‘Cézanne and the Modern’ stirs emotions at High Museum


EXHIBIT PREVIEWS

“Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art From the Pearlman Collection”

Opening Oct. 25. Through Jan. 11. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays (until 9 p.m. Fridays), noon-5 p.m. Sundays. High Museum of Art. $19.50; $16.50 ages 65 and up and students (ID required); $12 ages 6-17. 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-4444, www.high.org.

Henry Pearlman was far from an expert in modern art when he began building one of the strongest collections of that tradition-shedding period in 1945. But he gradually became one by remaining open to wise advice and through his own obsessive curiosity.

Because it was defined by a spirit of experimentation, modern art doesn't provide a simple-to-follow through-line, even for art aficionados. Yet walking through "Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art From the Pearlman Collection," the touring exhibition opening Oct. 25 at the High Museum of Art, director of collections and exhibitions David Brenneman pointed out a recurring quality in the art that caught the collector's eye.

A lifelong New Yorker and an entrepreneur whose passion for modern art burned until his death in 1974, Pearlman “really responded to a kind of painting that he felt was genuine,” said Brenneman, who also is the High’s European art curator. “That guided his collection. He wasn’t trying to create a history of painting from the last 50 or 60 years. He was trying to buy things and live with things that he felt expressed a genuine emotion that came directly from the artist’s inner being.”

Before the international tour that brings the paintings and sculpture to the High through Jan. 11, the collection had remained on view at the Princeton University Art Museum since 1976. “Cézanne and the Modern,” then, is a rare opportunity to view this strong impressionist and post-impressionist cache.

With Brenneman as our guide, we focus on five highlights from the 50-work exhibition that features 24 works by Cézanne, including 16 fragile and seldom-exhibited watercolors.

Paul Cézanne’s “Mont Sainte-Victoire” (circa 1904-06)

Painting in a faceted style powered by bold paint markings, the French artist veered from the completely descriptive on his way to creating what the curator termed “a new visual language.”

Rising in isolation above the plains outside Aix-en-Provence, Mont Sainte-Victoire was a recurring subject of Cézanne, who had a breathtaking view of it from his hillside studio across the valley from the mountain and who often painted outside.

Nearly all of Cézanne’s depictions of it are horizontal. This canvas, however, is vertical, capturing the bands of the landscape — the red-roofed hillside farmhouses, the valley’s flattened plains, and the blue-gray mountain as it reaches for the pillow-clouded sky — in a way that shows the artist’s assurance with his subject.

“You can go to the place and actually stand where he painted this from,” Brenneman said of the landscape, which graces the cover of the exhibition catalog. “It kind of looks the same today.”

Vincent van Gogh’s “Tarascon Stagecoach” (1888)

Brenneman considers this a “nostalgia painting,” van Gogh’s ode to a form of transportation that, in late-19th-century France, was going the way of the dinosaur.

In a letter to his brother Theo, van Gogh referenced Alphonse Daudet’s 1872 novel “Tartarin de Tarascon,” in which the protagonist converses with a timeworn Provence stagecoach, now doing duty in the French colonies of North Africa. Replaced by the railroad (which itself would be challenged by the just-invented automobile), the coach reminisces about golden days on the Tarascon-Nîmes route. Van Gogh wrote that he had painted that coach.

Nothing against the sentimental message, but what captures the curator’s eye is the artist’s celebrated expressive brushwork.

“One of the first things you see is this incredible sea of paint marks,” Brenneman said, pointing to the grayish-white courtyard in the foreground. “It looks like an ocean, a group of waves that are crashing into each other.”

Above it, there are the green-dominated carriages, the ochre wall and violet sky, each evoked in similar textured streaks of oils.

“There’s a physicality to the paint itself,” the curator said. “You have to think that van Gogh applied it in a very physical way.

“It’s just an absolutely gorgeous painting.”

Edgar Degas’ “After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself” (1890s)

For an artist known for his graceful depictions of ballerinas, Degas picked a rather awkward pose for his model here, one in a series of works on bathers. Yet he still somehow managed to produce an expressive painting, Brenneman said.

The curator noted that this late-career work shows the inspired artist “drawing with paint” and making “almost Chinese calligraphic lines.”

About all those lines: The painting never left Degas’ studio during his lifetime, and while he was known for working and reworking his canvases, it’s not certain if he ever considered this one finished.

Regardless, “After the Bath” exposes the old master trying out new tricks: The artist achieved the stippled background by applying paint with his fingers. Brenneman takes that as Degas’ nod to the emergence of the pointillist school.

Amedeo Modigliani’s “Jean Cocteau” (1916)

The offline eyes, the crooked nose, the small squirrelly mouth, the unfinished hands …

Small wonder that the great poet Cocteau had a love-hate response to boho artist Modigliani’s portrait.

Cocteau “wrote that he thought it was just a horrible record,” Brenneman noted, “but I think he actually knew that he’d been immortalized in the painting as well.”

Paul Cézanne’s “Portrait of Paul, the Artist’s Son” (circa 1880)

One in a series of rapidly executed Cézanne portraits of his 8-year-old son with future wife Marie-Hortense Fiquet, this small (6¾ inches high by 6 inches wide), intimate sketch is unfinished and yet well-nigh perfect, in the curator’s view.

“Cézanne always had troubled relationships, including an awful one with his parents, but in this case, he’s really making an attempt to capture and connect with his child,” Brenneman said.

The innocence of childhood is conveyed in the dreaminess of the boy’s eyes and the tilt of his head. Cézanne painted most of his later sketches and more finished portraits of Paul from the same angle, showing his expression becoming more defined and suggesting the boy’s developing personality.

This loving time-capsule is “just a little gem of a painting,” Brenneman said.