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“ Cezanne ” is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan AvenueĬhicago, Illinois, May 15–September 5, 2022. “We as a public have to work a little harder to fully appreciate what he’s doing.” “That was a liberating thing for artists,” he concluded. It’s hard to express, like anything that has to do with intangibles and art.” “He’s trying for something quite different,” Groom added, “trying to express how he feels in a stroke that will communicate to us a feeling of emotion.
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“What you start to see over the course of the exhibition is an artist who is trying to figure how to make a painting for himself and who is doing that by constructing his work sensation by sensation,” said Haskell. And in a way, that’s true: Cezanne never stopped honing his technique.īut with that repetition, the show reveals something else too. In a show like the one on view in Chicago, the repetition can make his artworks feel like studies-the efforts of a painter perfecting his craft before applying it to more sophisticated scenes. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.įruit-filled still-lifes, sun-baked landscapes, bathers beset by verdant flora: Cezanne revisited the same subjects over and over again. “When you do that and you start thinking about painting really on the level of the mark, what you begin to have is a type of painting that is pretty honest about the way it’s constructed-and gets you thinking about the way it’s constructed,” Haskell added. That same group of paintings were put through a “ whole battery of imaging techniques,” including x-ray infrared analyses, Haskell said, as she and her partner looked to Cezanne’s meticulous techniques for their own curatorial cues. For instance, Groom and Haskell worked with conservators to remove all traces of synthetic varnish from the eight oil paintings owned by the Art Institute, which had been applied in years past, leaving their respective surfaces bare-another preference of Cezanne’s. You’ll find subtle examples of that commitment elsewhere in the show, too. It may seem like a semantic change, but it symbolizes something more: the organizer’s dogmatic dedication to Cezanne’s own vision. That’s the way the artist wrote it, the curators explained, and so it’s the version they adopted for the show’s title, catalogue, and wall texts as well. You may also notice, at this point in the article, that I’ve elided the accent over the “e” typically found in Cézanne’s name. Paul Cezanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine (c.
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