Link to Post:
http://mnaves.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/on-the-importance-of-drawing/
Mario Naves considers the ongoing relevance and importance of observational drawing.
Naves notes that "while this grounding [in life drawing] may be obvious in the case of representational artists, with abstract artists the connection can be slippery. It is, nonetheless, there. If we ask that a painting or sculpture be an autonomous object–a thing with its own inherent vitality–it must also have some connection with the world it occupies. If we ask that a painter create a convincing illusion of a world, then it is necessary to have had an encounter with actual objects and actual space. The art critic Robert Hughes wrote that “the philosophical beauty of Mondrian’s squares and grids begins with the empirical beauty of his apple trees.” Anyone who attended the great Mondrian retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art can attest to the truth of this statement. What we learn from Mondrian is that drawing from life can inform abstract art just as it can with figurative art. It can serve as a scaffolding for art which veers away from representation. Drawing is an armature that can be overt and covert."
Link to Post:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/09/artseen/jean-baptiste-simon-chardin-chardins-visor
John Elderfield considers the true meaning of Cézanne's interest in the painting Self Portrait or Portrait of Chardin Wearing an Eyeshade, 1775 by Jean-Siméon Chardin.
Elderfield writes: "we cannot dismiss the possibility that the unclear sentence in Cézanne’s unquestionably authentic letter on Chardin’s self-portrait is not, in fact, about a physical attribute of the pastel: the plane of light that carries across the bridge of the nose and allows the work’s range of tonal values better to be seen. It could well be about the practical purpose of the shade-creating visor depicted in the pastel..."
Link to Post:
http://www.theartblog.org/2012/07/gauguin-cezanne-matisse-visions-of-arcadia-at-the-philadelphia-museum-of-art/
Andrea Kirsh reviews the exhibition Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on view through September 3, 2012.
Kirsh writes: "In terms of the exhibition's theme one has to ask, why this subject then? And why such monumental paintings? The previous avante-garde had pointedly rejected the hierarchies of the Academy, which considered still lives and portraits beneath consideration, landscapes a lesser genre, and valued only history painting: paintings of figures depicting scenes from Biblical or Classical stories or actual events, such as Gericault's Raft of the Medusa. These have been called the grand machines of the French tradition, and only Manet attempted the genre (traditionally with the Execution of Maximilian, and in abased form with his Dejuner Sur l’Herbe and Olympia). This return to majestic history painting certainly raises the question of what turn-of-the-20th century painting should be and do, and where it fits within the history of art. The paintings by Gauguin, Cézanne and Matisse stand out in scale and ambition, exceptions within their oeuvres.
Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/barnes-foundations-new-facility.html
Charles Kessler visits and reviews the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
Kessler writes: "There are many good reasons why breaking the Barnes trust was a bad idea... And while a case can be made that this type of installation is a cultural artifact worth preserving, there are other ways, short of wholesale preservation, to document it. The bottom line is I LOVED the new Barnes... all of [the] criticisms come to nothing when confronted with the art - it will make you weep with joy! They have 69 Cézannes—more than in all the museums in Paris... And they have Matisse's Joy of Life which, along with Picasso's Demoiselles D’Avignon, is one of the landmarks of twentieth-century art. And now Joy of Life is in its own alcove instead of hanging in a stairway as in the old Barnes... And it absolutely glows. "
Link to Post:
http://www.artnews.com/2012/05/24/bathers-but-not-beauties/
Jack Flam discusses the implications of Cézanne's "de-eroticized" approach to the figure in The Large Bathers (1906), part of the upcoming exhibition Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on view from June 20, 2012 - September 3, 2012.
Flam writes that "...Cézanne’s lack of finish created an extraordinarily suggestive spatial openness, one that redefined the esthetics and structure of painting, as well as what was permissible in the representation of the human figure. We can also perceive the discontinuities in Cézanne’s paintings as being important factors in their spiritual implications. If the solid forms in his paintings seem to be on the verge of dissolution and the empty spaces on the verge of becoming solidified, they reflect Cézanne’s intuitive understanding of the interchangeability of matter and energy and his intense awareness of the metaphysical void that underlies what we can know of the natural world."
Link to Post:
http://www.art-theory.com/
Kent Minturn undertakes and in-depth examination of Clyfford Still's thesis on Cézanne and the clues it provides to Still's early and later development as an artist.
Minturn notest that "In his thesis Still eloquently emphasizes Cézanne’s 'tactual' application of paint and takes pains to describe the way his predecessor 'feels' his way around his forms. Cézanne and Still similarly dismantle Albertian perspective by giving equal emphasis to figure and ground... Although Still points out that one of Cezanne’s 'most important contributions to the evolution of modern art' was his ability 'to realize form in color rather than make color look like form,' he does not argue that one of these plastic elements is subordinate to the other. Rather, he situates them on equal footing and demonstrates the extent to which color and form are inextricably intertwined in Cézanne’s praxis."
Link to Post:
http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/c-zanne-and-paris
Nicola Homer reviews the exhibtion Cézanne in Paris at the Musée du Luxembourg, on view through February 26, 2012.
Homer writes that "The show takes as its starting point the year in which the 21-year-old Cézanne arrived in the city, after a number of letters from Zola encouraging him to escape the confines of Aix. But in contrast to the writer’s literary description of the spectacle of Napoleon III's modernised capital, with its wide elegant boulevards and uniform façades designed by Prefect Haussmann; and its surface attractions like dance and theatre... what unfolds is Cézanne’s description of a silent 'inner' city that was frequently overlooked."
Link to Post:
http://mnaves.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/bored-with-modernism/
A must read post from Mario Naves begins: "it’s been a while since Cézanne and, for that matter, modernism have excited me... I’m beholden to modernist precedent. But what’s excited me the past few years isn’t modern at all. It’s newer than all that." Naves' point is serious, it's easy for an artist's historical canon to become too narrow. He highlights "forever contemporary" artists such as Memling as well as artists today whose work engages in dialogues outside modernism.
Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/on-ground-with-cezanne.html
Kyle Gallup writes about Cézanne's Card Players on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 8, 2011. Gallup writes: "Viewing 'Cezanne’s Card Players' exhibit currently at the Metropolitan Museum was like visiting with a dear friend. The show renewed my thinking about Cezanne’s painting, and... I appreciate anew the totality of his vision"
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-elkins/post_1691_b_819376.html
As part of his blog series about slow looking James Elkins ponders the "ferociously difficult" question of when a painting is finished. He examines 'unfinished' paintings from a number of painters including Parmigianino, Cezanne, and de Kooning "map[ing] out three of the fundamental ways that paintings can be unfinished, because thinking about how something is unfinished is just a little clearer than thinking about how it's finished."
