Volume 56, Number 13 · August 13, 2009
Godfather of the Modern?
By Robert L. Herbert
Cézanne and Beyond
an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 26–May 17, 2009
Catalog of the exhibition by Joseph J. Rishel, Katherine Sachs, and fifteen others.
Philadelphia Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 585 pp., $65.00
Cézanne und die Moderne
an exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen bei Basel, Switzerland, October 10, 1999–January 9, 2000
Catalog of the exhibition by Gottfried Boehm.
Hatje Cantz, 137 pp. (2002)
Cézanne and the Dawn of Modern Art
an exhibition at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, September 18, 2004–January 16, 2005
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Felix A. Baumann, Walter Feilchenfeldt, and Hubertus Gassner, with essays by Fred Leeman, Pepe Karmel, and Peter Kropmanns.
Museum Folkwang/Hatje Cantz, 240 pp. (2004)
Paul Cézanne's art is a vein of gold that's been constantly mined but never exhausted. Since the early twentieth century, successive generations of artists have extracted nuggets and reflections from it. Cézanne was not well known until the late 1890s when he was 'discovered' by young artists who were rebelling against Impressionism. In the years just before and after his death in 1906, he gained widespread prominence with numerous exhibitions of his work, often organized by the young Parisian avant-garde. Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin were also celebrated by the same artists, but as the decades passed, Cézanne displaced them as the dominant godfather of modernist art. The other three have always been admired, but except for a Seurat boomlet in the early 1920s, their heritage has been widely dispersed.
Review, 3305 words
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