{"id":42032,"date":"2025-07-06T00:20:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-06T00:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/42032\/"},"modified":"2025-07-06T00:20:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-06T00:20:11","slug":"the-foundation-story-of-modern-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/42032\/","title":{"rendered":"the foundation story of modern art"},"content":{"rendered":"

When banker Louis-Auguste C\u00e9zanne bought the Jas de Bouffan mansion and park outside Aix-en-Provence in 1859, he assumed his only son would follow him into the family business and enjoy the place as a county retreat. He never dreamt that within a year the grand salon would be a studio, covered with violent, clumsy, bizarre images, and in the central alcove his own impasto portrait: fierce, unyielding face in profile, engrossed in his newspaper, austerely indifferent to his son\u2019s paintings. A decade after the patriarch\u2019s death, Paul C\u00e9zanne still introduced guests to \u201cle papa\u201d glowering on that wall.<\/p>\n

C\u00e9zanne au Jas de Bouffan at Aix\u2019s Mus\u00e9e Granet is riveting and revelatory from the moment of its opening coup: reuniting a dozen murals which C\u00e9zanne in his twenties painted directly on to the salon walls. Not seen together since 1907, when they began to be removed panel by panel, sold and dispersed worldwide, they range from \u201cBather and Rocks\u201d, a tough, ungainly nude holding up a boulder against a torrent, acquired by Walter Chrysler, to classical figure allegories \u201cThe Four Seasons\u201d. They are a prism into a young mind turbulent but already forging his path: taking from tradition to make painting new.<\/p>\n

Unfolding how he did so, the show is, of course, ravishing. Rilke wrote of landscapes \u201cmade with the blue of the air, the blue of the sea and red roofs conversing together against a green ground\u201d; to see these paintings in Aix is to understand C\u00e9zanne\u2019s visceral connection to reality, even as he transformed nature, places he walked, swam, climbed, into near-abstract forms: modern art\u2019s foundational story.<\/p>\n

Many radiant pieces demonstrate that formal process: \u201cHouse at Bellevue\u201d, a geometric arrangement of honey-hued stone walls, steps, terraces, rows of pines; massive, angular orange cliffs below a strip of purple sky and blurred treetops in \u201cThe Bib\u00e9mus Quarry\u201d; proto-cubist houses rising above the water in \u201cThe Sea at L\u2019Estaque\u201d, once owned by Picasso.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AA room in the exhibiton \u2018C\u00e9zanne au Jas de Bouffan\u2019 at Aix\u2019s Mus\u00e9e Granet \"A\u2018The Sea at L\u2019Estaque\u2019 (1878-79) \u00a9 Mus\u00e9e national Picasso<\/p>\n

A majestic, surging \u201cMont St Victoire\u201d, sun sculpting the close-up mountain face into patches of light and shadow, found in Cornelius Gurlitt\u2019s Nazi-era collection, makes its debut in a C\u00e9zanne show. Illuminating juxtapositions include paired \u201cGrove at Jas de Bouffan\u201d paintings, dense in 1871, luminous, freer, in 1875-76, demonstrating impressionism\u2019s influence, and two splendid architectonic harmonies of variegated greens and ochres on an open plain: the Courtauld\u2019s \u201cTall Trees at Jas de Bouffan\u201d (1883), airy and rustling, and the Guggenheim\u2019s \u201cNeighbourhood of Jas de Bouffan\u201d (1885-87) sombre, receding into emptiness, imbued with resignation.<\/p>\n

The Granet\u2019s argument, that just as Provence\u2019s landscape shaped C\u00e9zanne, so the Roman city Aix and the 18th-century Jas were pivotal to his sensibility, poised between classicism and modernity, is amplified in a wider summer festival C\u00e9zanne 2025. It offers trails to the Jas, restored following a long closure, the studio Les Lauves and, for the brave, descent to the Bib\u00e9mus rocks. So biography becomes immersive experience, with rewarding discoveries. In 2023, conservators at the Jas unveiled a fragmented unknown C\u00e9zanne, \u201cHarbour Entrance\u201d (1860), aping Claude\u2019s port scenes. Also uncovered was a graceful plaster relief of Leda and the Swan, part of the house\u2019s original decor; C\u00e9zanne passed it daily \u2014 inspiration, we see now, for his quirky painting of the same subject.<\/p>\n

In his privileged salon, C\u00e9zanne both embraced and fought the Jas\u2019s classical sumptuousness. Across the Granet\u2019s downstairs galleries, fantasies such as \u201cGame of Hide and Seek\u201d (1862-64), imitating a Nicolas Lancret f\u00eate galante, alternate with rough, near-expressionist portraits in his early couillard (ballsy) manner, paint slathered on with a knife.<\/p>\n

His schoolmate \u00c9mile Zola, poor, fatherless and physically weedy, looks particularly despondent, but all the friends \u2014 poet Antony Valabr\u00e8gue, geologist Antoine-Fortune Marion \u2014 from C\u00e9zanne\u2019s precious youthful coterie appear dark, introspective, downcast. \u201cPaul is a horrible painter,\u201d Valabr\u00e8gue groaned. \u201cEvery time he paints one of his friends it seems as if he were avenging himself for some hidden injury\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018The Artist\u2019s Father, Reading L\u2019Evenement\u2019 (1866) \u00a9 National Gallery of Art, Washington\"A\u2018Bather and Rocks\u2019 (c1867-69) \u00a9 Chrysler Museum of Art<\/p>\n

Looming over this evocative gathering is a second paternal portrait, fearful, affectionate: \u201cThe Artist\u2019s Father, Reading L\u2019Evenement\u201d \u2014 a leftwing newspaper, employing young Zola. Louis-Auguste would not have touched it. Nor did he care for the picture depicted at his shoulder, and on display alongside: \u201cSugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup\u201d, built from thick paint scrapings, crustily refusing convention, proclaiming independence.<\/p>\n

Not until after his father\u2019s death in 1886 did C\u00e9zanne dare his sole full-frontal view of the Jas. \u201cHouse and Farm at Jas de Bouffan\u201d (1885-87), from Prague, is the centrepiece of the upstairs landscape galleries, its monumental facade slightly swaying, the blue shutters echoing the clarity of the sky, offset by a brilliant red roof. Earlier depictions, as beautiful, are comparably hesitant: \u201cThe House at the Jas de Bouffan\u201d, obscured by trees; \u201cThe Pool at Jas de Bouffan\u201d playing with impressionist reflections on water.<\/p>\n

From 1887, until he was forced to sell it in 1899, the Jas became C\u00e9zanne\u2019s laboratory for three final grand series, all musing on painterly illusion: bathers, still lives, portraits of the estate\u2019s workers.<\/p>\n

Friezes of compressed female figures in broken outlines merge with landscape, echoing its slopes, mounds, trees, in \u201cBathers\u201d: stylised imaginings of Mediterranean unity recalling Poussin, anticipating Matisse. The gauche young friends return, transmuted into awkwardly wading, undressing, reclining youths in \u201cBathers at Rest\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"An \u2018Bathers\u2019 (c1899-1904) \"A \u2018Still Life with Cherries and Peaches\u2019 (1885-87) \u00a9 Los Angeles County Museum of Art<\/p>\n

\u201cStill Life with Cherries and Apricots\u201d and \u201cStill Life with Apples and Melon\u201d, ripe, rich, oozing, represent the French art of pleasure at its apogee, even as shifting viewpoints, tilting objects, bare areas of canvas \u2014 \u201cKitchen Table\u201d, MoMA\u2019s \u201cStill Life with Apples\u201d \u2014 assert painting as artifice.<\/p>\n

Finally come \u201cthe people of Jas de Bouffan\u201d, grave, humane, fateful. \u201cThe Card Players\u201d\u2019 columnar forms, emphatically separate, exist in contemplative, flickering equilibrium. Buttoned into a geometrically pleated blue dress \u201cWoman with a Coffee Pot\u201d, bearing work-hardened hands, is as rigid as her cafeti\u00e8re. Reserved in expression, lively in the restless strokes and dabs of colour, \u201cMan with Crossed Arms\u201d also has crossed eyes, one seen from above, one from below.<\/p>\n

In \u201cPeasant in a Blue Smock\u201d, 1896-97, C\u00e9zanne at the Jas comes full circle: the worker, stoic, dignified, pensive, poses before a folding screen painted by C\u00e9zanne in 1859 with an 18th-century pastoral couple. In this painting of a painting, the peasant, weighty and substantial, is placed to obscure the screen man and imply that the sketchy screen woman, faceless, translucent, is his reverie of youth. Both express C\u00e9zanne\u2019s hopes of art as eternal.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday everything is\u00a0changing,\u00a0but not for me,\u201d\u00a0he wrote shortly before he died. \u201cI\u00a0live in\u00a0the town of\u00a0my\u00a0boyhood,\u00a0and I\u00a0rediscover the past in\u00a0the faces of\u00a0the people of\u00a0my\u00a0own age\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009who obey the rules of\u00a0time\u201d.<\/p>\n

To October 12, museegranet-aixenprovence.fr<\/a>, cezanne2025.com<\/a><\/p>\n

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