内容提要
The French painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) has been universally acknowledged for many years as the definitive link between late-nineteenth-century Impressionism and twentieth-century modern art. The critical function that American artists played in the establishment of Cézanne’s reputation and dissemination of his influence in the United States is a topic that has been never comprehensively examined. The pages that follow are the first attempt to explore fully the pioneering roles that American modernists assumed in the early years of the twentieth century through their works of art, writings, lectures, socializing, as well as their organization of and participation in exhibitions. A number of these artists were also active as advisors to the first American collectors of Cézanne’s work and even acquired examples themselves. Thus they played pivotal, vanguard roles in the canonization of Cézanne, especially from about 1907 to 1930. Many of the master’s works are in American private and public collections today, and since the mid-twentieth century this country has taken the international lead in the scholarly discourse on Cézanne and his popularization.
Elucidating the myriad ways in which Cézanne inspired the thirty-four artists represented in this project can, at times, be a complex and elusive matter. Not every instance of artistic influence is supported by direct documentary evidence, although in a number of cases, newly discovered primary-source material illuminates the strong connections. Furthermore, the vehicles of transmission are significant, whether by direct viewing of original works or via reproductions, and are compounded by the filters of other artists’ styles, especially Matisse’s Fauvism, as well as Picasso’s Cubism. Another mediating factor is the rich context of coexisting modernist tendencies, including primitivism, orientalism / Japanism, and photography. The challenges of pinpointing Cézanne’s influence also derive from the multifaceted aspects of his career and reputation. These ranged from the imaginative, expressionist reworkings of traditional subjects in the 1860s, when he resided in Paris, to the more tranquil Impressionist works of the countryside of the Île-de-France when he was painting with Pissarro in Auvers and Pontoise in the 1870s and on his move back to his native Aix-en-Provence in the 1880s. There he gradually withdrew, creating the late works, infused with a new intensity in which discrete objects are increasingly merged into fluctuating patches of color, inspired in part by his groundbreaking
watercolors—which were the first works to be presented in American solo exhibitions of Cézanne’s work, in 1911 and 1916. Thus Cézanne’s varied oeuvre offered a variety of liberating options for American artists and others who regarded him both as a formalist and a mystic, who submitted nature to an intellectual / analytic process of organization, and who penetrated beneath the veil of appearances to capture the inner essence or soul of his subjects as well as their fundamental forms.
Shifts in Cézanne’s influence, as reflected in the work of many American modernists, reflect the general trajectory of an evolution away from the explosion of radical modern art movements that opened paths to abstraction prior to World War I. While at first regarded as instrumental for breaking through the academic barriers of mimetic representation through his innovative pictorial techniques, Cézanne came to be appreciated for the timeless, architectonic stability of his harmonious compositions during the postwar era of classical values that would rebuild society in the 1920s.
The American artists featured in this project—selected from a multitude of possible candidates—were chosen for the intensity and high quality of their varied aesthetic and intellectual engagements with Cézanne’s artwork and philosophy—whether their engagements were of passing, but seminal, importance, or reflected a more lasting devotion. Cézanne’s transformative impact on their works is revealed not only by their adaptations of his stylistic hallmarks but also through their choice and serial approach to his subject matter—still lifes, landscapes, figurative works, and portraits. These themes have informed the selection of works for this exhibition. Still-life compositions by Max Weber, Morgan Russell, Charles Demuth, Arshile Gorky, Man Ray, and many others are included, followed by landscapes by several painters, notably Marsden Hartley, one of a number of American artists who traveled to Aix-en-Provence to experience firsthand Cézanne’s native environment. Others such as John Marin, Andrew Dasburg, Willard Nash, and also Hartley found native counterparts to Cézanne’s landscape motifs in New England, the West, and elsewhere. Figurative subjects, in portraits by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Alfred Maurer, Weber, and others, are also featured. Cézanne’s many variations on the theme of Bathers in landscape settings—among his earliest works exhibited in America—were highly influential for Arthur B. Davies, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Abraham Walkowitz, Man Ray, Maurice Prendergast, and many others as modern incarnations of this classical, idyllic subject.
These American modernists’ range of pictorial responses can be loosely summarized in terms of their individual approaches to Cézanne’s alterations of form and creation of complex, architectonic, pictorial structures out of vibrant colors rendered in parallel, constructive brushstrokes, rather than traditional methods of chiaroscuro modeling. They similarly adapted other practices of Cézanne that reinforced and unified the planarity of the support, with shallow, bas-relief–like compositions moving downward and outward toward the viewer, rather than into depth: his high horizon lines, tilted perspectives, flattening of ellipses, and passage, that is, the opening of objects’ contours to allow the colored planes which define them to spill or “bleed” into adjacent areas. Furthermore, they practiced their own versions of Cézanne’s controversial incorporation of blank spaces of canvas or paper (his “non-finito,” especially appreciated in his watercolors) to suggest volume, form, and highlights, leading to modern pictorial concepts whereby the surrounding spaces are as concrete as the objects / subjects themselves and the integrity of the composition is the standard for completion rather than the literal re-creation of nature.
This catalogue reflects a range of diverse scholarly perspectives provided by a team of twenty-three scholars. These seminal essays address the relationship of Cézanne to American modernist art criticism, as well as the roles that pioneering American collectors played in furthering his reputation. Cézanne’s influence upon American photographers of the early twentieth century is examined for the first time, in recognition of the exceptional importance that Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and others played in introducing modernism to America.
The introductory essay covers the American reception of Cézanne from 1895 to 1930, primarily in terms of artists, critics, exhibitions, and publications centered around New York, with a brief section devoted to the emerging appreciation of his oeuvre in other parts of the country. This is complemented by an essay on the dissemination of Cézanne’s influence in the American West—as evidenced by the work of John Marin, Willard Nash, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Andrew Dasburg, and others. Furthermore, the ongoing impact of Cézanne is extended in one essay beyond the timeframe of this project into the era of Abstract Expressionism and the 1960s.
The essays are followed by shorter texts on each artist, with pertinent information elucidating their specific connections to and appreciation of Cézanne. Discussions of their artworks in the exhibition are provided within the context of the transformative impact that Cézanne’s oeuvre had upon their individual aesthetic visions and accomplishments.
American artists’ various perceptions of Cézanne’s work as modern and abstract yet profoundly realistic and rich in tradition, as well as native / French and universal / transcultural, reveal how his persona and oeuvre were viewed through the complex filters of projected individual aesthetic needs and desires. His work constituted a vital bridge assuring continuity with the past that had been disrupted by the seemingly formless, atmospheric transience of Impressionism and stultification of academicism. Cézanne’s complex relationship to various aspects of modernity—science, spirituality, primitivism, classicism, orientalism, abstraction, and realism—illuminate how he remained an all-purpose, relevant guiding spirit for American artists throughout this period and beyond.
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