Cezanne appeal
Susan Moore
Even after the genius of Paul Cezanne was almost universally acknowledged, a few years before his death in 1906, it was received opinion that the great man could not draw. Cezanne himself, arrogant yet racked by self-doubt, might well have agreed. Only one of his extraordinary drawings — a large-scale 'finished' watercolour — was ever exhibited during his lifetime. As for the reams of pencil or watercolour studies that filled his 18 or so known small pocket sketchbooks or carnets, and the no less remarkable larger watercolours, the majority remained in the hands of his hopeless son, Paul, and his dealer Ambroise Vollard. Practically none was sold until 1930. Then up popped Adrien Chappuis.
Like Cezanne, Chappuis was the son of a prosperous banker who spurned a career in the law to pursue other interests. While Cezanne's passion was painting, Chappuis's was the drawings of Cezanne. Buying extensively from Paul fits, Vollard and Paul Guillaume, who had known the former through buying paintings for Dr Albert Barnes, he amassed a collection that proved the starting-point for his celebrated catalogue raisonne of all the artist's drawings. At its core were three camets, several outstanding watercolours and over 40 independent drawings — portraits of the artist's son, his wife Hortense and his friend Emile Zola, plus landscapes, figure and compositional studies and copies of Old Master paintings and sculpture. It is this collection, bequeathed to the family of his doctor and friend Georges Barut, that comes up for sale at Christie's on 26 June. Despite Chappuis's sale of one of the sketchbooks to Paul Mellon in 1967, and the Baruts' donation of the finest watercolour to the Musee d'Orsay in lieu of taxes, this remains the most important group of Cezanne drawings ever offered at auction.
As a draughtsman, Cezanne was prolific and obsessive. He was also radically innovative. Strikingly, there is no sureness of touch, no sweeping line, no clean outline. Take the bald pate of his own self-portrait here (estimate f60,000-£80,000). Even this simple curve is made up of a weft of small strokes, each one thought, rethought and doubted. In his stumpy figure studies of bathers the line becomes a tortured thatch. Here is a man evidently all but paralysed by his own sense of perfection. But his complex, broken line also reveals the artist's wider preoccupations with breaking down the old hierarchies in painting and of integrating figures and landscape in such a way that neither takes the dominant role. Drawings are used to map out the relationships between figures, objects or landscape features, but each is accorded equal value.
Needless to say, Cezanne perplexed his contemporaries. As his friend and champion Pissarro put it in a letter to the critic Theodore Duret: 'If you are looking for a five-legged sheep, I think Cezanne might be to your liking, and he has studies that are quite strange and seen in a unique way.' It is precisely this painful intensity as well as the drawings' modernity that appeals today. Revealingly, it is not so much the big-buck Impressionist collectors who form the fan club as the new breed of affluent and more cerebral Old Master — or should I say Master? — drawings collectors who have steadily grown in number, particularly in the US, since the 1980s. Hence Christie's decision to put the Chappuis-Barut collection into a separate catalogue during this week's Impressionist sales.
Cezanne drawings may no longer be worth the derisory amounts they were in the first half of the 20th century, but looking through this catalogue it is tempting to say that they are still undervalued in terms of both Impressionist painting and Old Master drawings. The self-portrait head bears the highest estimate in the sale for a single sheet — the portrait of Zola, with the bonus of a drawing of the young Paul fils on the reverse, along with the odd watercolour study, come in at £40,000-£60,000. But here, too, are drawings estimated at /4,000 — and the study of a plaster cast in the artist's studio, an unimaginably modest £400. Before you rush off to decide where you will hang it, give pause to the likelihood of it selling for that kind of price (you might be lucky to get it for a multiple of ten). Christie's struck this deal four years ago. Since then, for instance, a bather highly comparable to the one being offered now at £40,000£60,000 has sold in New York for $130,000. It was probably the adjoining page in the carnet.
At the top of most collectors' shopping lists — inevitably — is the sole sketchbook in the collection to remain intact — Chappuis dismembered another on the grounds that a Cezanne drawing is best appreciated in splendid isolation. This offers page after delicate page of little gems speckled with colour and dirt but none the less delectable for that — studies of the sleeping infant Paul, of the Venus de Milo, a street scene here, a jug or a cloud study there and, best of all, a double spread of voluptuous, calligraphic female bathers. It is anyone's guess what that might make (estimate £130,000-£150,000).
Certainly this London season offers a bumper crop of Impressionist and Modern works on paper more generally Christie's alone offers a rediscovered Van Gogh pen and ink sketch plus unusuall■ good groups of Picasso, Giacometti and Leger. A significant part, culminating in a glorious Mira gouache, comes from the collection formed by the great art publisher Teriade. This could be the moment — if it is not already too late — to take a closer look at works on paper. Blue-chip artists aside, it is still an area in which /10,000 can buy you something worth having. The one small caveat is that it is a minefield, laden with work that is not right. A prudent collector needs to know about paper, condition and provenance. No wonder the flash big spenders aren't interested.
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