Cezanne’s Unifying Force

Cezanne is a marker at the crossroads. He’s the great synthesizer in late 19th century painting, whose often modestly scaled pictures weave together contradictory threads. The magnificent retrospective of his ruthlessly demanding landscapes, still lifes and portraits, currently packing in crowds at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, lays out the myriad ways he did it.

If the past comes together in Cezanne’s art, though, great chunks of the future also loom large. You can’t look at a Picasso or Matisse or at much of German Expressionism in the 1910s without catching within them at least a glimpse--and usually more--of the earlier paintings made by the reclusive banker’s son from Aix-en-Provence. The scale of the Frenchman’s achievement is such that his death in 1906, at age 67, let 20th century art be born.

Not the least of the artist’s triumphs was his reconciliation of an inescapable dilemma for Modern cultural life. In a newly secular age, how could a painter grapple with big moral themes hitherto addressed in Western art through Christian religious imagery? Cezanne found a way.

In the 1860s Courbet and Manet had dismantled, once and for all, the long-established conventions of traditional religious painting. Show me an angel and I’ll paint one, Courbet famously challenged, while Manet bluntly depicted the “Dead Christ With Angels” as a gathering of the most mortal of flesh-and-blood creatures.

Impressionism wasn’t the secular answer to the new problem--no matter how many times Monet painted the transient light playing across the imposing facade of Rouen Cathedral. But Impressionism was a key to unlocking Cezanne’s developing aesthetic. The time he spent at Pontoise working at the side of Camille Pissarro in 1872 opened wide the door to his subsequent accomplishment.

Cezanne laid the groundwork for a style that would be as revolutionary for Modern art as one-point perspective had been for the Renaissance. He lightened his palette, broke up his heavy-handed brush strokes and divided his colors to create a more controlled and subtle surface. He began to paint in broken planes of color composed of adjacent values, which made atmospheric space simultaneously seem pictorially flat.

And, not least of all, Impressionism showed him that the deep and resonant complexity of nature could be a productive avenue for an art of moral seriousness. By temperament, he was ready for the discovery.

As early as 1867 Cezanne had painted his first picture of a nude in the landscape, perhaps inspired by a similar work of Courbet’s. In 1870 he painted a pastoral idyll showing female nudes and clothed men by a lake, inserting a portrait of himself reclining indifferently in the center. The picture looks back to Manet’s scandalous “Luncheon on the Grass,” with its female nude and jauntily dressed male picnickers; but it also looks ahead--to the great and perplexing paintings of bathers, which would prove so important to his career.

Two of the three large paintings of multiple bathers have been brought together for the first time in the Philadelphia show--just one of many joys in this remarkable retrospective, beautifully organized and installed by curator Joseph J. Rishel. The third is conveniently housed a few miles away in the Barnes Foundation, whose collection numbers more than five dozen Cezannes. Given the 170 or so works now on view in the retrospective, this city is the place to be for the artist’s fans.

Bathers are a prelapsarian subject. Naked men or women, shown by the water in a verdant landscape, recall Eden before the fall, Paradise without sin, nature untrammeled by cultural anxieties. Cezanne’s primeval bathers are modern Adams and Eves evoking a lost Golden Age of peace and harmony, which cannot be recovered--even in the imaginative precinct of painting.

Not that the artist doesn’t try. His anxious pictures are cobbled together like intricate puzzles that leave nothing to chance.

Cezanne’s art brings into simultaneous play pictorial philosophies that had been in dramatic opposition since Rubens and Poussin in the 17th century. Was the convincing magic of painted form created by the brilliance and luminosity of color? Or, did the refined and classical organization of line do the trick?

The argument over color versus line still raged between champions of Delacroix and Ingres 200 years later, when the painter from Aix was first setting to work. Cezanne’s answer was to build his pictures bit by painstaking bit, in patches of luminous color constructed from linear strokes of paint. Line and color were made inseparable, the long dispute given final resolution.

Still, the inevitable result is paintings of great dynamism and liveliness, not serenity and languor--of edgy resignation to human frailty and firm commitment to artistic possibility. Looking at Cezanne’s paintings is like gorging from the tree of pictorial knowledge.

No wonder he so often chose to paint apples, that momentous fruit of Eden! His famous little red, yellow and occasionally green orbs perform a range of mind-bending functions, in still-life paintings that collectively add up to the greatest body of such work ever painted by a single artist.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a tiny canvas, like the 7-by-10-inch picture in which seven apples are lined up in rows for your inspection, or if it’s a monumental work, such as the large and imposing “Still Life With Apples” (1893-94), recently purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum in a headline-making acquisition. There, apples cascading from a tilted dish share a convulsive tabletop “landscape” with a faience sugar bowl, a bottle of rum, a ginger jar and a green-glazed ceramic vase, all tucked into hills and valleys formed by a patterned blue drapery and a crumpled white tablecloth.

Sometimes Cezanne seems to have added apples to a picture just because the composition called for something round, or because he needed a primary color as a counterpoint to a field of blue. Occasionally the apple establishes a swelling volume that contrasts with a concavity, dramatizing the fullness of the fruit and the hollowness of a dish.

In the great Getty picture, the tumbling apples also conspire to create visual movement in an otherwise static image. The rolling fruits seem to have bumped the sugar bowl and knocked it askew. The bowl balances precariously atop a curving leaf in the patterned drapery--a leaf that leads visually to the tulip leaves painted on the sugar bowl, while the tulips’ red and yellow color echoes the disruptive apples.

Tapestry leaves, faience tulips, painted apples--in one little passage of a big painting, Cezanne mixes up artificial representations of nature, including his own. Visual movement creates cognitive action, while contradictory realms vividly converse with one another.

In Cezanne the bracing revolution of secular modernity gets compared to the painful fall in ancient paradise. Through sweat equity, coupled with a conviction for the value of humble painting in an urban age of titanic industry when nature itself seemed poised to disappear, he showed us both the power and the poignancy of the transformation.

Somewhere in there is a lesson for our own brutishly convulsive age of postmodernity. The Philadelphia exhibition, which has already been seen in Paris and London but will not travel further, is the first full-scale retrospective of Cezanne’s paintings to have been organized in 60 years; it isn’t likely to be repeated any time soon. Given our predicament, the timing turned out to be just right.

* “Cezanne,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, through Sept. 1. Closed Mondays.

Can’t make it to Philadelphia this summer? Visit the exhibition’s Web site at: https://www.pcezanne.com/