The Triumph of the Recluse

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, a great Cezanne show

In the last decade of his life, Paul Cezanne experienced, perhaps more fully than any great artist since Michelangelo, the anxiety of Tantalus. The more he painted, the more he saw. The more he saw, the more manifold and unattainable truth became. "I must tell you," Cezanne wrote to his son six weeks before his death in the fall of 1906, "that as a painter I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature, but with me the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I do not have the magnificent richness of coloring that animates nature. Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply ..."

Cezanne's anxiety--the scrupulousness of a genius without facility --would soon become one of the touchstones of modern consciousness. One cannot guess what form art might have assumed without the example of late Cezanne. He was to cubism what Masaccio had been to the Florentine Renaissance. But Cezanne's importance as progenitor of modern art has, paradoxically, blurred him as a painter. As the English art historian Lawrence Gowing remarks, "In his last years Cezanne was reaching out for a kind of modernity that did not exist, and still does not." To gain any sense of that terrain, one must consult the paintings: and that is hard to do, since they are scattered across the world from Leningrad to Los Angeles.

But last week, an exhibition entitled "Cezanne: The Late Work" opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Four years in the making, organized by two leading Cezanne specialists, Professors John Rewald and Theodore Reff, in troika with MOMA's director of the department of painting and sculpture, William Rubin, it is the sort of show which very few museums could even attempt: 124 oils and watercolors, including nearly every major painting that has been preserved from Cezanne's last working decade, 1895-1906. Its catalogue, with nine essays by various experts, is a landmark in Cezanne studies. There has never been a Cezanne show like this before, and there may never be one again. One is drawn back, beyond the theory, beyond the historical results, into the most radical meditations on space, shape, light and how to paint them.

Did any painter ever achieve more in such isolation? Cezanne did not have a one-man show until 1895, when he was 56. If the last years of his life made him something of a public figure in his native Aix-en-Provence and among the artists in Paris, he spent them in virtual seclu sion in his studio at Les Lauves, on the hillside above Aix. The workplace held the permanent characters of his still lifes: the plaster cupid, the blue ginger jar, the plain Provenc,al stoneware, the scroll-sawed kitchen table, the floral rug, the skulls, onions and peaches. Above all, there was Mont Ste.-Victoire, which would become, thanks to the painter's obsessive scrutiny, the most analyzed mountain in art. One sees how absolutely, unlike most other painters who work en serie, Cezanne despised repetition. Each painting attacks the mountain and its distance as a fresh problem. The bulk runs from a mere vibration of watercolor on the horizon, its translucent, wriggling pro file echoing the pale green and lavender gestures of the foreground trees, to the vast solidarity of the Philadelphia version of Mont Ste.-Victoire, 1902-06. There, all is displacement. Instead of an object in an imaginary box, surrounded by transparency, every part of the surface is a continuum, a field of resistant form. Patches of gray, blue and lavender that jostle in the sky are as thoroughly articulated as those that constitute the flank of the mountain. Nothing is empty in late Cezanne -- not even the bits of untouched canvas. This organized dialectic of shape and of color is the subject of Cezanne's famous remark: "Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations." To realize a sensation meant to give it a syntax -- and as the hatched, angled planes in late Cezanne become less legible as illusion, so does the force of their pictorial language become more ordered. His goal was presence, not illusion, and he pursued it with an unremitting gravity. The fruit in the great still lifes of the period, like Apples and Oranges, 1895-1900, are so weighted with pictorial decision -- their rosy surfaces filled, as it were, with thought -- that they seem about twice as solid as real fruit could be. It mattered to Cezanne that he was a Provenc,al. Mont Ste.-Victoire was central to him, not only as a shape but as an emblem of his roots. The light in his watercolors (perhaps the most radiant exercises in that medium since Turner) is not just the transcendent energy, the "supernatural beauty" of abstraction; it is also the harsh, verifiable flicker of sun on Provenc,al hillsides. To his anguish and fulfillment, Cezanne was embedded in the real world, and he returns us to it, whenever his pictures are seen. --: Robert Hughes

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