{"id":261064,"date":"2026-01-31T13:51:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T13:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/261064\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T13:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T13:51:09","slug":"he-set-paint-free-a-new-show-explores-cezannes-final-flourish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/261064\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018He set paint free\u2019 \u2014 a new show explores Cezanne\u2019s final flourish"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI must tell you,\u201d Cezanne in Aix-en-Provence wrote to his son in Paris in September 1906, \u201cI\u2019m becoming more clear-sighted in front of nature, but the realisation of my sensations is still very laboured. I can\u2019t achieve the intensity that builds in my senses.\u201d Nevertheless, \u201cmotifs multiply, the same subject from a different angle provides a fascinating subject\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009so varied that I think I could occupy myself for months without moving, leaning now more to the right, now more to the left\u201d.<\/p>\n

It was in this familiar Aix countryside, painting \u201cJourdan\u2019s Cabin\u201d during a rainstorm, that Cezanne collapsed on October 15 1906. Found unconscious and taken home by a laundry van driver, he rallied next day to paint his elderly gardener Vallier, fainted, and within a week was dead from pneumonia.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Gardener Vallier\u201d in his straw hat, sitting by a climbing plant, the contours between the man and the world disappearing, is a trembling form but mighty presence in three portraits in Fondation Beyeler\u2019s Cezanne, an exceptionally rewarding exhibition of the late paintings. In the prismatic watercolour especially, where white paper constitutes the gardener\u2019s clothes and sunlight flows around and through him, Vallier is more spirit than matter: transcendent.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018The Gardener Vallier\u2019 (c1906, in oil) <\/p>\n

Bare paper also delineates \u201cJourdan\u2019s Cabin\u201d, its pointed chimney balanced by a canopied tree, arabesques of branches and lush green vegetation lightly sketched: a clear structured landscape evoked with minimal means.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If \u201cVallier\u201d is Cezanne at his most expressive, in \u201cJourdan\u201d the master-builder employs cubes, cylinders, cones. In both, Cezanne goes beyond imitation of nature to show the painting\u2019s construction, how he converts coloured impressions into taches, touches of paint, to create an image that stands on its own: not mimesis but \u201ca harmony parallel to nature\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Abstraction was a step away, and through 80 masterpieces gathered from across the globe \u2014 half from private collections \u2014 the Beyeler exuberantly tells how, without fully relinquishing the motif, Cezanne set paint free to play to its own rhythms and surface patterns.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018Rocks and Branches in Bib\u00e9mus\u2019 (1900-04) <\/p>\n

His long influence began in 1895, when Ambroise Vollard staged his first exhibition. The dealer did not always understand the works \u2014 faced with a bluish tracery of trees, thick interplay of emerald green foliage and an ochre quarry sharply cut into cubes, he repeatedly rotated \u201cRocks and Branches at Bib\u00e9mus\u201d to decide which way up to hang it \u2014 but looking at them he felt \u201cas though I had been punched in the stomach\u201d.<\/p>\n

At the show\u2019s opening we meet Cezanne in 1895 in a little-known \u201cSelf-portrait\u201d head: wily expression, eyebrows arched like a visual question mark, deep eye sockets, penetrating gaze at once outward and inward, chin jutting determinedly forward from a vivid scumbled ground. Cezanne, then 56, had turned his back on Paris and abandoned too his elegant Jas de Bouffan estate as a motif, in favour of wild, remote sites at Bib\u00e9mus, its weathered, cubic forms an abstraction in waiting, and at Ch\u00e2teau Noir\u2019s forests and rocks: primeval and timeless.<\/p>\n

In Philadelphia\u2019s architectonic \u201cMillstone in the Park of the Ch\u00e2teau Noir\u201d (1892-94), visiting Europe for the first time, the rugged disorder of ancient rocks and bowed branches is emphasised in contrast with the pristine man-made sphere. By the 1900s, the light-pierced jumble of stones, trees and shadowy crevices in \u201cRocks Near the Caves above Ch\u00e2teau Noir\u201d, formerly owned by Matisse, is almost abstract, while MoMA\u2019s majestic \u201cCh\u00e2teau Noir\u201d, which once hung in Monet\u2019s bedroom, is essentially a spangled web of colour, rich dense foliage, loosely brushed sky and ruined facade gleaming golden.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018Millstone in the Park of the Ch\u00e2teau Noir\u2019 (1892-94) <\/p>\n

By 1906 in \u201cGarden at Les Lauves\u201d, broad bands of colour with vibrant mauve, rose, blue and green patches amid white ground render an expansive yet abbreviated panorama of Aix seen from the terrace of Cezanne\u2019s final studio, where he worked from 1902. This canvas has, said Duncan Phillips, who acquired it for Washington in 1955, \u201cthe painterly excitement and sense of adventure to which our best, our most poetic abstract expressionists aspire\u201d.<\/p>\n

Most of Cezanne\u2019s last, luminous \u201cMont St Victoire\u201d pictures, 1902-06, were painted from the Lauves hill \u2014 the exhibition has seven examples \u2014 in mosaics of large taches, varying darker and brighter greens, violets, ochres, shimmering blues, brushstrokes opaque and translucent, vertical, diagonal, horizontal. Close up you confront a tangled mass; at a distance the view coheres. Radically, colour modulations, not linear perspective, give depth.<\/p>\n

\"ACezanne in his studio in Les Lauves, Aix-en-Provence, photographed by Bernard Emile <\/p>\n

Complementing these, a \u201cMont St Victoire\u201d watercolour, whose ethereal washes seem to float weightlessly yet conjure trees, houses and vegetation unfolding in a vast space beneath the soaring peak, suggests how Cezanne learnt from watercolour\u2019s limpidity and freedom in constructing these final canvases.<\/p>\n

Displayed in ample galleries giving on to the Beyeler\u2019s park and surrounding cornfields, vineyards and T\u00fcllinger Hills, the landscapes are the show\u2019s heart, but the same grandiose, sumptuous, concentrated vision illumines every genre. The frieze of male \u201cBathers\u201d, virile, robust, achingly nostalgic \u2014 C\u00e9zanne swam in the river Arc in his boyhood with Zola and their geologist friend Antoine-Fortun\u00e9 Marion \u2014 roots landscape in felt memory. The female \u201cBathers\u201d, often in static pyramidal arrangements, blend into nature or imitate her forms: Cezanne wanted \u201cto marry the woman\u2019s curves to the shoulders of the hills\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018Apples and Oranges\u2019 (c1899) <\/p>\n

Tilting table-top still lifes, led by Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay\u2019s agitated\/melodic \u201cApples and Oranges\u201d (c1899), with contrasting cascading draperies and stark fruit on a white cloth, share the landscapes\u2019 monumentality, profuse nuanced colour, compositional complexity. By the end Cezanne saw the apples and oranges as characters who suffer and age like men: \u201cFruit likes to pose for a portrait. It sits there as if asking your forgiveness for discolourations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among towering figure paintings is Vollard, instructed to remain unmoving as an apple: his domed head like St Victoire\u2019s coned peak, lustrous touches highlighting his broad brow, his face expressing exhaustion from 115 sittings. Matching him in sombre, still absorption, and arresting in their strange chromatic contrasts and irregular lighting, the stoic \u201cCard Players\u201d (1892-96) pursue their individual strategies in games of rules and chance \u2014 surely a mirror for the artist\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018Boy in a Red Vest\u2019 (1888-90) <\/p>\n

Cezanne, though, broke every rule. The \u201cCard Players\u201d may be his stand-ins, but so is the yearning, old-age recollection of listless, melancholy, exquisite youth \u201cBoy in a Red Vest\u201d (1888-90), languid and lyrical against a geometric interior. His crimson waistcoat sings out within a white-grey tonality, in the painting and in two rare watercolours of the sulky adolescent, reunited for the first time since they left Cezanne\u2019s studio. In the painting, the right arm is extraordinarily, unfeasibly long, yet \u201cso beautifully painted, it can\u2019t be long enough\u201d, quipped the German artist Max Liebermann. As this eloquent show demonstrates, Cezanne\u2019s late paintings follow their own internal logic, sensations, structure: the liberation that opened the door to modern art.<\/p>\n

To May 25, fondationbeyeler.ch<\/a><\/p>\n

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