Day 326 - Cezanne, etc.


December 30, 2022

Number 823 is another Annenberg gallery, this one hung with paintings by Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Vuillard, Braque, Picasso, and Matisse. The introductory placard states that "the works presented in this gallery invite consideration of artistic influences and dialogues that span two generations," with Picasso seen in conjunction with his early idols Cezanne and Lautrec and Matisse in connection with Seurat and Bonnard, whom he admired.  Maybe so, or maybe this is just a rationale for presenting disparate  works together.  I can't say I really took up the invitation.

Two Vuillard oils that show the interiors of salons intrigue me,  not so much because of the paintings themselves as because these rooms belonged to  Thadee and Misia Natanson and to Jos and Lucie Hessel. Natanson,  I surmise, was Jewish, and I wonder if Hessel was as well. A quick check on the internet once I'm home confirms both suspicions. It's a reminder of how cosmopolitan late 19th century Paris was, and how affluent Jews contributed to that sophisticated ambience.  (I think of my 2008 trip to Paris, when we visited the Musee Nissim de Camondo, and of the mansions that Camondo and other Jews of means purchased in the newly developed area near the Parc Monceau.) I wonder whether the Annenbergs were particularly eager to acquire these two Vuillard paintings because they identified with the Natansons and the Hessels, prominent patrons of the arts in their day.

Today's work is a Cezanne portrait, ostenesibly of a Dominican monk.  Although small in format (only about 27 inches high and 24 inches wide), the image is powerful and, to my mind, forbidding. The subject, seen from the waist up,  looks out unsmiling, his arms crossed across his chest. The palette is restricted to black and white except for the flesh tones of the monk's face and hands and a slate blue ribbon around his neck from which hangs a cross. The paint is thickly applied with a palette knife.  (I wonder if this mode of painting imposes special curatorial challenges.)  I speculate that Cezanne disliked the clergy and that this painting reflects his anticlerical attitudes. And then I read that the portrait is of Cezanne's uncle, Antoine Dominique Sauveur Aubert, dressed up as a monk; in another portrait, Aubert wears a tasseled cap. So maybe Cezanne, who was 27 when he executed this work in 1866, was just enjoying a private joke. According to Wikipedia, he became a devout Catholic later in life.
 

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