The sun had just broken through when I shut the door to my apartment building. Sunday. 11:00am. It was a mild temperature, surprisingly warm. With a sense of discomfort to come, I put my sweater in my leather-backpack.com. Kept the blazer on. Never can be too sure in April, Washington, DC.
After a great brunch at Mimi's, I jumped out of the Subaru at the National Gallery to see Cezanne. The guy is French. Kinda trollish, but appealing. The self portraits and archived photographs gave him an aire of Santa Claus mixed with drunk farmer. Jolly combination for a impressionist painter. Guess that's the stereotype for most French impressionists, but it seemed refreshing to me since I hadn't seen a collection of impressionist work like this in years.
With $5, in cash, for the audio tour, I lept into the exhibit. A grand enterance way with a rotunda and 6 foot tall plants with a fountain set a European stage. Warmed me up for the landscape and trees to come.
I wasn't so moved by the landscapes. They seemed attempted but not finished, which is interesting since Cezanne could take over a a decade to finish a painting. My bias, I'm sure, because I like realism, which Cezanne is not.
On the other hand, I found his attention to trees captivating. It's in his trees that I understood what drove his passion for painting. Self-indulgence.
Above, you see The Great Pine. A sinuous tree that seems to be fluttering with the wind and shaking all the foliage around it. He painted not for the strenuous attention to detail, but for the act of putting oil on canvas. Trees presented the best foil for this exersion because nature offered an inexhaustible study of movement.
At left is The Chateau Noir, another example of not only his attention to trees, but also his pleasure in the physicality of painting. The stroke. The short, curt dashes for leaves. I suggest Cezanne loved the act of painting more than the product of the act. The paintings were memories of passionate, physical moments.
His attetion to the building seems flat and lifeless. True, his palette for the building is full of life with greens and reds to demonstrate the setting sun. It brings life, but not movement, an important higher level for Cezanne.
Even in his portraiture, he shows a compulsion for each stroke with it's unique color and short, exact brush. I really feel his bursts of red, green and blue among the foundation of yellow, orange and brown. I'm a sucker for color, so the accents fill in a lot for me.
I find his choice of subjects really puzzling. With so much love of painting and color, why not take on
more exaggerating, excessive subjects like a marching band or dancer? Anything that has more color. I think it's because he was not a showman. He was a thinker. And his paintings let him think about something for as long as he wanted. He could try and try again, which many of his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire demonstrate, even from the same vantage point. (here, here, here, and here)
Great exhibit. The audio tour was worth the $5 because I wouldn't have had any context for his style nor subject matter. I actually like to read the descriptions at the side of paintings while listening to the audio narrative because it helps me retain the exhibition.
The exhibit ends on May 7, so take a hop, skip and jump down there before your impressionist wonders off into the woods without so much as a phone call.
