CENTRE POINT
I have scaled the Matterhorn of art tourism and lived to tell the tale
SIMON JENKINS
Paris havehave scaled the Matterhorn of art tourism. I have done the Paris Cezanne. Like Mark Twain arriving in Zermatt, I knew the task required teamwork. I took a masseur, a chiropodist, a linguist, a book- keeper, two historians and three conversa- tionalists. This proved inadequate. We added a nutritionist, an aesthetician, a traf- fic engineer, a black-marketeer and a mar- riage-guidance counsellor, in addition to such hangers-on as queue-bargers, physio- therapists, child-minders and bomb-dispos- al experts. And this was before we reached the door.
I know these slopes. I have done the Picasso, the Manet, the Goya, the Matisse. From the Matisse I watched survivors crawl, gasping for water, their legs withered under them. After the Goya, small urchins tugged at your sleeve and offered to find you a psy- choanalyst. The Cezanne show culminates in a small opening through which you must squeeze before descending to the street below, exhausted, with blue-green cubes dancing before your eyes. But you have made it back to base camp. You have done Cezanne and lived to tell the tale. You have earned rest and recuperation.
These vast shows are the summit confer- ences of art curatorship. Five years goes on preparation. Fourteen nations contributed to the Cezanne. Negotiating next year's Vermeer exhibition is requiring the diplo- macy of a test-ban treaty. Huge prestige attaches to the organisers, the venues, the catalogues and the sponsors. Prestige must also go to the lenders. The Cezanne is des- tined for the Tate in London (from Febru- ary) and Philadelphia, and donors will not see their pictures back until autumn of next year. The spin-off is interminable. In Paris a large bookshop is selling only Cezanne. There is azanne for children, Cezanne CD-ROMs, Cezanne videos, Cezanne cookbooks, Cezanne diaries, Cezanne crockery. I have no doubt there are Cezanne fabrics, Cezanne menus, mystery tours to le Tholonet and Cezanne rock- climbs on Mont Sainte-Victoire.
Tickets to the Paris show are of Pavarotti- ish desirability. Ambassadors are plagued for them. Hostesses die for them. The exhibition is open in the morning only for prebooked, timed reservations that cost 60 francs, which at the extortionate hotel exchange rate is now almost £10. These tickets are booked until Christmas. Afternoons are unreserved, but involve a queue snaking all day round the block to the Avenue Franklin Roo- sevelt and down the Seine. Nothing hypes a blockbuster quite like a mind-numbing queue. People cannot say they came to Paris and failed to see the Cezanne.
I hardly need add that the pictures are holding up well under the strain. There are 177 of them, embracing Cezanne's entire career and including most of his best- known works. (The organisers failed to lift two glorious landscapes from the Orangerie down the road.) Like all such shows, the revelation they offer to a lay visi- tor is overwhelming. I confess to having found Cezanne unmoving, introverted, often gloomy, an artist for the scholar and critic. He did not seem a chronicler of life, let alone an architect of fun. He was using his subjects as material for experiment, like Vermeer peering through his lenses. I like the tale of the austere George V visiting a Cezanne exhibition and calling a friend over to one work. 'Look at this,' he alleged- ly said, 'it'll really make you laugh.' I am still not laughing, but am captivated. In the early works are traces of Daumier and Delacroix. The portrait of Achille Emperaire might be by Manet. His style brightens briefly under the influence of Pis- sarro when his broken patches of colour are most vividly Impressionist. But Cezanne soon took up the burden of indi- vidualism, of being of no movement or style, the 'feeling of having come too soon'. Like a self-conscious writer, he sensed his otherness. 'I have resolved to work in silence until the day I would feel capable of defending in public the results of my exper- iments.' He never really felt capable. Yet he never diverged from naturalism. He never subsided into abstraction and when his daubs of colour seemed imprecise, purely sensational, he always referred to them as incomplete.
I had not realised that Cezanne's numer- ous bathers were such an idee face. This apparent misanthrope, this escaper from the world, portrayed male and female bathers in no fewer than 250 works, 'to do Poussin entirely from nature'. He found models hard to come by and ended by working and reworking his bathers in the studio, culminating in the vast final compo- sition brought from Philadelphia for the show. Nor had I realised how sad were his faces, especially his eyes. A man gazes out with folded arms. A woman intently fingers her rosary beads. In these crowded rooms, the portraits form a backcloth against which the dark silhouettes of spectators are constantly moving. They form a tableau like characters in a mediaeval stained-glass window, rich in greens, yellows and blues.
The landscapes and still lifes are a differ- ent matter. The crowds come close to ruin- ing them. I cannot appreciate a Provencal hillside or a bowl on a kitchen table when being elbowed and jolted and forced to stand aside to let the latest group pass, audioguides glued to their ears. After an hour of this I start to suffer museum fatigue. Cezanne, says the catalogue, 'broke loose from the overwhelming influence of museums to settle under that of nature'. Would that this was true of his work today.
The later pictures are mostly of his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire. He peopled this guardian mountain with spirits and magic. He painted it in all weathers. Some- times the sun seems to shine from the rocks and light start from the canvas. Mostly it is a sad mountain of savage shapes against a blue-green sky, framed by trees tortured by the mistral. I have seen Sainte-Victoire in every weather and tried to recall how Cezanne responded to those moods. I longed to see his pictures against the view itself, to see theme and creation alongside one another.
Perhaps one day a Croesus will be found to build galleries for landscapes to be placed in their original context. The best instance I know is the Annunciade in St Tropez, where Signac's canvases reflect the same light leaping in from the sea that he painted on the spot. Pictures are not easy for laymen to interpret and appreciate. Some of these Cezannes should be repatri- ated to Aix, which has almost none, to be seen in the light and against the backdrop that was their inspiration. Meanwhile, they dominate Paris. Next stop, London.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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