The N.Y.T has an interesting review of a new exhibition on Cezanne and Pissaro: The Innovative Odd Couple of Cézanne and Pissarro - New York Times by Holland Cotter. The exhibition, opening June 26, at MoMA highlights their friendship and the influence their ideas had on each other as they worked side by side painting plein-air.
Paul Cézanne. The House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise. 1873.
Oil on canvas, 21 5⁄8 x 26" (55 x 66 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Count Isaac de Camondo Bequest, 1911.
Photo: Hervé Lewandowski. © Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY
Camille Pissarro. The Conversation, chemin du chou, Pontoise. 1874.
Oil on linen, 23 5⁄8 x 28 3⁄4" (60 x 73 cm). Private collection
"I love Cézanne for his crankiness, which guarded an isolated soul; I love Pissarro for his kindness, which seems to have been completely unguarded and unconditional. I love both for being workaholic rebels with high causes - revolution, simplicity - and for being rebels to the end, the very end. I love their art: Cézanne's transparent palisades of stained-glass green and blue; Pissarro's woods and fields, light-dusted and virginal. Maybe more than anything, I love how they loved each other, with an affection alternately paternal, brotherly and collegial, competitive but protective. Thanks to Pissarro, a hazardously high-flying young Cézanne made it to earth without a crash. Thanks to Cézanne, Pissarro took flight in ways he might otherwise not have."
The friendship spurred the two artists on in their quest for beauty and perfection.
It continues into the decade with the years around 1875 marking the culmination of their effort to define an innovative, increasingly conceptual form of painting, in which a traditional grammar of drawn outlines, tonal volumes and perspectival depth - in a word, realism - gives way to a new logic of color and light.
A gallery of landscape paintings at the center of the show is devoted to this high moment, their own private Woodstock. It's a room of rigorous, fanatically concentrated beauty. Paintings of woodland scenes line one wall, with alternating pictures by each artist. They are like windows onto a sun-dappled Eden, an unbroken curtain of green seen by two sets of eyes that have become one.
Cezanne, the artist was monastic in his dedication and pursuit of painting for it's own sake. "This man thought only of painting, loved only painting," Monet, a worldlier type, said of Cezanne long after his revered Impressionist confrere was gone.
Here are some of Cezanne's thoughts on painting, gathered by his son, from "Conversations with Cezanne", a book I would highly recommend.
"Conversations with Cézanne (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art)" (Paul Cezanne, P. M. Doran)
- The artist must avoid literature in art
- Art is the manifestation of an exquisite sensitivity
- the nobility of an artist's creation reveals his Soul
- Art is a religion. Its goal is the elevation of thought
- He who does not hunger for the absolute (perfection) is content with placid mediocrity
- the quest for novelty and originality is an artificial need which can never disguise banality and the absence of artistic temperament
- the artist knows the joy of being able to communicate to others his excitement about nature, that masterpiece whose mysteries he believes he has deciphered
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