One of the best shows in
recent months lasted less than a
week. I mean the exhibition in November of ten paintings by Paul
Cézanne at Sotheby’s, New York, prior to their sale. This
dazzling array of little pictures spanned the first two decades of
the painter’s career, from the early 1860s through 1880.
At one end was a fierce, hallucinatory self-portrait,
painted when Cézanne was not yet twenty-five; at the other, a
cool, carefully observed head of his friend, Victor Choquet,
painted in 1880. The emphasis was on eccentric early efforts:
witness a thickly troweled portrait of Uncle Dominique (c. 1866),
posing patiently in a turban; the brutal L’Autopsie (1869),
with its livid, propped-up corpse; and the first version of
Une Moderne Olympia (c. 1870), Cézanne’s rock-hewn
commentary on Manet’s celebrated nude, here
folding in on herself instead of boldly displaying her assets, as
though retreating from the scrutiny of her thickset, black-clad
protector.
Some works were familiar, some not. An 1872 view of the Halle
aux Vins at the Quai de Bercy, opposite the cramped apartment
Cézanne occupied with Hortense Fiquet and their infant son
during an early sojourn in Paris, figured in the recent
retrospective of Cézanne’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
as did the glorious Lutte d’Amour (c.
1879–80).
At once an
homage and a challenge to the tradition of the
Venetians and of Poussin, the rhythmically stroked, tense
Lutte
instantly made explicit Cézanne’s roots and pointed both
to his