The Hermit A Friday New York Times article on th…

The Hermit

A Friday New York Times article on the Cezanne exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. is illustrated with a photo that recently came to light. Taken by Gertrude Osthaus, wife of the museum director Karl Ernst Osthaus, it shows the notorious Hermit of Aix en Provence as host, pulling up a chair for a guest.

This rare shot is a great pendant to another famous photo, which I can’t get my hands or browser on at the moment. It shows Cezanne walking out to the “motif,” as he called it–to some desired vista in the chalky, pine-studded hills around the Bay of Marseilles. In that photo, he has his gear on his back. He looks the curmudgeon, stalking away from the camera. In this “new” photo, he is still less-than-beaming. Perhaps the southern sun is in his eyes. He wears his signature soft brimmed hat, stepping from the door of his studio in Les Lauves in 1906. What a find. Compare it to his late self portraits!

And I must say that I can always count on the Times critics to bring out the curmudgeon in me. Here is Roberta Smith’s summation: “Cezanne’s work reminds us that a bond with the natural world is often an essential aspect of great art, regardless of style. Even more valuable, his achievement confirms that artists must change painting in a basic, physical way to be truly innovative.”

Well, I shouldn’t pick on Smith. Her’s is really the New York School’s take things, in which style and innovation trump the real purpose of art—creativity and self expression. I’m sure that a 19th century Parisian version of this kind of thinking was part of what that kept Cezanne down by the bay. Painters need no reassurance that the feeling they have before nature is what painting is all about. If a painter innovates, that’s great. That usually means he or she feels something deep and personal and manages to express it in his or her own voice. It’s not about technique. It’s not about paint. Forget about that pressure to “shock” with “the new.” Try, instead, to communicate feeling.

The rest of Smith’s review is…ah, it’s pretty good. She goes into Cezanne’s connection to the landscape, which is the main thing that kept Cezanne in Provence. He’s evocation of the region did change art and set the stage for the Modernists. And what an ideal life he led there. That studio in the crags. All that wonderful still life paraphernalia inside. He would use those much-loved items to design his own in-door landscapes in still life.

And what a way to go. Cezanne basically died with his boots on, collapsing at the motif, as Smith reminds us, a few months after the newly-found photo was taken. He lay in the rain for several hours until someone brought him home in a laundry wagon. He died on October 23, 1906 in Aix.

I’m going to devise a reason to have to visit the day-job home office in D.C. soon so I can get to the exhibit.

Curmudgeonly,
Vanx