If you’ve ever read “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats and wondered what the phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” would look like in oil on canvas, look no further than Cézanne in Provence.
The immense exhibition, on display at the National Gallery of Art, boasts an astoundingly thorough compilation of works from museums and private collections around the world.
Cézanne is most commonly associated with picturesque, impressionistic compositions, Provençal scenes en plein air, French for the outdoors. But vibrant colors and heavy, deliberant brushstrokes in this collection prove that Paul Cézanne is an artistic movement within himself. The breadth of his compositions, from his early estate pieces at the Jas de Bouffan estate to his modernist abstractions, invites comparisons to such artists as Camille Pissarro and Henri Matisse, even paying homage to the seventeenth century classical landscapes of Nicolas Poussin.
The arrangement of Cézanne’s works opens with the Jas de Bouffan series, inviting the audience into a series of scenic views of his father’s estate rendered with thick, rich strokes merging light and color into one distinct, decisive element. Quaint, but hardly delicate, these images chronicle the artist’s passion for the outdoors. Yet there is also an ambition to capture a sense of durability and intransience within the impressionist movement, an aspiration which provides an unremitting thread throughout the exhibit.
The scene takes a brief repose indoors to an assortment of portraits of Cézanne’s relatives and school friends, the most prominently displayed being The Artist’s Father Reading “L’événement.”
As the exhibition progresses, the evolution of Cézanne’s work emerge, as his landscapes take on subtler, increasingly confident strokes and more vibrant colors, while his portraiture, shifting subject to peasants and low-class estate workers, evokes emotion through theatrical composition. His depiction of the village of Gardanne demonstrates the artist’s move away from the quick, hasty brushstrokes of impressionism to more defined, geometrical forms, while his later landscapes at Sainte-Victoire manifest in intricate, abstract color.
The exposition culminates with his famous Bathers, a series of basking, anatomically disproportioned nudes classically-inspired but rendered from the artist’s imagination. The concluding masterpiece of the exhibit, “The Large Bathers,” which stirred its contemporary audience at the prestigious Paris Salon in 1905, is at once disquieting and serene. It both finalizes Cézanne’s vision and propels his work into the revolutionary modern era.
Rarely, if ever, does one come across a collection as comprehensive, placing the artist’s most pivotal works mere footsteps apart from one another. Immaculate, painstakingly compiled and tactically arranged, it is impossible to overrate this exhibit and inhuman to reside within a hundred-mile radius of these timeless masterpieces but resolve to indifference. It is nearly as difficult to fight the urge to purchase the memorabilia strategically situated at the exit, but, even shameless tactics to make a quick buck cannot dull the impressions of Cézanne’s Provence.
