ART
SOMEWHERE between the last work of Cezanne and the early work of Picasso Seven hundred years of European painting Were turned upside down. Yet who shall say whether that revolution was really accomplished before 1906, when Cezanne died, or after the following year when Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon? She personal development of each artist }vas so astonishing that between the early Work of Cezanne and the latest work of Picasso there runs the deep—and, one Would say, almost unbridgeable—chasm of !nearly a century. Two exhibitions in Paris Snark these extreme limits separating the two giants who once, as it were, touched fingers half a century ago.
• • * At the Orangerie, coincidentally with the successful conclusion of efforts to establish his modest studio in Aix as a permanent Museum (largely with American funds) are being shown those Cezannes, mostly early, which form the richest and most celebrated Private collection of his work in existence. Joined by others from the Louvre, they form about two-thirds of the whole exhibi- tion—paintings known well enough in reproduction, many of them, but more rarely seen in actuality. There are some w, onderful later still-lifes and landscapes, the best and most 'realised' of the 'Bathers' aeries, the Card-Players, the portrait of Oustave Geffroy, but it will perhaps best give the feel of the show to say that out before 73 oils and water-colours 22 were painted oefore 1872; 43 before 1878.
This perhaps marks the beginning of an attempt to establish the early Cezanne rather as recent years have seen in Holland an attempt to establish as hitherto under- .etltimated masterpieces the early work of Van Gogh. The one seems as optimistic as we other. Cezanne's first stumbling efforts trt Portraiture are as clumsy as Van Gogh's tt glorifications of the peasant, which I:need, in some ways, they closely resemble. oth artists were, to begin with, insensitive uraughtsmen with the sense of form, who aimed in the colours of potato-peelings. the ease. of Cezanne, whose power of colour analysis was to develop so acutely, and whose greatest achievement was to be the construction of form by the infinitely variable modulation of colour alone, the visual evidence of this strikes one as parti- cularly extraordinary. The portraits of his father, of Achille Emperaire the Van-Dyck- headed dwarf, indeed the first picture of all, a romanticised burning-eyed self-portrait of about 1861—these sombre-toned canvases on which flit paint has been laid on so thickly with the knife suggest rather the early struggles of a northern or central European expressionist rather than one we place in the great tradition of lucid French classicism.
The jump from early Cezanne to late Cezanne seems infinitely greater than from one of his bathers (say, Venturi 549) to blue-period Picasso, or from early Picasso to late Picasso—if only because of the latter's spasmodic and simultaneous development in a dozen different directions. The exhibi- tion at the Maison de la Pensee Fran9aise started, as is well known, as a show of his early work based on 37 pictures from the Leningrad and Moscow museums. After the abortive lawsuit of an émigré Russian claiming ownership of these, they were removed and replaced by 39 very recent works by Picasso (all are from the last four years; 20 are dated 1954). Photographs of the Russian pictures bear silent witness to the changed nature of the exhibition and, together with a dozen 'early paintings from French private collections which remain, provide an historical perspective to this great man's achievement. The earliest picture here is the powerful and telling (and entirely realistic) portrait of the blind Celestine done in 1903.
All the recent pictures revolve around Picasso's relaxed and happy life at Vallauris. The majority depict the artist's two children Claude and Paloma, with and without Mme. Picasso, in a high chair, playing trains on the floor, eating, watching each other draw. One or two of the earlier were seen in reproduction some years ago in Picture Post, and the reality confirms this as one of the most fruitful periods of Picasso's post-war oeuvre. Thirteen of this year's paintings constitute a series of related portraits, all but three of them grisailles, of a young woman with a fringe and a pony-tail hair-do, sitting in a wicker arm-chair. She has large eyes, a graceful. neck, beauty and a wistful charm. Her portraits range from one as touchingly realistic as something from the Blue or Pink Periods, through varying degrees of abstraction. They do not lead into one another, as do those in so many series by Matisse, but are each a separate and indi- vidual exercise upon a theme. Together they give an astonishing picture of Picasso using with utter relaxation and assurance the language of forms he has invented through his long life.
Partly because London has only, as it were, seen Picasso at play since 1946, the impression has gained ground that, though his inventiveness may be undiminished, he no longer has the staying-power to push any- thing beyond its first, and not necessarily most complete, expression. The exhibition on the white screens of the Maison de la Pensee Francaise shows this to be untrue. Half a dozen of the paintings there are considered masterpieces.
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