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Cezanne wanted to cast out the 500-year-old demons of pictorial illusionism, naturalism, and romanticizing.
I devoted a whole section of my bookHow to Be An Artistto the incommunicability of his resistant art.
It took me until my early 50s to be smote by Cezanne.
Now I love him.
While he is part of a gigantic continuum of modern painting, he also stands alone.
He worked at the same time as the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.
They loved his art; he loved theirs.
Yet the differences are enormous.
We luxuriate in their making and perceive the method and theories in use.
For those artists, every area of a painting is given equal importance and retinal energy.
Everything is finished or turned up to 11 in the case of Van Gogh.
Things have perceptual-conceptual-spatial continuity and are still tethered to naturalism and illusionistic space.
Space as we know it begins to collapse.
For his part, Cezanne thought the opposite that, alas!
before him landscape has never been painted.
Cezanne was born in 1839 in the South of France to a banker father.
Matisse called him a God.
Picasso deemed him the father of us all.
But he was gruff, incredibly shy, and looked, one colleague said, like a zinc miner.
He so revered Manet that he was afraid to speak to him.
MoMA curators Jodi Hauptman and Samantha Friedman allow us to grasp all of this.
My recommendation: fight the fatigue of so many framed works.
Select just three or four drawings in each of the eight galleries any three or four.
You will be confronted with Cezanne the seeing, recording machine.
Its almost inhuman, maybe monstrous.
He said he wanted solace without passion.
He made 80 bather paintings, 40 paintings of Mt.
He famously said, I will astonish Paris with an apple.
Really, theres not much difference between her, an apple, a mountain, or a skull.
His people, places, and things are just forms, masses, weights, and measures.
He made 136 drawings of his son, but most of those are of him sleeping.
He must have been a pretty distant husband and father.
Cezanne created a time machine that slowed the moment when everything glitched and stood still.
Consider any work; study how charged the blank space might be.
He never outlines things, but objects always form as shapesdissolving, overlapping, and interweaving one another.
Light comes from all different directions at once.
A shadow is cast one way, then another.
You see an apple from above and below and left and right.
Middle, close, and far space intermix, coalesce, and flip-flop.
His graphic field is like a vibrating string.
Notice, too, that the two biggest claims about Cezanne dont stick.
On the contrary: Cezannes objects and spaces are filaments; they shift and oscillate.
Nothing is solid or stays in place.
They are made of pirouettes of squiggles, squalls of color, lines always in motion.
Everything is always wobbling.
Almost all of his horizon lines make no sense at all and are broken.
You are seeing some mitochondrial thread that moves in swells and subtle cadences of energy.
This imparts a pictorial amplitude and visual grandeur to whatever hes drawing.
Cezanne said, Paint it as it is.
Cezanne rendered thisitasisas it ever was.
