Princeton
University Art Museum Feb. 24 through May 13, 2018
Among the artists exploring radical new approaches to space,
brushstroke and drawing was Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), whose work also
figures in Landscapes Behind Cézanne, curated by the Princeton
University Art Museum’s John Elderfield, who is Allen R. Adler, Class of
1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer, with Calvin Brown, associate
curator of prints and drawings. This intimate exhibition will be on view
from Feb. 24 through May 13, 2018; Princeton is its only venue.
Paul
Cézanne, Pine Tree in Front of the Caves above Château Noir, ca. 1900.
Watercolor and graphite on cream wove paper. Princeton University Art
Museum. Anonymous gift
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Cézanne is widely
acknowledged to have transformed landscape painting, most radically in
his late watercolors. These works do not so much attempt to depict the
actual appearance of a scene as to translate it into self-sufficient
sequences of patches and lines of a restricted range of vivid colors.
This installation juxtaposes Cézanne’s work with landscapes drawn,
printed or painted by earlier artists. The resulting dialogue between
images both reveals the extent to which Cézanne employed standard types
of landscape depictions – close-up views, woodland panoramas, rocky
landscapes, wide vistas, landscapes with buildings – but also suggests
how Cézanne goes further, explicitly acknowledging that what is real in
art is different and independent from what is experienced in nature. It
is not, therefore, an exhibition about causalities, but rather a
profound way of illuminating the path of Cézanne’s investigation.
“The vision of these path-breaking European and American artists of
the modern era richly reward our close consideration a century later,”
said James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976,
Director. “We are delighted to partner with the Phillips Collection in
exploring both the formal vocabularies of art and the ways in which it
responded to broad cultural and political shifts through new visual and
formal means
