Cézanne and Beyond

Paul Cézanne's posthumous retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907 was a watershed event in the history of art. The immediate impact of this large presentation of his work on the young artists of Paris was profound. Its ramifications on successive generations down to the present are still in effect.

Exhibition Minutes

Artists take from other great artists when they need to become more themselves...

This exhibition features forty paintings and twenty watercolors and drawings by Cézanne, displayed alongside works by several artists for whom Cézanne has been a central inspiration and whose work reflects, both visually and poetically, Cézanne's extraordinary legacy. Based on the remarkable resources of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, both in its holdings of major works by Cézanne and in its large collections of early modernist works—thanks to A. E. Gallatin and Louise and Walter Arensberg—this show is a unique occasion to experience the continuing impact of this influential painter.

Chronology

Click on linked names below to discover some of the masterpieces in the Museum's collection that were created by artists influenced by Paul Cezanne. Please note that not every work of art is featured in the exhibition Cezanne and Beyond.

1. 1839
   1. Jan 19

Paul Cézanne is born in Aix-en-Provence.

1. 1861
   1. Apr

Cézanne makes his first trip to Paris and lives there for several months, attending art school, copying paintings and sculpture at the Louvre, and meeting other artists, including the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, who will be a longtime friend and mentor and an important artistic influence. Cézanne will travel between Aix and Paris many times over the course of his life.

1. 1863
   1. May 15

The Salon des Refusés opens in Paris, showing paintings refused by the official French salon, including Cézanne’s, and is widely ridiculed. Cézanne’s childhood friend Émile Zola will include a fictionalized account of the scandal in his 1886 novel L’Oeuvre.

1. 1864
   1. Summer

Cézanne visits L’Estaque on the Bay of Marseille in southern France, which will become an important motif throughout his career and one that will impact many later artists, including Ellsworth Kelly and Brice Marden.

1. 1895
   1. Nov–
      Dec

Prompted by the perceived injustice of the French state’s rejection of Cézanne’s work in the Caillebotte estate, the dealer Ambroise Vollard mounts Cézanne’s first one-person exhibition at his gallery, showing more than 150 paintings and watercolors on a rotating basis. The artists Edgar Degas, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro purchase paintings, and possibly also Auguste Pellerin, who will become a major collector of Cézanne’s work. Pissarro writes to his son about the Cézannes: “There are some exquisite things, some still-lifes of irreproachable perfection, others much worked on and yet left unfinished, and, even more beautiful than the rest, some landscapes, some nudes, some unfinished heads which are, however, truly imposing and so artistic, so supple . . . Why?? Because sensation is there.” Matisse also attends the exhibition, and so, probably, does the German critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who will go on to write a number of important essays and books on Cézanne, including, in 1910, the first monograph devoted to the artist.

1. Dec 1

The critic Thadée Natanson urges readers to see the Cézannes at Vollard’s gallery, calling the painter’s influence “profound.” He will become a major proponent of Cézanne’s work.

1. 1897
   1. Oct

The painting Mill on the Couleuvre at Pontoise, 1881, is the first work by Cézanne to enter a public collection when it is purchased by the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin (then directed by Hugo von Tschudi), from the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris. When Tschudi hangs the painting, the Prussian Parliament reacts in fury, asking Kaiser Wilhelm to intervene.

1. 1898
   1. May 9–
      Jun 10

Vollard mounts another important one-person exhibition of more than sixty Cézanne paintings. Matisse likely sees the show.

The French press, referring to the Caillebotte bequest, publicizes the Nationalgalerie purchase of the previous year: “Isn’t the relevant point that in 1897 a foreign administration purchased a painting that none of this country’s own museums would have had anything to do with, even as a gift, in this same year of 1897?”

1. 1899
   1. Jul 1–4

The widow of Victor Chocquet, a collector and frequent commissioner of paintings by Cézanne, dies, after which the estate is auctioned off at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. In the preface to the auction catalogue, the critic Théodore Duret writes of Chocquet: “He was especially tireless on the subject of Cézanne, whom he placed in the very first rank.” Many collectors attend the auction, where they see Cézanne’s work for the first time. Among them is the Comte de Comondo, whose Cézanne paintings will be bequeathed to the French state and eventually hang in the Louvre.

1. Dec

Vollard buys the entire contents of Cézanne’s studio, as he informs Gauguin in a letter. He mounts another exhibition devoted to the artist, from which Matisse purchases his first Cézanne, Three Bathers, 1879–82. Around this time, Cézanne begins painting a portrait of Vollard, which he will work on for several months, visiting the Louvre in the afternoons for inspiration.

1. 1900
   1. Nov 2

A group exhibition at Paul Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin includes twelve Cézanne paintings on loan from Durand-Ruel, all of which will be returned unsold. These are the first Cézannes to be exhibited in Germany. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke discovers Cézanne’s work at this show and will make a point of visiting the artist’s retrospective at the 1907 Salon d’Automne, leading to a now famous series of letters on the artist.

Maurice Denis paints Homage to Cézanne , a group portrait of Nabi and Symbolist painters gathered reverently around a Cézanne still life. Cézanne writes to Denis thanking him for this expression of "artistic sympathy." Denis writes back: "Perhaps you will now have some idea of the place you occupy in the painting of our time, of the admiration you inspire, and of the enlightened enthusiasm of a few young people, myself included, who can rightly call themselves your students."

Matisse sees Cézanne's work at the Durand-Ruel gallery, later recalling: "At Durand-Ruel's I saw two very beautiful still-lifes by Cézanne, biscuits and milk bottles and fruit in deep blue. My attention was drawn to them by old Durand to whom I was showing some still-lifes I had painted. ‘Look at these Cézanne's that I cannot sell,' he said, ‘you should rather paint interiors with figures'"

1. 1901
   1. Apr 20–
      May 21

The Salon des Indépendants exhibits paintings by Cézanne and Matisse, as well as Maurice Denis’s Homage to Cézanne.

1. Oct 10

Alberto Giacometti is born near Stampa, Switzerland.

1. 1902
   1. Mar 29–
      May 5

The Salon des Indépendants this year includes paintings by Cézanne. Matisse sees the exhibition and later recalls: “I can still hear old Pissarro exclaiming at the ‘Indépendants,’ in front of a very fine still-life by Cézanne representing a cut crystal water carafe in the style of Napoleon III, in a harmony of blue: ‘It’s like an Ingres.’ When my surprise passed, I found, and I still find, that he was right. Yet Cézanne spoke exclusively of Delacroix and of Poussin.”

1. 1903
   1. Jan

Cézanne moves into a new studio in Les Lauves, outside Aix, and writes to Vollard: “I work obstinately, I glimpse the Promised Land. Will I be like the great leader of the Hebrews, or will I really penetrate it? . . . I’ve made some progress. Why so late and so painfully! Is Art, then, a priesthood demanding pure beings who belong to it completely?”

1. Mar 9–
   13

An auction of the estate of Émile Zola at the Hôtel Drouot, Paris, includes nine important paintings by Cézanne, five of which are purchased by Pellerin.

1. Sep

Beckmann visits the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris, where he sees work by Manet, Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Cézanne. He will later say: “My greatest love already in 1903 was Cézanne.”

1. Oct 31

The first Salon d’Automne, another exhibition established as an alternative to the official French Salon, is held at the Petit Palais, Paris, and includes works by Cézanne, Bonnard, Matisse, and Paul Gauguin.

1. 1904
   1. Feb 21–
      Mar 24

The Salon des Indépendants this year includes a special exhibition of Cézanne's work.

The art historian Bernard Berenson, on a visit to Paris, advises the collector Leo Stein to go to Vollard's gallery and see the Cézannes there. Stein, who had never heard of Cézanne, ends up buying a landscape painting before the end of Spring.

He and his sister, Gertrude, and brother, Michael, host a weekly salon in their apartment where artists, scholars, and collectors meet. They will become major collectors of Cézanne’s work.

1. Apr

Vosdanig Manoog Adoian (who will later call himself Arshile Gorky) is born in the Lake Van region of Turkish Armenia.

After three visits to Paris, beginning in 1901, Picasso moves there permanently, settling in the complex of artists studios known as the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre.

1. Jun 1–
   18

In the catalogue for Matisse’s first one-person exhibition, at Vollard’s gallery, the critic Roger Marx writes: “The art of Henri Matisse harmoniously reveals the synthesis of the combined teachings of Gustave Moreau and Cézanne; it captures the curiosity of the historian as well as that of the enlightened amateur.”

1. Jul

The painter and writer Émile Bernard describes Cézanne in the journal L’Occident as “the only master” from whom “the fruit of the art of the future can emerge.” Bernard includes in his essay a number of Cézanne’s statements about art, which become quite famous. Matisse reads Paul Signac’s copy and is particularly fond of such aphorisms as “To paint is to record the sensations of color,” “Drawing and color are not distinct from one another; gradually as one paints, one draws,” and “Penetrate . . . what lies before [you] and . . . strive to express [your]self as logically as possible.”

1. Oct 15–
   Nov 15

The Salon d’Automne includes thirty-three paintings (including the Three Bathers that Matisse had purchased) and two drawings in individual galleries devoted to Cézanne, who is listed in the catalogue as one of the Salon’s founding members. For the first time there is a separate photography section in the exhibition, which includes photographs of Cézanne’s paintings.

Braque is living in Paris, where he frequents the Musée du Luxembourg, the Galerie Vollard, and the Durand-Ruel gallery, seeing Cézanne's work for the first time.

Bonnard paints a portrait of Ambroise Vollard in which Cézanne’s Four Bathers, 1877–78, can be seen hanging on the wall behind the collector. According to the later account of the Cézanne biographer John Rewald: “Bonnard apparently wished to associate Vollard with the artist whom he was so actively defending and who was then still alive. Since Bonnard did not own this picture, he must have asked Vollard to bring it along for this portrait (unless Vollard himself suggested that it appear in the background).”

1. 1905
   1. Jan

Cézanne writes to thank Roger Marx for his positive articles about his work in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts: “In my thought one doesn’t replace the past, one only adds a new link to it. Along with a painter’s temperament and an artistic ideal, in other words a conception of nature, sufficient means of expression are necessary to be intelligible to the average public and occupy a suitable rank in the history of art.”

1. Jan–
   Feb

A group exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London, organized by Durand-Ruel, includes the first Cézanne paintings to be shown in Great Britain.

1. Oct 18–
   Nov 25

The Salon d’Automne includes ten of Cézanne’s paintings. Max Weber, an American artist who will help bring Cézanne’s work to awareness in the United States, sees the show and later recalls: “I had heard of Cézanne before, but when I saw the first ten pictures by this master, the man who actually . . . brought an end to academism, I said to myself . . . ‘this is the way to paint. This is art and nature reconstructed by what I should call today an engineer of the geometry of aesthetics.’”

The critic Charles Morice surveys young artists about the current state of French art. His questions include “What opinion do you have of Cézanne?” and “Do you think that the artist should expect everything to come from nature, or should the artist only ask of nature the plastic means to realize the thought that is within him?” The fifty-seven responses indicate that Cézanne is currently the chief subject of discussion in artists’ studios.

Picasso purchases a copy of Cézanne’s lithograph Large Bathers, made after the painting Bathers at Rest, 1876–77 now in the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. Braque and other artists who visit Picasso’s studio see it there.

Paul Cézanne outside his studio at Les Lauves, Aix-en-Provence. The photograph was taken during a visit with Karl Ernst Osthaus on April 13, 1906. Photograph by Gertrude Osthaus. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg / Art Resource, New York

1. 1906
   1. Apr 13

The German collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, founder and director of the Museum Folkwang Essen, visits Cézanne in Aix and acquires two paintings for the museum,The House at Bellevue and the Dovecote and Bibémus Quarry.

1. Sep

Beckmann travels to Paris on his honeymoon, where he meets with Vollard. The two discuss their mutual admiration for Cézanne, and Vollard gives Beckmann a large photograph of the painter.

1. Oct 6–
   Nov 15

The Salon d’Automne this year includes ten Cézanne paintings.

1. Oct–
   Feb 1907

Braque goes to paint at L’Estaque for the first time and will return repeatedly in the coming years. Much later, in response to a question by the interviewer Jacques Lassaigne —“Was it because of Cézanne that you left for L’Estaque?”—Braque will answer: “Yes, and . . . I can say that my first pictures of L’Estaque were already conceived before my departure. I nonetheless applied myself to subjecting them to the influences of the light and the atmosphere, and to the effect of the rain which brightened up the colors.”

1. Oct 23

Paul Cézanne dies in Aixen-Provence.

1. 1907
   1. May–
      Jul

Inspired by Cézanne’s Large Bathers paintings and African sculpture, Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a work that will have an enormous impact on art from this point on.

1. Oct 1–22

The Salon d’Automne this year is devoted to a retrospective of Cézanne’s work that comprises fifty-six paintings and several watercolors. Max Weber will later recall that, prior to the exhibition, “almost everywhere in Montmartre and Montparnasse . . . one could find groups of young painters in heated discussion on Cézanne’s art. So great was the anticipation of the event, that students postponed their trips to Spain, Italy or other parts of the Continent.” Many artists see the exhibition, including Picasso, Braque, and Léger. The latter writes of the show to his fellow painter André Mare: “The second revelation [was] Cézanne. Ah! my old fellow, stunning things next, of course, to incomplete things. Among other works, a canvas representing two working class chaps playing cards. It cries out with truth and completeness, do you understand, [it’s] modelled in terms of values, and what facture! It’s unaffected, clumsy, one would think one was looking at the work of some decent, simple man who had just invented painting two thousand years before Jesus Christ.” Of this time, Léger will later declare: “Cézanne allowed me to find my way in a more conscious manner. . . . For two years I manipulated shapes. I built, I was the most scrupulous bricklayer. . . . Slowly, color reappeared, blended, shy, calculated, as in Cézanne, by whom I was influenced.”

The artists Henri Rousseau and Max Weber attend the Cézanne exhibition together. Standing in front of the Large Bathers, 1906, now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rousseau comments: “You know, this is an extremely interesting canvas. I like it very much. Too bad he left so many places unfinished. I wish I had it in my studio, I could finish it nicely.”

The Steins also visit the show. Recalling it years later, Leo states: “Hitherto Cézanne had been important only for the few; he was about to become important for everybody. At the Autumn Salon of 1905 people laughed themselves into hysterics before his pictures, in 1906 they were respectful, and in 1907 they were reverent. Cézanne had become the man of the moment.”

Rilke visits the Salon d’Automne repeatedly and records his impressions of Cézanne’s paintings in letters to his wife that will later be published as the influential volume Lettres sur Cézanne, or Letters on Cézanne. In one letter he writes: “I again spent two hours in front of a few pictures today; I sense this is somehow useful for me. . . . One can really see all of Cézanne’s pictures in two or three well-chosen examples, and no doubt we could have come as far in understanding him somewhere else. . . . But it all takes a long, long time. When I remember the puzzlement and insecurity of one’s first confrontation with his work, along with his name, which was just as new. And then for a long time nothing, and suddenly one has the right eyes.”

Braque abandons the bright, Fauvist hues of his previous work for a more subdued palette, possibly in response to the Cézanne exhibition.

1. Oct 1 and 15

Émile Bernard publishes his correspondence with Cézanne in the journal Le Mercure de France. Braque and Picasso read the letters, the former even learning some of the passages by heart. The most famous lines come from a letter dated April 15, 1904: “Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. . . . But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.” Another much-quoted passage is from a letter of July 25, 1904: “In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric through looking and working. I mean to say that in an orange, an apple, a ball, a head, there is a culminating point; and this point is always—in spite of the tremendous effect; light and shade, colour sensations—the closest to our eye; the edges of the objects flee towards a centre on our horizon.”

1. Oct 4

Demuth sails from Philadelphia to Paris, possibly arriving in time to see the final days of the Salon d'Automne. He will stay until March 21, 1908.

Popova enrolls in the painter Konstantin Yuon's private art school in Moscow, where she is introduced to the work of Cézanne and Gauguin as well as to Japanese prints, Fauvism, and other styles popular at the time.

A year after Cézanne's death, his son Paul sells half the contents of his studio to Vollard and Bernheim-Jeune.

1. Dec 25

In the United States, the journalist and critic James G. Huneker writes to his friend Charles J. Rosebault: “The Autumn Salon must have blistered your eyeballs. Nevertheless Cézanne is a great painter—purely as a painter, one who seizes and expresses actuality. This same actuality is always terrifyingly ugly (fancy waking up at night and discovering one of his females on the pillow next to you!). There is the ugly in life as well as the pretty, my dear boy, and for artistic purposes it is often more significant and characteristic. But—ugly is Cézanne. He could paint a bad breath.” Huneker will publish several articles in the New York Sun the following year, expanding awareness of Cézanne’s work in the United States.

1. 1908
   1. Early Jan

Matisse opens his art school, the Académie Matisse, in Paris, where he instructs pupils on the principles of Cézanne’s painting. Max Weber will later recall of one of his classes: “With great modesty and deep inner pride he showed us his painting Bathers by Cézanne. His silence before it was more evocative and eloquent than words. A spirit of elation and awe pervaded the studio at such times.” He will also remember Matisse speaking of Cézanne as “the father of us all.”

1. Mar

The first Cézanne illustrations to be reproduced in an American periodical appear in Burr-McIntosh Monthly.

1. Mar 20–
   May 2

Maurice Denis notes a growing confirmation of Cézanne’s impact on painting in his review of the Salon des Indépendants: “It is apparent that there is much less influence of Matisse here than of Cézanne.”

1. Apr 18

The Salon de la Toison d’Or, an exhibition of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Fauvist art, is held in Moscow, organized by the Russian symbolist journal The Golden Fleece. Popova most likely knows of the exhibition, as her father subscribes to the magazine.

1. Oct 26

Matisse acquires six Cézanne watercolors from Vollard.

Morandi sees photographs of the work of Cézanne and the French Impressionists in a book by Vittorio Pica, and he also reads Ardengo Soffici’s reports from Paris in the magazine La Voce, in which Soffici calls Cézanne a “born-again Italian.”

1. 1909
   1. Winter

Picasso and Braque begin a closer dialogue as their mutual interest in Cézanne grows. Picasso’s painting Still Life with Hat (Cézanne’s Hat) shows the Kronstadt hat Braque had purchased in homage to Cézanne.

1. Apr

In his review of the Salon des Indépendants of this year, the critic André Salmon writes: “Although Cézanne’s spirit wanders through these rooms, many of the artists who came under his influence affirm their temperament to be entirely original.” The term “Cubism” first appears in print in another review of the exhibition, by Charles Morice: “I believe I do see that Mr. Braque is on the whole a victim—setting ‘Cubism’ aside—of an admiration for Cézanne that is too exclusive or ill considered.”

1. Dec 3

Cornelis Hoogendijk’s collection of old master paintings and contemporary art is displayed on permanent loan to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Included are eleven of the thirty-one Cézannes Hoogendijk acquired from Vollard during his lifetime.

Morandi studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Bologna, where he sees reproductions of Cézanne's work.

1. 1910

Julius Meier-Graefe’s monograph on Cézanne is published in Germany.

1. Jun 27–
   Jul 23

Vollard’s exhibition Figures de Cézanne includes twenty-four paintings. The poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire sees the show and writes: “Most of the new painters admit their debt to this sincere and candid artist.”

1. Nov 8– Jan 15, 1911

The exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries, London, includes twenty-one Cézanne paintings as well as works by Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. The exhibition is poorly received by the public. The art historian and critic Roger Fry writes in the journal The Nation: “[Picasso] is possessed by a peculiar passion for geometric abstraction and executes things that are already familiar to us from Cézanne with almost desperately rigorous persistence.”

1. Nov 18–
   Dec 8

Alfred Stieglitz shows a collection of lithographs and drawings at his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, including both color and black-and-white lithographs by Cézanne. Also on display are about a dozen black-and-white photographs of Cézanne’s paintings that the artist Max Weber purchased from the Paris gallery owner and photographer Antoine Druet.

Mondrian, along with the Dutch painters Conrad Kikkert and Jan Sluijters, founds the Moderne Kunst Kring (Modern Art Circle), with fellow artist Jan Toorop acting as chairman. Following the model of the Salon d’Automne in Paris, the group plans to mount annual exhibitions of work by avant-garde artists. The following fall they will organize an exhibition in honor of Cézanne at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, also showing works by Mondrian, Picasso, Braque, and others. At the show’s opening, Toorop refers to Cézanne as “the father in France and even, dare I say it, in all of this brave Europe of painting, the precursor of the modern school; the laborer; the profound, subtle, and majestic tonalist; precursor, after Manet, of this modern school.” The exhibition will have a huge impact on Mondrian’s work in the year to come.

1. 1911
   1. Mar 1–25

The first exhibition in the United States dedicated to Cézanne’s work, Watercolors by Cézanne, opens at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, where both Demuth and John Marin see it. Later in the year, an anonymous essay on Cézanne appears in Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work. The author (likely Stieglitz himself) asserts: “On first glancing at the few touches of color which made up the water-colors by Cézanne . . . the beholder was tempted to exclaim, ‘Is that all?’ Yet if one gave oneself a chance, one succumbed to the fascination of his art. The white paper no longer seemed empty space, but became vibrant with sunlight. The artist’s touch was so sure, each stroke was so willed, each value so true.”

1. Apr

Matisse purchases Cézanne’s painting Fruit and Leaves, c. 1890.

1. Summer

In Maine, Hartley paints works inspired by black-and-white illustrations of Cézanne’s paintings in Meier-Graefe’s monograph on the artist (published the previous year) and on ideas about Cézanne he gleaned from Weber.

1. Autumn

The American artist Arthur B. Davies takes Hartley to the home of Louisine Havemeyer, an influential New York collector, who along with her husband had amassed an important collection of contemporary paintings, including, by 1907, thirteen Cézannes, the first Hartley sees in person. In his autobiography, Somehow a Past, Hartley will later elaborate: “It was an amazing afternoon—one needed strength to be with all the great pictures for everyone now knows the Havemeyer Collection in the Metropolitan Museum. I was sorry when the collection was finally put on view not to find the Cézannes I had remembered most of all.”

Sir Michael Sadler purchases The Abandoned House, 1878–79, the first Cézanne painting to enter a British collection. In November he organizes a show in London assembled around his recently acquired paintings by Cézanne and Gauguin.

Morandi visits the International Exhibition of Rome, which includes work by Cézanne.

1. Dec 18

Stieglitz writes a letter to the editor of the New York Evening Sun, saying that the Metropolitan Museum of Art “owes it to the Americans to give them a chance to study the work of Cézanne . . . [which] is the strongest influence in modern painting. . . . I firmly believe that an exhibition, a well-selected one, of Cézanne’s paintings is, just at present, of more vital importance than would be an exhibition of Rembrandts.” He also tells a New York critic that “without the understanding of Cézanne . . . it is impossible for anyone to grasp, even faintly, much that is going on in the art world to-day.”

1. 1912

Léger paints The Woman in Blue and Railway Crossing. Of this period, he will later say: “I fought the battle to abandon Cézanne. His influence was so strong that in order to free myself I had to move all the way to abstraction. In La Femme en bleu [Woman in Blue] and in Le Passage à niveau [Railway Crossing], I felt I was breaking free from Cézanne.”

Popova visits the collection of Sergei Shchukin, open to the public since the Spring of 1909, and sees paintings by Cézanne, Matisse, Braque, and Picasso. By this time, Shchukin owns eight important Cézannes, including Mardi Gras, 1888, which will have a direct impact on Popova’s figural painting.

Mondrian moves to Paris, initially sharing a studio with Conrad Kikkert.

1. Mar 14

Beckmann publishes “Thoughts on Timely and Untimely Art” in the journal Pan, in response to comments by Franz Marc regarding Cézanne. Beckmann refers to Cézanne as a great inspiration: “I myself revere Cézanne as a genius.”

1. Mid-Apr

Hartley arrives in Paris and immediately visits many museums and galleries. He writes to Stieglitz on April 13: “I saw 8 Van Goghs this afternoon— several fine, one ‘La Berceuse’ a beauty— others—landscapes—four Cézannes at Vollard’s (funny place). Tomorrow I shall go on to the Louvre—then the Salon des Indépendants.” Shortly after his arrival, he attends one of Gertrude and Leo Stein’s Saturday evening gatherings at 27, rue de Fleurus, where he sees their collection. Hartley remembers that the walls were “crowded with the new Picassos—many of the ‘collage’ epoch, with piece[s] of the daily papers stuck in, or perhaps oftener painted in, pieces of the words ‘jour’nal— ‘trans’igaient too perhaps—and there were still a few Cézannes and a Matisse or two.”

1. May 25–
   Sep 30

The Sonderbund westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler (Separate League of West German Art Lovers and Artists), founded in 1909, mounts an influential exhibition in Cologne of avant-garde art, including works by Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Paul Signac, and Edvard Munch.

1. Fall

Hartley writes to Stieglitz that he has “been thrilled of late with Cézanne water colors” and that he has discovered in them a “new aspect of vision the which I am intensifying in myself in connection with what I want to do.” He calls the watercolors in the current Bernheim-Jeune show Cézanne’s “finest expression as pure vision. . . . registrations of pure sensation out of a peaceful state of mind.”

The International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show) at the Art Institute of Chicago, Spring 1913

1. Dec

Demuth embarks on his second and most extended European visit, where he meets Hartley (with whom he will later travel to Berlin) and the Steins. He will stay in Europe until the Spring of 1914, attending art academies and absorbing the Paris art scene.

Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a Philadelphia businessman, makes his first visit to Paris and acquires two Cézanne paintings, the beginnings of what will become a world-renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and modern art. He will eventually amass a collection of sixty-nine Cézannes.

1. 1913
   1. Feb 17–
      Mar 15

Modeled on the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne the previous year, the International Exhibition of Modern Art (popularly known as the Armory Show after its venue at the 69th Regiment Armory) opens in New York. The exhibition, which includes fourteen paintings and one watercolor by Cézanne, brings European modern art to the United States on a large scale and forever changes the American art scene, especially in New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchases their first Cézanne painting from the show, View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph, 1888–90. The exhibition will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Copley Society of Boston in the coming months.

1. Spring

Hartley visits the Berlin Secession, an annual exhibition founded in 1899 in opposition to the official salon and aiming to support avant-garde art and artists in Germany, which this year features Cézanne and the Expressionists. He sends a postcard to fellow artists Vasily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter in May: “I have seen the Secession— Nothing of any consequence outside of Matisse, Cézanne—Van Gogh—Seurat— Kokosehka [sic] & the Refusierten der Secession a few doors below is ridiculous.” Max Beckmann probably visits the show as well.

1. 1914
   1. Mar

Beckmann publishes an article titled “The New Program” in the journal Kunst und Künstler, in which he writes: “Rembrandt, Goya, and the young Cézanne strove for important sculptural effects without succumbing to the danger of naturalism in the least. It makes me sad to have to emphasize this, but thanks to the current fad for flat paintings, people have reached the point where they condemn a picture a priori as naturalistic simply because it is not flat, thin, and decorative. . . . I am of the opinion that not one of all the French followers of Cézanne has vindicated the principle of two-dimensionality that followed the inspired clumsiness of the late Cézanne, the holy simplicity of Giotto, and the religious folk cultures of Egypt and Byzantium.” Beckmann’s comments are inspired by several Cézannes he sees in Germany at this time, including Rocks, L’Estaque, 1865–66, Portrait of Anthony Valabrègue, 1866, Portrait of a Monk (Uncle Dominique), c. 1866, and Still Life, 1867–69.

Vollard publishes a monograph on Cézanne, anecdotally recounting his firsthand experiences with the artist. It will later be translated into English and released in several editions. Morandi will purchase the book in 1919.

The Galerie Bernheim-Jeune publishes an album honoring Cézanne, which includes original lithographs by several prominent artists after his work. Bonnard contributes a lithograph after the bather painting he owns, and Matisse creates one after his Cézanne painting Fruit and Leaves. The book also includes an original etching by Cézanne.

1. Apr 13–
   Jun

Morandi attends the Rome Secession, which includes thirteen Cézanne watercolors as well as paintings and prints by Matisse. He also sees reproductions of works by Cézanne and Picasso in illustrated monographs published by La Voce around this time.

1. Aug

Following the outbreak of war in Europe, a number of artists join or are mobilized to serve in the army or medical or engineering corps of their countries, including Beckmann, Braque, and Léger. Hartley is forced to return to the United States, and Mondrian to the Netherlands.

1. 1915

Morandi paints several canvases related to Cézanne’s bather paintings, particularly his Five Bathers, 1885–87, which is in the collection of Egisto Fabbri, an American painter and collector then living in Florence. Morandi sees Five Bathers in reproduction in Sedici opere di Cézanne (Sixteen Works by Cézanne), published by Libraria della Voce in 1914. The previous year, the Italian journal Lacerba had published an article on Cézanne by Vollard with a reproduction of a bathers drawing.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Loan Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings, New York, 1921

1. 1916
   1. Jan 1–31

Demuth sees an exhibition of seven paintings and twenty watercolors by Cézanne at the Montross Gallery in New York, which contributes to a dramatic stylistic change in his work the following year, particularly in his watercolors.

Matisse paints his first portrait of Auguste Pellerin. While visiting the collector, he likely sees Cézanne’s Portrait of Gustave Geffroy, 1895–96, and other Cézanne paintings in the Pellerin collection, sparking a renewed interest in the artist and a reworking of his landmark painting Bathers by a River (now at the Art Institute of Chicago) and the Back sculpture series.

1. 1918
   1. September

Perhaps inspired by Meier-Graefe’s Cézanne and His Circle (published in Munich this year), Beckmann publishes his “Creative Credo,” in which he explains: “Most important for me is volume, trapped in height and width; volume on the plane, depth without losing the awareness of the plane, the architecture of the picture. . . . I certainly hope we are finished with much of the past. Finished with the mindless imitation of visible reality; finished with feeble, archaistic, and empty decoration, and finished with that false, sentimental, and swooning mysticism! I hope we will achieve a transcendental objectivity out of a deep love for nature and humanity. The sort of thing you see in the art of Mälesskircher, Grünewald, Brueghel, Cézanne, and van Gogh.”

1. 1920
   1. Mar

Gorky arrives in the United States with his sister and settles in Watertown, Massachusetts, where his sister is living.

1. Apr 17–
   May 9

The first showing of Cézanne’s work in Philadelphia—eight paintings and six watercolors—takes place in the exhibition Paintings and Drawings by Representative Modern Masters at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

1. May–
   Oct

An exhibition dedicated to Cézanne in the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, organized by Paul Signac, includes twenty-eight of his paintings. Morandi sees the exhibition, and Giacometti attends with his father, the painter Giovanni Giacometti, who is a member of the Swiss Art Committee for the Biennale. During this trip to Italy, the younger Giacometti is fascinated by Cimabue, Giotto, and Tintoretto. He will later notice the same qualities he admires in these artists in Cézanne, stating that this “gives him for me a unique position in the whole painting of recent centuries.”

1. 1921
   1. Spring-
      Summer

Two New York exhibitions of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings—one at the Brooklyn Museum and another at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—stir controversy, with some wondering whether museums, as “bastions of good taste,” should even show modern art. In the Met’s bulletin, curator Bryson Burroughs calls Cézanne the “strongest influence among the younger painters of our time.” His stated objective in presenting the exhibition is to display paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, and other avant-garde artists near galleries housing the museum’s accepted masterpieces so that audiences can draw their own conclusions about their merit. The debate surrounding the shows significantly increases attendance.

1. Summer

An anonymous pamphlet is published denouncing the modern art on display at the Metropolitan Museum and calling for a boycott of the exhibition. The authors cite an article written by a group of Philadelphia physicians claiming to have found evidence of psychological degeneracy in certain modern artists. Applying the doctors’ theories, the pamphlet’s authors find several of the exhibited paintings, including one by Cézanne, to be “pathological in conception, drawing, perspective and color.” The collector Albert C. Barnes defends the artists in the show, offering his entire collection of modern art and a gallery in which to house it to the city of Philadelphia if the local physicians can prove themselves qualified in the science of normal and abnormal psychology. His offer is ignored.

1. 1922

Barnes establishes a foundation in his name and three years later will open a gallery in Merion, Pennsylvania, dedicated to his collection, including his sixty-nine Cézannes.

1. 1923
   1. May 31

Ellsworth Kelly is born in Newburgh, New York.

Gorky bases several paintings on reproductions in Meier-Graefe’s Paul Cézanne, published in its fifth edition this year.

1. 1924
   1. May 25

Liubov Popova dies in Moscow.

Gorky moves to New York this year and begins working as an instructor at the New School of Design, making trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then lecturing his students on the techniques of the old masters as well as those of Cézanne and other modern artists.

1. 1925
   1. Jun–
      Jul

The Rétrospective Paul Cézanne at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, includes a large group of paintings and watercolors. Hartley sees the show during a trip to Paris from the south of France, where he has been staying.

1. 1926
   1. Jun 1–30

Cézanne’s first one-person exhibition in Great Britain, held at the Leicester Galleries, London, includes twelve paintings as well as watercolors and drawings. Roger Fry says of the show: “By now the perspective [on Cézanne] has changed, and he appears to us altogether hors concours . . . to stand in a class apart, to be related no longer to the other artists of his day, but rather to the great names of a remoter past.”

1. Sep

Gorky begins teaching at the Grand Central School in New York, where he will remain on the faculty until 1930. Over the next couple of years the self-taught Gorky will study Cézanne closely, seeking out books and articles on the artist at libraries and bookstores and painting in his manner. One student, Revington Arthur, will later recall: “Gorky was always speaking about Cézanne, so we looked at the book by Meier-Graefe.” As Gorky explained many years later: “I was with Cézanne for a long time . . . and then naturally I was with Picasso.”

1. Oct

On his way to Paris to see an exhibition of his own paintings, Hartley spends a day in Aix-en-Provence and then three more days on his return. He takes long walks in the country to visit Cézanne’s studio on the Chemin des Lauves and toward the Château Noir, along the Route du Tholonet, always seeing Mont Sainte-Victoire in the distance. He soon moves outside Aix on the Petite Route du Tholonet, where from his windows he can see Mont Sainte-Victoire. He will later write: “I couldn’t believe my eyes for what I saw in the way of dignified beauty . . . and one mountain—which in one time or another would have brought worshippers for the sense of grandeur & majesty it possesses.” He notes a “general opulence of nature” that accounts for the qualities in Cézanne’s work. Of Aix, he writes: “Such color exists nowhere outside of the windows of Chartes & St. Chapelle —the earth itself seems as if it were naturally incandescent & seems fired from underneath somehow—yet withal so restrained & dignified. & How remarkable that Cézanne should have found it to be so complete.”

The Picasso scholar Christian Zervos launches the journal Cahiers d’art. Giacometti collects a series of issues that contain reproductions of important works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian.

1. 1927

Roger Fry’s Cézanne: A Study of His Development is published in London by Hogarth Press. Gorky reads the book and studies its images.

Hartley moves into the Maison Maria— Cézanne’s second studio and a frequent subject of his paintings—just outside Aix.

1. 1928
   1. Jan

The Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Cézanne opens at the Wildenstein Galleries in New York with paintings from public and private collections in the United States and some from the collection of Egisto Fabbri. Gorky most likely visits the exhibition, since this year he paints a self-portrait seemingly modeled after one of Cézanne’s portraits in the show.

1. 1929
   1. Jan

Hartley exhibits still lifes and landscapes created during his stay in the south of France at Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery. The public and critics reject the paintings, with one critic, Murdock Pemberton, disapproving of Hartley’s travels outside the United States and his “worship[ping of] Cézanne at the foot of his own shrine [Mont Sainte-Victoire] and not being ashamed of it.” Hartley returns to Aix in April.

1. Jan 29

The Havemeyer bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art includes thirteen Cézanne paintings.

1. Nov

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, opens with its first exhibition of Post-Impressionist art, including twenty-nine paintings and six watercolors by Cézanne. The museum’s founders include the collector Lillie P. Bliss, a major contributor of Cézanne paintings to the museum.

Gorky sees a small number of Cézannes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He also frequents the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, certainly seeing Cézanne’s View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph, which is on view there during the 1920s.

1. 1930
   1. May 15

Jasper Johns is born in Augusta, Georgia.

1. 1931
   1. May 17–
      Sep 27

Lillie Bliss’s collection, following her death this year, is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in a memorial exhibition that includes all eleven of her Cézanne paintings. The show will travel to Andover, Massachusetts, and Indianapolis.

1. Jun 3–
   Jul 3

An exhibition of modern art at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, includes eleven Cézanne paintings. Beckmann, who is teaching at the Städel School of Art there, probably visits the show.

1. 1933
   1. Jun 1–
      Nov 1

The Art Institute of Chicago organizes the exhibition A Century of Progress to coincide with the World’s Fair and includes eighteen Cézanne paintings. They will host another iteration of the show the following year.

1. 1934
   1. Feb

Gorky travels to Philadelphia and visits the Barnes Foundation in nearby Merion. His wife will later recall: “When Gorky went to the Barnes Foundation he was in such a state of excitement over the Cézannes, but Mr. Barnes followed him around and stood just behind him and whistled and made little noises— ‘sh, sh, sh,’ and it drove Gorky mad so he left.”

1. Nov–
   Dec

The first one-person exhibition devoted to Cézanne in Philadelphia opens at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art (now the Philadelphia Museum of Art). It includes forty-five paintings as well as numerous watercolors, prints, and drawings.

1. 1935
   1. Oct 23

Charles Demuth dies in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

1. 1936
   1. May–
      Oct

To commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Cézanne’s death, the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, mounts a major exhibition of his work, including 113 paintings and 32 watercolors. During this time, Matisse gives his Cézanne painting Three Bathers to the Petit Palais, Paris, accompanied by a letter: “In the thirty-seven years I have owned this canvas, I have come to know it quite well, though not entirely, I hope; it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance; for this reason, allow me to request that it be placed so that it May be seen to its best advantage. For this it needs both light and adequate space. It is rich in color and surface, and seen at a distance it is possible to appreciate the sweep of its lines and the exceptional sobriety of its relationships. I know that I do not have to tell you this, but nevertheless I think it is my duty to do so; please accept these remarks as the excusable testimony of my admiration for this work which has grown increasingly greater ever since I have owned it.”

Picasso purchases Cézanne’s painting Château Noir, 1903–4, around this time. The Cézanne scholar Lionello Venturi publishes the first catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s work, including paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints.

1. 1937
   1. Jul 6

The Pennsylvania Museum of Art purchases Cézanne’s Large Bathers, the largest canvas in Cézanne’s oeuvre, from the Pellerin family. This is the first Cézanne bather painting acquired by a museum.

1. 1938
   1. Oct 15

Nicholas Brice Marden, Jr., is born in Bronxville, New York.

1. 1939
   1. Summer

Two exhibitions in London feature Cézanne’s paintings, watercolors, and drawings. At the time of these exhibitions, the British novelist Virginia Woolf writes: “It is difficult in 1939, when the gallery is daily crowded with devout and submissive worshippers, to realise what violent emotions those pictures excited less than 30 years ago. The pictures are the same; it is the public that has changed. . . . The public in 1910 was thrown into paroxysms of rage and laughter.”

1. 1940

Following the outbreak of World War II in Europe, and the fall of Paris in June, a number of artists leave for the United States, including Mondrian and Léger. Others flee to the countryside or to neutral cities such as Geneva.

1. 1943
   1. Sep 2

Marsden Hartley dies in Ellsworth, Maine.

1. 1944
   1. Feb 1

Piet Mondrian dies in New York City.

1. 1946
   1. Apr 5

The documentary film Fernand Léger in America—His New Realism, by the photographer Thomas Bouchard with a soundtrack by Edgard Varèse, premieres at the Sorbonne in Paris. As the writer Peter de Francia describes it: “The film shows Léger in his New York flat, surrounded with his paintings, moving from room to room, discussing a reproduction of Cézanne’s Women Bathing and pointing out the ‘Feeling for the Object’ that the painting contains.”

1. Sep 29

Jeff Wall is born in Vancouver, British Columbia.

1. 1947
   1. Apr 5

Beckmann moves to the United States from Amsterdam, where he had been living since 1937, and takes a teaching position at the School of Fine Arts, Washington University, in Saint Louis, Missouri.

1. 1948

Beckmann and his wife Quappi travel to American colleges and universities visiting art students and presenting his lecture “Letters to a Woman Painter,” which Quappi delivers because of Beckmann’s limited English. In the lecture Beckmann declares: “I must refer you to Cézanne again and again. He succeeded in creating an exalted Courbet, a mysterious Pissarro, and finally a powerful new pictorial architecture in which he really became the last old master, or I might better say he became the first ‘new master.’ . . . Don’t forget nature, through which Cézanne, as he said, wanted to achieve the classical.”

1. Mar 13

Beckmann visits the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which Ellsworth Kelly is attending on the GI Bill. Kelly will later recall the lasting impact the visit had on him: “I admired the intensity of [Beckmann’s] colours against their black outlines and his often brutal and erotic subjects. He was able to express the most disturbing subjects with great virtuosity. . . . At that time he was the most important painter that I had come in contact with. It was a very significant event in my life. . . . Picasso and Beckmann were the most important artists to me during my student years. Every time I see a Beckmann, I’m impressed by the content of his work, his structure, colour, and especially his brushwork. Even though my work is not Expressionist, Beckmann’s visual force has informed my painting and my admiration for his art only grows with time.”

1. Jul 21

Arshile Gorky dies in Sherman, Connecticut.

1. Oct

Kelly arrives in Paris, where he meets Gertrude Stein’s companion, Alice B. Toklas, and views the Stein collection. While in the city, he will also see exhibitions of work by Picasso and Matisse.

1. 1950
   1. Dec 27

Max Beckmann dies in New York, just outside his building at Sixty-first Street and Central Park West, while on his way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see his most recent self-portrait in an exhibition there. Kelly goes to New York shortly thereafter: “I read the story of his dying. . . . When I finished reading, I went down to New York and just stood on the corner.”

1. 1952
   1. Feb 7–
      May 16

The major exhibition Cézanne, which opens at the Art Institute of Chicago and travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, includes approximately eighty paintings and thirty-three watercolors. Johns attends the exhibition and later states in an interview: “It’s very hard for me to play with that word [influence], because one is influenced by everything. . . . My familiarity with Cézanne in the flesh dates from the show the Metropolitan did. They did a huge Cézanne show. . . . A beautiful, big show.”

Around this time one of Cézanne’s views of L’Estaque is acquired by Picasso, who shows it off to visitors, rapping on the central area and saying: “Look at the sea, it’s solid as a rock.”

1. 1954
   1. July–
      Oct

The exhibition Homage to Cézanne at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, includes sixty-four paintings and nine watercolors. Picasso probably sees this exhibition, which includes Cézanne’s Five Bathers, 1877–78, a painting he will purchase in 1957.

1. Nov 3

Henri Matisse dies in Nice, France.

1. 1955
   1. Aug 17

Fernand Léger dies in Gifsur-Yvette, outside Paris.

1. 1956
   1. Jun

Morandi visits Winterthur, Switzerland, and sees the collection of Oskar Reinhart, which includes many works by Pieter Bruegel, Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco de Goya, El Greco, Jean-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas Poussin, and Cézanne. Heinz Keller, then director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, will later remember of this visit: “Morandi’s attention was always selective. . . . He was highly impressed, as were the other two visitors [Vitale Bloch and Lamberto Vitali], by the overall view of the Manet-Cézanne room. Morandi was particularly taken with the three still lifes by Cézanne.”

1. 1957
   1. Apr 16

In an interview with Radio Télévision Française, Giacometti talks about Cézanne, who he says “threw a bomb at . . . vision by painting a human head like an object. He said, ‘I paint a head like a door, like it’s nothing.’”

1. 1958

Picasso purchases the Château de Vauvenargues in southern France. Picasso scholar Pierre Daix later recounts the event: “[Picasso] stopped painting and vanished abruptly with [his wife] Jacqueline. When he reappeared, he informed [the dealer Daniel-Henry] Kahnweiler that he had ‘bought the Sainte-Victoire.’ ‘Which one?’ Kahnweiler asked, unaware of any Cézanne on the market. ‘The real one!’ Picasso was crowing with pleasure. He had, in fact, just bought the Château de Vauvenargues, whose grounds include the famous mountain.”

Jasper Johns reads the artist Robert Motherwell’s Dada Painters and Poets, an anthology of essays about modern art, prompting his first visit to the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which includes works by Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, and Léger.

Brice Marden attends the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he frequents the galleries of Cézanne paintings.

Giacometti is in Zurich and probably visits the Kunsthaus Zurich’s exhibition of the Emil G. Bührle collection, which includes Cézanne’s Vase with Flowers and Apples of 1889–90. In 1961 he will paint his own Bouquet of Flowers and Three Apples.

1. 1960

Around this time, Johns conceives the idea of copying in gray Cézanne’s Bather in the Lillie Bliss collection at the Museum of Modern Art, but never realizes it.

The sculptor Henry Moore purchases Cézanne’s Three Bathers, c. 1875. He says at the time: “To me it’s marvellous. Monumental. It’s only about a foot square, but for me it has all the monumentality of the bigger ones of Cézanne. . . . Each of the figures I could turn into a piece of sculpture, very simply.” In 1978 he will in fact create a bronze bather grouping entitled Three Bathers—After Cézanne and later make several drawings of the maquette from different angles.

1. 1963
   1. Aug 31

Georges Braque dies in Paris.

1. 1964
   1. Jun 18

Giorgio Morandi dies in Bologna, Italy.

1. 1966
   1. Jan 11

Alberto Giacometti dies in Chur, Switzerland.

1. 1969
   1. Sep

Johns visits the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, with friends, including Roberta Bernstein, who will later write that Johns “was most interested in the Cézannes.” The group also visits the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where curator Anne d’Harnoncourt shows them Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés.

1. 1970
   1. May 23

Johns revisits the Barnes Foundation, again with Bernstein, and points out Cézanne’s Boy with Skull, 1896–98, as one of his favorite paintings.

In a conversation with the artist and curator Willoughby Sharp and three other artists, Marden, who is having a one-person exhibition at the Bykert Gallery in New York, says: “There’s a big difference between being realistic and depicting realistic subject matter. . . . I think Cézanne was painting, and not painting anything, just painting.”

1. 1973
   1. Apr 8

Pablo Picasso dies in Mougins, France.

Cézanne scholar Adrien Chappuis publishes his catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s drawings.

Jeff Wall visits the Philadelphia Museum of Art and sees Duchamp’s Étant Donnés as well as other important works in the collection. He later describes the visit as “crucial.”

1. 1974
   1. Jul 19–
      Oct 14

An exhibition of Cézanne’s works in French museums opens at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. Johns sees this show, which he calls “very beautiful.”

1. 1977
   1. Oct 7

The exhibition Cézanne: The Late Work opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It includes sixty-seven paintings and fifty-five watercolors and will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Grand Palais, Paris. Johns, who is having a retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art at the same time, sees the show in New York and remembers in particular the National Gallery of London’s Large Bathers, 1894–1905. Before the end of the year, he will use a postcard of this painting to make his first tracing from another artist’s work.

1. 1981

Johns purchases a Cézanne drawing of roses from the auction of the Leigh B. Block collection.

1. 1982
   1. Jan 16

An important exhibition of 125 of Cézanne’s watercolors opens at the Kunsthalle Tübingen before traveling to the Kunsthaus Zurich. Its catalogue becomes a landmark for the study of Cézanne’s watercolors.

1. 1983

John Rewald publishes his catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s watercolors, which will become a major reference work for Cézanne scholarship.

1. 1988
   1. Jun 15–
      Sep 4

The exhibition Paul Cézanne: Bathers at the Kunsthalle Basel includes seventy-two paintings. Johns sees the show, to which he lends Cézanne’s Bather with Outstretched Arms and the drawing Studies for Bathers, c. 1877–80.

1. 1990
   1. Sep 10–
      Dec 10

Kelly organizes the exhibition Fragmentation and the Single Form as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s Artist’s Choice series, in which contemporary artists select objects from the museum’s collection for exhibition. Kelly includes the Cézanne watercolor Foliage (1895–1900) as well as works by Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, and Léger. In the exhibition catalogue, he writes: “I feel that one of the most important developments in the history of abstraction has been the artist’s struggle to free form from depiction and materiality. . . . In the making of art, fragmentation of forms, whether willfully or by chance, is related to vision. Wherever we look in the world, objects are layered, jumbled together, spread out before us. The Impressionists, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne were among the first artists to try to come to terms with this visual chaos. . . . Cézanne tackled and conceptualized the three-dimensional world in terms of its underlying structure and our uncertain relationships to it.”

1. 1991
   1. Mar 23–
      Jul 21

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, asks Marden to curate an exhibition as part of its Connections series, using works from the museum’s permanent collection. Marden includes Cézanne’s Fruit and Jug on a Table, 1890–94, as well as the painting Head of Diego by Giacometti and Beckmann’s Still Life with Three Skulls. Marden writes a poem for the catalogue, of which the last lines are: “now / Rows of charged mysterious objects. A room of / things with no known author, excepting / Cézanne, my hero.”

1. 1991
   1. May 2–
      Aug 15

The exhibition Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, includes twenty Cézanne paintings. It will travel to Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Toronto, Paris, and Tokyo. Johns sees the exhibition in Washington, and again at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the following year makes a series of tracings of the Barnes’s Large Bathers using a poster from the show.

1. 1995
   1. Sep

Johns acquires Cézanne’s drawing Self-Portrait, c. 1880.

1. Sep 26

The major retrospective exhibition Paul Cézanne opens at the Grand Palais, Paris, before traveling to the Tate Gallery, London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The show includes 127 paintings as well as watercolors and drawings. Marden, Kelly, and Johns all attend at the Philadelphia venue.

1. 1996

Rewald publishes his catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s paintings, updating Venturi’s dating of many works and providing full references for nearly one thousand paintings.

1. 1998
   1. Aug 9–
      Nov 18

The exhibition Cézanne and the Russian Avant-Garde at the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, traces Cézanne’s influence in Russia and includes works by Popova.

1. 1999
   1. Oct 10– Jan 9 2000

The Fondation Beyeler, Basel, in their exhibition Cézanne und die Moderne, places forty-six paintings by Cézanne alongside works by Matisse, Mondrian, Léger, Picasso, Braque, Giacometti, and Kelly to more closely examine his effect on later generations of artists.

1. 2000
   1. Jan 28–
      Apr 22

The exhibition Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, includes works by Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Hartley, and Demuth, exploring Stieglitz’s influence on modernism in the United States.

Kelly visits Aix-en-Provence and Mont Sainte-Victoire, making drawings of the mountain.

1. 2002
   1. Mar 7–
      Jul 7

The exhibition Cézanne: il padre dei moderni (Cézanne: The Father of Modernism), at the Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome, includes more than sixty works by Cézanne, including drawings and watercolors.

1. 2004
   1. Oct 12– Jan 2 2005

The exhibition Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, includes twenty-three Cézannes. Kelly sees the show and is fascinated by the infrared photographs of Still Life with Blue Pot in the Getty’s collection.

1. 2006
   1. Jan 29–
      Sep 17

The exhibition Cézanne in Provence at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, which commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s death, includes 168 works. It travels to the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence.

1. Sep 13

The exhibition Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The show investigates the importance of Vollard as a dealer and proponent of modern art and includes twenty-four works by Cézanne, along with art by a number of his contemporaries and those that followed, including Matisse and Picasso. It will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

1. Oct 24– Jan 14 2007

As part of the Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition series Correspondences—for which contemporary artists choose a work from the museum’s permanent collection with which to create a dialogue—Jeff Wall selects Cézanne’s The Pont de Maincy, 1879–80, to show with his Rear View, Open Air Theater, 2005. Of the pairing, Wall states: “Cézanne led the way in the reduction of the intensity of the subject in painting. . . . Rear View is simply a documentary photograph, made rather quickly on an overcast day in July, after a bit of summer rain.”

1. 2007
   1. Mar 2–
      Jul 29

The exhibition Cézanne a Firenze: due collezionisti e la mostra dell’impressionismo del 1910 (Cézanne in Florence: Two Collectors and the 1910 Exhibition of Impressionism) opens at the Palazzo Strozzi. It includes twenty-one works by Cézanne and explores his impact on Italian artists in the early twentieth century, particularly through the collections of the Americans Eggisto Fabbri and Charles Loeser.

1. 2008
   1. Feb 20–
      Jun 29

The exhibition Cézanne and Giacometti: Paths of Doubt at the Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark, places sixty works by Cézanne in conversation with more than one hundred by Giacometti.

Teaching Materials

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence (ex-on-pro-VAHNCE), a small town in southeastern France. (The town is sometimes called Aix, and is in the region known as Provence.) He explored the countryside around Aix when he was growing up and felt closely linked to this landscape throughout his life. In his paintings he returned again and again to scenes he knew from childhood, including Mont Sainte-Victoire, the peak of a low range of mountains near Aix. Cézanne studied painting and drawing in Aix. His father, a wealthy banker, discouraged his artistic career and persuaded him to enter law school. Cézanne later withdrew from law school and convinced his father to support his move to Paris, where he met Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) and other artists who came to be known as the Impressionists. He worked alongside Pissarro, who encouraged him to paint outdoors and to concentrate on observing nature closely. From him, Cézanne learned to use lighter colors and smaller brushstrokes to capture the effects of sunlight. Cézanne showed his paintings with the Impressionists in 1874 and 1877. After 1878, he spent much of the rest of his life painting in Provence. Relatively isolated from the Paris art scene, Cézanne pursued his own artistic path. While the Impressionists depicted changing light and atmospheric effects, he was more interested in studying the underlying structure of the landscapes he painted. He said, "I wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring like the art in museums." Few of his works sold and he did not show his art publicly for almost twenty years. Cézanne gradually achieved recognition later in life. In 1895 an art dealer in Paris showed a large number of his paintings at his first solo exhibition and public interest began to grow. Cézanne, who vowed to die painting, became ill after painting outdoors in Aix in 1906 and passed away soon afterward. The next year, he was honored with a large retrospective (an exhibition that shows an artist's life work). His paintings continue to inspire artists today, over one hundred years later.

Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne

Looking and Discussion Questions

• Which parts of this landscape seem closest to you? Which seem farther away? How does the artist show that?
• How would you describe the colors that Cézanne used?
• Which parts of this painting are described in more detail? Which are less detailed?
• Think about a place outdoors that you know well. Why might an artist return again and again to paint the same landscape?

Mont Sainte-Victoire is a mountain in Provence (pro-VAHNCE), the region in southeastern France where Cézanne was born and spent most of his life. It can be seen from a hillside near a studio called Les Lauves (lay loave) that Cézanne built in 1902. The mountain's name, which translates as "Mountain of Holy Victory," was associated with a celebrated victory by Provence's ancient Roman inhabitants against an invading army. Cézanne painted more than sixty versions of what he called "his" mountain, yet none of the paintings looks exactly the same. We can imagine Cézanne looking out over this landscape and noticing how the shapes of the rooftops or the profile of the mountain changed as he shifted his viewpoint. In this painting Cézanne was not concerned with reproducing the exact details of the scene before him. He hoped instead to create a "harmony parallel to nature." We can see that goal fulfilled in his carefully harmonized patches of color that fit together like pieces in a mosaic. No one is sure why Cézanne returned to this subject so often. The mountain stands out boldly from its surroundings, just as Cézanne stood apart from his fellow artists, and both are closely linked to the artist's native Provence. Perhaps his many paintings of this mountain reflect his love of Provence, or his interest in discovering new aspects of a familiar place. " The same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study of the most powerful interest and so varied that I think I could occupy myself for months without changing place, by turning now more to the right, now more to the left." —Paul Cézanne in a letter to his son, 1906

Map of France showing sites in Provence where Cézanne lived and painted

Cézanne's Legacy

" It is true that there is hardly one modern artist of importance to whom Cézanne is not father or grandfather, and that no other influence is comparable with his." —Clive Bell, English art critic, 1922 The French artist Paul Cézanne (say-ZAHN), who lived from 1839 to 1906, is widely considered to be the father of modern art. His life and work have inspired artists for over a century. Some were impressed by his single-minded pursuit of an artistic vision. Others were inspired by his close observation of nature. His distinctive approach to painting opened many possibilities for other artists to explore. In the painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire (above), for example, he used separate touches of paint to create a color harmony throughout his composition. Cézanne himself saw that other artists would build on his breakthroughs. "I point the way; others will come after," he said. One of those who came after Cézanne was the American artist Marsden Hartley. Hartley traveled from his home in Maine to New York City and Paris, where he studied Cézanne's paintings. He also spent time in Cézanne's hometown in France, even living briefly in a building that had once been his studio, all so that he could better understand this master painter. The Philadelphia Museum of Art owns many important works by Cézanne and by artists whom he inspired, including Marsden Hartley, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian. Cézanne's legacy is the subject of , a special exhibition on view at the Museum from February 26 to May 2009.

New Mexico Landscape by Marsden Hartley

Looking and Discussion Questions

• Compare New Mexico Landscape by Marsden Hartley to Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire. What do you think Hartley may have learned from Cézanne? What did he do differently?
• Find some colors or shapes that repeat in New Mexico Landscape. How does Hartley use them to unify his composition?
• Have you ever visited a place that was very different from your home? How could you depict its unique features in a painting or photograph?

Marsden Hartley, like Cézanne, tried to capture the essence of nature in his landscapes. Hartley was living in Europe when World War I broke out in 1914, and he began searching for distinctively American places after his return to the United States in 1915. He found them in New Mexico, whose Native American cultures and dramatic scenery offered a unique environment. Hartley lived in Taos and Santa Fe for several months, where he used pastels to draw the nearby mountains and deserts. They are unlike any of his previous work. Here is how he described his reaction to New Mexico: " It is the most intensely pristine landscape I personally have experienced...there is nothing in conventional esthetics that will express the red deposits, the mesas, and the Canyon of the Rio Grande, nothing in the world like them...New Mexico is essentially a major sensation, for my eye, at least." —Marsden Hartley, 1918

After the artist returned to New York City in 1919, he worked in his studio on oil paintings such as New Mexico Landscape based on his recollections. Hartley contrasted warm golden and pink tones of the desert landscape with isolated patches of green vegetation. In this carefully balanced composition the rounded mountains stand out clearly against the sky. A riverbed runs through the bottom of the painting, and there are no signs of human habitation anywhere. Hartley believed that American artists would learn from firsthand contact with the landscapes of their own country, rather than imitating traditional artists, but he praised Cézanne, who was true to his own observations of nature:

" America as landscape is profoundly stirring, and the American painters must first learn to arrive at firsthand contact with it. It shall not come by way of...conventional methods. It is nearer in Cézanne because he sought to establish the quality of reality, the understanding of solidity." —Marsden Hartley, 1918

Marsden Hartley, an American artist (1877–1943), was best known early in his career for landscape paintings of his native Maine. In 1909 he met Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer who owned a prominent art gallery in New York City. Stieglitz took this photograph of Hartley and owned New Mexico Landscape before it entered the Museum's collection. With support from Stieglitz, Hartley traveled to Paris, where he admired paintings by Cézanne and other modern artists. He lived in Berlin, Germany, from 1913 to 1915. Soon after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Hartley fled Germany for the United States. A restless traveler throughout his life, Hartley returned to Europe in the 1920s and settled in Cézanne's hometown of Aix, France. He even lived in a building that had once served as Cézanne's studio, where he painted views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Hartley stayed in Provence for several years before returning to the United States. He spent his last years in Maine, where he painted landscapes, including Mount Katahdin, the state's highest peak, as well as portraits of young men and groups of people.