, the United States and France. It includes many, though not all, of Cezanne’s best-known works. “Many were just too difficult to obtain,” Cachin said. “Some collectors don’t want to lend their paintings because the collectors are very old and they cannot imagine parting with them for a year.

“We could not have everything, but we have some very fine ones,” she added. “Some of these paintings haven’t been seen by the general public since the beginning of the century and are known only through reproductions.”

The most important paintings include two versions of “Les Grandes Baigneuses,” one from the Philadelphia museum and the other from the National Gallery in London. They will be reunited for the first time since they left Cezanne’s studio in 1904, two years before his death. (The third, in the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, was unavailable for the exhibition, though it was on display with others from the Barnes collection at the Musee d’Orsay in 1993.)

Cezanne is one of the most closely studied artists of his generation. He rarely signed and never dated his paintings. Yet his influence was profound. After his death, as his works began to be shown across Europe, they greatly influenced the Fauve painters, including Matisse; the Cubists, such as Pablo Picasso; and most other advanced art of the early part of this century.

Cezanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, where he went to school and became friends with the French novelist Emile Zola. Both boys, inspired by a love of the classics, vowed to devote their lives to art.

But when Zola began his literary career, Cezanne studied law, then, at the behest of his father, tried to manage the family bank. He was a failure as a banker and was allowed to settle in Paris, where he began painting. It was there that Cezanne became known as one of the more revolutionary of the young painters, a bitter critic of official art.

In Paris, he met Camille Pissarro, one of the foremost Impressionists, and painted with him at Auvers, assimilating the Impressionist principles of color and lighting and broadening them with his own vision. He also became friends with others in that group, including Manet.

But he remained an outsider artistically, and his work was consistently rejected by the official galleries.

When his parents died, a large inheritance gave him the freedom to devote himself to art, without the need of buyers for his work. His only goal then “was to carry out the highest level of artistic creation,” said Cachin, the French museum official.

He moved back to the family home in Aix. He remained there for most of the last 20 years of his life, concentrating on basic subjects, including still lifes, studies of bathers (based on a male model because of his legendary reluctance to use female nude models) and views of the Mt. Sainte Victoire, a landmark visible from his studio.

In fact, Cezanne seemed to maintain his sense of purpose despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of popular attention. The story is told of how he used to sit in the back of the church in Aix-en-Provence, far from the village dignitaries in the front pews. Asked by a joking friend if he didn’t worry that he’d be poorly placed in heaven, too, he was said to have replied: “No, because up there, they know that I am Cezanne.”

Although outspoken as a youth, he became a solitary, analytically minded man later in life, confident in his art, despite the lack of acclaim. While in Aix, he became virtually unknown in the larger art circles of Paris. A small group of enthusiastic admirers, however, showed his paintings in other European countries. Finally, in 1904, another retrospective of his work in Paris won wide praise, giving him a small taste of the fame that would await his paintings after his death, two years later at age 67.