With Shows Like These, Who Needs Blockbusters?

MoMA and the Met highlight rarely explored aspects of two modern titans

Right now New York is being graced with a pair of small—though monumental—interrelated exhibitions that spotlight rarely explored aspects of two of the giants of Modernism. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cézanne’s Card Players and the Museum of Modern Art’s Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 offer viewers not only the chance to look backward a century or more into the origins of Modern art, but also to dig deep into the poetic transformations possible with paint, assemblage, collage, pedestrian materials and straightforward subjects; to immerse themselves in an artist’s development of a theme and to grasp the power of visual metaphor.

Maybe we can credit the lagging economy for the recent run in New York of concentrated scholarly exhibitions that—produced mainly in-house and in close cooperation with and loans from other institutions—reexamine and underscore a handful of masterworks from a museum’s permanent collection. Whatever the cause, with shows like these, who needs blockbusters?

Paul Cézanne’s “Man in a Blue Smock.” 2010 Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Paul Cézanne’s “Man in a Blue Smock.” Worth, Texas / Art Resource, NY / Scala, Florence

Cézanne’s Card Players arrives on the heels of the Met’s traveling exhibitions Vermeer’s Masterpiece “The Milkmaid” and Miró: The Dutch Interiors, and originated last fall at The Courtauld Gallery in London, but is organized and installed at the Met by Gary Tinterow. And it is spectacular—pitch perfect. There have been excellent Cézanne exhibitions in this country recently, including Philadelphia’s 1996 retrospective and, in 2006, the National Gallery’s thrilling Cézanne in Provence. But, this is the first monographic New York museum show devoted to Cézanne in over half a century.

Both Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), revolutionary innovators of gargantuan proportions, were traditional genre painters. Refusing from the outset to reinvent the wheel, instead focusing their attentions on tried-and-true themes rich enough for past masters—still life, portrait, nude, interior, figure and landscape—they were able to see the world afresh and, in turn, to remake art and our world anew.

Acknowledging that our experience of life (our viewpoint) is never fixed, but in a state of constant flux, Cézanne introduced into painting the existential nature of seeing—the ways in which our eyes, constantly changing focus and attention, move through and around objects and space; and the ways in which our minds, responding to what we’ve seen, free-associate and continually wander. This is part of what Picasso was responding to when he said of Cézanne that what excites us about his art is its “anxiety.” He could have said that what excites us in Cézanne is the sense that it is brimming and simmering with the immediacy and dynamics of life. Pictures in this exhibition have the power to jolt you into the here-and-now as strongly as an evening spent reading Kierkegaard or Nietzsche.

Cézanne is, of course, the father of Modernism and is rightfully revered by painters. Although acknowledged as such, he is often touted merely as the bridge between Impressionism and Cubism. Cézanne is credited—during the retinal, sensory onslaught of Impressionism—with giving monumentality and weight (the solidity of the Old Masters) back to painting and for setting the stage for Cubism, which led to abstraction. Yet none of Cézanne’s innovations (dutifully noted in art-history textbooks) matter when you are confronted with the monumentality of Cézanne’s achievement—that is, the experience, masterpiece by masterpiece, of the paintings and drawings themselves.

Too often, in our self-centered postmodern times, artists of the past (and especially Modernist titans like Cézanne and Picasso) are seen not for what they are, but merely as stepping stones to our present. The Whitney’s 2006 Picasso and American Art exhibition treated Picasso as the butt of a joke: a downward-spiraling European artist to refute, ridicule and plunder by ascendant American artists. Peter Schjeldahl, reviewing Cézanne’s Card Players in The New Yorker last month, wrote that he doesn’t especially like Cézanne’s pictures. He dismissed the show as “antique” and “thoroughly banal.” He claimed that in the “Card Players,” the painter is indifferent to subject matter; and he summed up Cézanne merely as having “commenced the extravagant endgame—as we can see, now that it has ended—of Modernism.”

This misreading, misconception and utterly baseless and worn-out trope that the art of the past (and especially that of Cézanne) becomes increasingly insignificant with the triumph of each new “ism,” proves how much we need constant reminders like Cézanne’s Card Players to take the focus off of Cézanne the “bridge,” the “founding father,” and place it on Cézanne the “master of Aix-en-Provence.”

Picasso’s “Guitar,” after mid-January 1914. ©2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ARS

Cézanne’s Card Players begins with a series of thematically related prints from the Met’s permanent collection, including 17th-century genre images of interiors, card players and smokers by Adriaen van Ostade; 18th-century etchings after Caravaggio and Chardin; and 19th-century works by Manet, Thomas Rowlandson and Daumier. Browse these works but save yourself for Cézanne, who—linking the subject of card playing from Chardin to Balthus—changed the rules of the game.

Each of Cézanne’s 20 oils and works on paper here (all from the 1890s) deserve devoted attention: Cézanne’s spatial shifts and restless, twitching contours (foreshadowing not only Cubism but also Giacometti’s nervous elisions); Cézanne’s shifting, tilting card tables, with their multiple perspectival trajectories and rumbling surfaces, as uneven as landscapes; his inwardly absorbed figures, with their stalwart, stovepipe limbs, as heavy as sandbags, as broad as levies—their hands of cards blurry, unreadable and fluttering like captured birds; and Cézanne’s zigzagging, elastic spaces, in which a single figure, as if in a constant state of shuffle, occupies multiple locations. All of this adds up to the strategies and activities of life (or in this case the metaphor of the game).

In the last room of the show (the most fulfilling use of this leftover, oddball gallery I have ever encountered) is an airy grouping of five masterpieces—portraits of rugged men, including a gardener and farm worker who modeled for the “Card Players.” The “Peasant,” pearly, as if submerged, recalls the inwardness of El Greco’s saints and the melancholia of Picasso’s Blue Period. In “Man in a Blue Smock,” a vaporous woman, like a daydream, hovers outside the figure; as if startled awake, his foreshortened arms pull violently into his shoulders and his bright red scarf flashes like a flag of emotional surrender.

Cézanne keeps his subjects—men of the earth—close to nature. His stony figures’ features and the folds of their clothing feel world-weary, rutted, worn into place. “Man with a Pipe” is as rooted as a tree; its browns, at times reminiscent of the velvety robes of Zurbarán’s monks, shift like thickened bark. The disheveled and softly weathered “Seated Peasant” cradles his oversized hand in his lap like a giant mollusk or clubfoot, an appendage seemingly the cause of as much strife as good. And “The Smoker,” his elbow rooting him in place to an upended table that threatens to erupt and dislodge him, rises diagonally in space like a great oak. Color and form move through this picture not as tablecloth and clothing, but with the flow and actions of waterfall and forest.

You would do well to move directly from Cézanne’s Card Players to MoMA’s Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914, in which Picasso—inexhaustibly inventive—building on Cézanne, dissolved and reordered Renaissance space altogether. Organized by Anne Umland, with assistance from Blair Hartzell, this stunning exhibition of some 70 collages, drawings, assemblages, paintings and sculptures (along with photographs and ephemera), sets its sights on the two-year period commencing in 1912, the beginning of the second, or “synthetic” phase, of Cubism.

The star, or theme, of the show is the guitar; but mostly it centers on Picasso’s endlessly revolutionary exploration of his subject, which also includes various other still-life objects. Picasso understands that the stringed instrument—with its neck, mouth and body—is traditionally a metaphor for the figure (specifically a woman), as well as a metaphor for music and the rhythm of life and the turning of the seasons. He imagines the guitar as odalisque; standing figure and phallus; table and landscape; representative of the movements of river and song.

Picasso: Guitars is overflowing with Picasso masterworks. It includes a digitized period sketchbook whose pages can be quickly turned, revealing a flipbook in which architecture, figure, still life, bird and guitar—as if interchangeable—all merge and reemerge one out of the other. The sketchbook gives a sense of Picasso’s complete openness to the transformative possibilities of objects and materials.

Throughout the exhibition, Picasso conflates drawing, sculpture and collage; figure, face and object. He treats newsprint as rhythm, geometry and voice. Drawn line turns readily, easily, from contour to melody to plucked string. In this show’s two sculpted guitars, “Still Life with Guitar” and “Guitar”—made of cardboard, paper, string and wire; and ferrous sheet metal and wire, respectively—Picasso brings sculpture from the pedestal and the floor to the wall; and he rids sculpture of its gravity-bound mass and center-outward expansion. He dissects and reconstructs space and form. He makes void palpable—volume weightless. Allowing planes not just to describe surfaces, but literally to intersect sculpture, Picasso merges our world, our space, with that of art and music. Foregoing bronze and marble, and instead utilizing everyday materials, he declares that, in the right hands (and for the first time), anything, even detritus, can be transformed into art.

Certainly both Cézanne and Picasso bridge our past to our present. They open doors—and keep them open. But we must remember (despite the carping of art critics) that art—if it truly is art to begin with—does not have a sell-by date. “To me,” Picasso observed, in 1923, “there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present, it must not be considered at all.” Cézanne’s paintings and Picasso’s constructions are far from Modernist relics of a period long passed. Suggesting woman and instrument, art and illusion, a figure’s inner being and outer shell, Picasso’s rust-brown sheet metal “Guitar” links Zurbarán’s monks, Chardin’s still lifes and Ingres’s odalisques (through Braque’s birds) to the torqued ellipses of Richard Serra. Picasso’s “Guitar” remains an element of genre painting or, here, genre assemblage—among the first of its kind. Picasso’s “Guitars,” like Cézanne’s “Card Players”—both spiritually imbued and strikingly contemporary—are as relevant and alive today as they ever were.
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Cézanne’s Card Players through May 8, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., 212-535-7710; Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 through June 6, Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9431.