Getty Is Home to Another Cezanne

The J. Paul Getty Museum will announce today that it has purchased a major figure painting by Paul Cezanne. “Young Italian Woman Leaning on Her Elbow” (1895-1900), which sources estimate to have cost the museum between $25 million and $30 million, is a pristine and unusually expressive example of the French Impressionist’s final, most influential period. It will go on view Thursday alongside the Getty’s three other oil paintings by the artist.

The Getty does not disclose prices of artworks not bought at auction, but museum officials say they rank the Cezanne among the top few paintings in the Getty’s art holdings.

“These paintings don’t go into museums,” said museum director John Walsh, noting that major works by leading French Impressionists and Postimpressionists generally disappear into private collections after commanding astonishingly high prices at public auctions.

A Cezanne still life was sold at auction last May for $60.5 million, the fourth highest sum ever paid for a work of art and more than double the artist’s previous record of $28.6 million. The day after the auction, casino mogul Steve Wynn purchased the painting from the unidentified buyer and hung it in the gallery at his Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. Most of the 20 other paintings by Cezanne that have commanded more than $5 million apiece during the last decade are rarely, if ever, put on public view.

“We are not going to receive the gift of a very good late Cezanne any time soon,” Walsh said. “One of the wonderful things about being here at the Getty is that great works of art are offered to us and, thank God, we can do this from time to time.”

Deborah Gribbon, a specialist in 19th century art who is the museum’s deputy director and chief curator, said the painting is at least as fine as any other work in the Getty’s collection. “To find a painting so powerful and moving that also sums up [artistic developments of] the 19th century and points the way to the next century is extraordinary,” she said.

Impressionist and Modern art experts outside the museum also praised the acquisition.

“I think it’s a terrific painting,” said Robert Rosenblum, a prominent art historian who teaches at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. “It’s very rare because it’s so dense, so finished, and it has such a strong mood.”

Theodore Reff, a Cezanne scholar who teaches at Columbia University, said the painting is “a very fine late work” and “a real strong addition” to the Getty’s collection. “It’s very fully realized, unlike many of Cezanne’s late works, which were left in a state of unfinish. It’s also very rich and resonant in color,” he said.

The painting has “a very moving subject,” which continues an artistic tradition of portraying models with their heads resting on their hands to evoke a state of melancholy, Reff said. “Cezanne used the pose in several portraits of men, but I don’t know another female representation by Cezanne that conveys that feeling. The woman’s face and costume is very beautiful, but she has a sad attitude and pose.”

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The name of the woman depicted is unknown, but she is thought to be a relative of Michelangelo di Rosa, an Italian model who posed for Cezanne at his studio in Paris and appears as “The Boy in the Red Vest” in several works made in 1888-90, said Scott Schaefer, the Getty’s curator of paintings.

The woman is dressed in a traditional costume from the south of France, but Cezanne probably painted her in Paris, because the canvas shows no evidence of having been rolled up for transport to his Parisian dealer, Ambroise Vollard. French industrialist Auguste Pellerin, who compiled a major collection of Cezanne’s work, purchased the painting from Vollard.

Dr. Harry Bakwin, a child psychologist who lived in New York, bought the painting around 1929 along with “Sous Bois,” a Cezanne landscape purchased by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1993. “Young Italian Woman” was passed on to Bakwin’s heirs and remained in the family until a few years ago, when it was sold to an unidentified collector or dealer.

Although known to scholars, the picture has not been exhibited in the United States for 20 years. It appeared in “Cezanne: The Late Work” in 1977-78 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In 1979, the painting was shown at Wellesley College. Its most recent public appearance, in 1990, was at the Tate Gallery in London, in the exhibition “On Classical Ground: Picasso, Leger, De Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930.”

The painting has been well cared for over the years, Schaefer said. “It’s in spectacular condition. The canvas has not been relined. There’s not a single retouch on the surface, and the color has not faded because it has been kept out of the light.”

The museum’s other works by Cezanne include two portraits, “Anthony Valabregue” (1869-71) and “Eternal Feminine” (c. 1877), both early, experimental works. An additional painting, “Still Life With Apples” (1893-94), is a major, mature example of one of the artist’s archetypal subjects. A watercolor, “Still Life” (c. 1900), depicts similar objects on a draped table and is among Cezanne’s largest and most ambitious works in that medium.

The Getty’s Impressionist gallery will be closed today for reinstallation and in observance of A Day Without Art. The newly repainted gallery, displaying the museum’s new Cezanne, will reopen Thursday.