Museum of Modern Art, New York (6th June–25th September)

‘A deep dive into Paul Cézanne’s process in pencil, ink and watercolor’ is how the curator Jodi Hauptman introduces this capacious, thrilling exhibition (p.13).(1) The title is key: Cézanne Drawing, rather than ‘Cézanne’s Drawings’. This is not a traditional exhibition of works on paper valued for their ability to illuminate the more august oil paintings that followed. Within the easy-to-navigate galleries, visitors see that Cézanne drew on just about every piece of paper – recto and verso – that he touched. As Hauptman puts it, ‘working in ink or pencil or watercolor on paper produced Cézanne’s “most radical work”’. Even large canvases were not exempt; in Madame Cézanne in the conservatory (1891–92; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; cat. fig.222) the subject’s loosely entwined fingers are materialised only by streaks of graphite.

After a compact, lucid preamble, visitors are ushered into a large, airy room. Slightly dimmed lighting offers the right compromise, protecting the fragile works while encouraging prolonged, comfortable viewing. A selection of drawings displayed on the wall provides a comprehensive introduction to the figures and objects Cézanne looked at most intently, especially earlier in his career: himself, his immediate surroundings, his son, Paul, and his wife, Hortense, the least popular but most visible of all the wives and mistresses associated with Modernism.(2) Hortense is everywhere on this wall, looking slightly different every time. Paul fils’s rounded face and almond eyes are more consistent. The exhibition includes a pencil drawing of him as an adolescent (c.1885; private collection; fig.119), which shows that even in adulthood, he looked vaguely cherubic. In the centre of the room are narrow, waist-high tables supporting standing frames that allow both the recto and the verso of each work on paper to be displayed, an innovative strategy used throughout the exhibition that was first employed to display Cézanne’s drawings by the Kunstmuseum Basel, for the exhibition The Hidden Cézanne: From Sketchbook to Canvas in 2017.(3)

Aside from the sheer abundance and variety of works, this exhibition offers a Cézanne to view with affection, not just admiration. Reviews of Cézanne Drawing have been lavish with praise, but are shot through with undercurrents of anxiety – do I understand why he’s so important?(4) The exhibition invites viewers to ignore their own uncertainties and answer such questions for themselves. The catalogue is edited by Hauptmann and Samantha Friedman, who have led the curatorial team. The essays are instructive and wide ranging and the works are beautifully reproduced on matte paper that does justice to the subtle tonalities of the drawings and watercolours.(5)

A drawing with watercolour Large pine, study (1885–90; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; fig.128) shows the same tree that is the star of the oil painting Large pine and red earth (1895; State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). On paper, the tree’s branches and foliage oscillate between wiry aggression and a celestial calm, a combination of effects entirely distinct from the monumental gravity of the larger oil. In The green jug (fig.197; Fig.13), Cézanne disengages the shadow from the jug’s rim with looping strokes of black, which are then funnelled into a tiny tornado; the shadow itself seems poised to spin off into space. The garment with its incongruous sleeves in Coat on a chair (fig.68; Fig.14) appears capable of crushing the piece of furniture on which it has landed. It may actually be two garments – one atop the other – fused together in a state of permanent war. As Alexander Eiling pointed out in the catalogue of an exhibition in Karlsruhe, Cézanne’s Metamorphoses in 2017, this piece is an extraordinary amalgam of a still life, a piece of nature and a portrait of a person, perhaps the artist himself.(6) The coat is very much like the one he wears in Camille Pissarro’s Portrait of Paul Cézanne (1874; National Gallery, London). Juliane Betz has also highlighted the affinity of what looks in the drawing like the jacket’s collar to the peak of the artist’s beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire.(7)

The generous scale and clean design of the exhibition encourage repeated viewings, informed comparisons and fresh insights. Because similar themes are grouped together, alertness to the nuances of the artist’s capacity for transformation sharpens throughout the exhibition. The penultimate and largest section is divided by two free-standing walls, hung with a generous selection of works that offer a summation of the artist’s key themes. The sheer act of looking comes to feel transformative. Leaves resemble knives in The vase and the column (c.1890; private collection; fig.137); boulders look like piles of soft flesh in Rocks near the caves above Château Noir (1895–1900; Museum of Modern Art; fig.161); trees cluster together like anxious congregants in Forest landscape (1904–06; private collection; fig.189). Surfaces dissolve and materialise before the eyes, to different effect each time.

There are eight sketches in pencil, gouache and oil of the plaster Cupid that Cézanne kept in his studio, a reproduction of a sculpture by Pierre Puget (1620–94). The sketches are linked to one of Cézanne’s greatest still life paintings, Still life with plaster Cupid (1894, Courtauld Gallery, London).(8) In nearly all of the Cupid studies on display here, the object’s status as a sculpture with its arms broken off is unambiguous, whether seen from the side, front or rear. But there is one drawing (fig.236; Fig.15) that, in spite of the missing arms, conjures up the fleshiness of an actual child, with curving lips, multiple rounded chins, ample belly and chubby thighs.

The final and most intimate room of the exhibition contains only two works: the lavish but unrevealing Curtains (c.1885; Musée du Louvre, Paris; fig.52) and the austere, confrontational Skull on a drapery (1902–06; private collection; fig.53). Cézanne painstakingly rendered a detailed pattern for the curtains in graphite before he applied muted tones of red, green, yellow and violet-blue to selected portions of the surface. Their sheer volume suggests an operatic grandeur, reinforced by the large, multi-coloured tassels that trail down from the cords used to gather the fabric. Yet all that fanfare announces a gold-tinted but otherwise nondescript floor that ends at a closed door; the curtains offer an entrance to an exit. Skull on a drapery at first seems an unlikely companion to the painstaking detail and recessive interior of Curtains. The skull is placed in the centre of the composition, a stark symmetry unusual for Cézanne. Its hollowed-out eye sockets stare out from a nest of fabric, which turns out to be a simplified, loosely patterned version of the curtains he had painted in 1885. The pairing of an inaccessible domestic interior and an all-seeing skull somehow eases the departure from the exhibition, otherwise faced with great reluctance.

1. Catalogue: Cézanne Drawing. Edited by Jodi Hauptman and Samantha Friedman, with contributions by Kiko Aebi, Annemarie Iker and Laura Newfield. 216 pp. incl. 275 col. + 4 b. & w. ills. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021) $45. ISBN 978–1–63345–126–1.

2. On the portraits of the artist’s wife, see S. Sidlauskas: Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense, Berkeley 2009.

3. The exhibition was reviewed by Karsten Schubert in this Magazine, 159 (2017), pp.884–45..

4. See, for example, P. Schjeldahl: ‘Drawing conclusions’, New Yorker (28th June 2021);and J. Farago: ‘Seeing Cézanne’s point of view’, New York Times (28th June 2021).

5. A complete illustrated checklist is available online http://press.moma.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Cezanne-Drawing-Checklist_6.1.21-compressed.pdf, accessed 11th August 2021.

6. A. Eiling: ‘Cézanne’s metamorphoses’, in idem, ed.: exh. cat. Cézanne Metamorphoses, Karlsruhe (Staatliche Kunsthalle) 2017–18, pp.22–43, at p.39.

7. See J. Betz: ‘Hineinsehen or “seeing-in”: Some basics on formal ambiguities in the works of Paul Cézanne’, in ibid., pp.70–83; and F. Ruppen: ‘On margins and versos: the hidden interrelationships among Cézanne’s works on paper’, in ibid., pp.84–99. Related ideas about Cézanne’s ‘domestic uncanny’ were discussed at the conference ‘Aesthetic Orders of Dwelling: The Visual Politics of Dwelling and Domesticity in the Art and Visual Culture of Modernity’, organised for the Mariann Steegmann Institut, Art & Gender, Bremen University, by Irene Nierhaus, Kathrin Heinz and Amelie Ochs, 18th–20th June 2021.

8. On Still life with plaster Cupid and Cézanne’s technique more generally, see especially R. Shiff: ‘Cézanne’s physicality: the politics of touch’, in S. Kemal and I. Gaskell, eds: The Language of Art History, Cambridge 1991, pp.129–80.