Cézanne and the Modern is a brilliant exhibition, and well worth going to see!

For the first time ever, Henry Pearlman's wonderful collection of works by Impressionist, Post Impressionist, Modernist, Expressionist and associated artists is being displayed in Europe, and the Ashmolean museum has the honour of being the first to host the exhibition on its tour, from 13th March until 22nd June.  The museum has done a fantastic job of hanging the collection, creating a warm and intimate display which allows the paintings to sing with full voice, undistracted.

Pearlman was an American businessman who began collecting art in his fifties; in 1945 he purchased a work by Chaïm Soutine and for the first time he experienced an exciting connection with a painting. In his book, Reminiscences of a Collector, Pearlman wrote, 'When I came home in the evenings and saw it I would get a lift ... I haven't spent a boring evening since that first purchase.' He discovered a particular fondness for Cézanne's work, in particular his watercolours. In the words of the curator of the Ashmolean's exhibition, Colin Harrison, this is 'one of the finest and best preserved groups of Cézanne watercolours in the world'. Indeed, having been exquisitely cared for by first the Pearlman family and then Princeton University, the paintings are still as fresh and vibrant as when they were created.

It is generally said that, where oil paintings are the public side of an artist's work, watercolours are often more private acts of creation, and I definitely got that impression from this exhibition. Cézanne is known to have been very dismissive of his own watercolours, but amongst them are very strong, confident, beautiful works, and in them can be seen the development of an artistic voice.

Before seeing this exhibition I had known only Cézanne's oils of Provençal hillsides of arid yellow soil, deep green cypress trees and warm burnt-orange rooves: deeply affectionate pieces, happily and busily populated with structures and shapes. There are a number of such glorious paintings here, including Mont Sainte-Victoire and Provençal Houses.

The watercolours show these same themes, often the same happy clutter, the same loving sensuousness and warmth, but in a freer hand and rejoicing in shimmering lines of rainbow colour.  The culmination of this journey of style development is the magnificent Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit. This is one of Cézanne’s very last paintings and it feels at once deeply anchored and completely radiant, with outlines which dissolve and forms which vibrate with colour.

Cézanne was famously tacit on the subject of whether his paintings were complete; he was, apparently, of the opinion that they were finished when he stopped painting.  Route to Tholonet, an engaging landscape seen through trees, has an underlying structure in graphite which is only partially reworked in oil, leaving the building in the foreground a curiously empty sketch amongst densely coloured foliage.  Many of the pieces in the exhibition, not only those by Cézanne, have a sketch-like quality which seems to shift focus towards the act of creating rather than the finished piece.  Edouard Manet’s Young Woman in a Round Hat is one such painting.  It is an intriguing piece: a portrait in which the subject is looking away, eyes veiled, and the setting is indoors but the subject is dressed to go out.  The contradictions and the style of line lend movement and energy to the work.

Pearlman’s taste, states Harrison, ‘teeters on the brink of abstraction’, and the pieces in the collection remain strongly representational whilst ranging from the Impressionist sweep of Sisley, through Cézanne’s Post-Impressionist compatriots such as his good friend and mentor Pisarro, to the Expressionists Soutine and Lipchitz and the Modernist Modigliani. 

Beyond Cezanne, highlights of the exhibition include, for me, Gaugin’s small sculpture of a woman from Martinique in unfired clay, with jewellery made of painted canva.  Another is a Van Gogh from 1888, the year in which he produced more than 50 known paintings, and at the end of which he suffered the severe mental breakdown for which he is sadly famous.  Tarascon Stage Coach is a joyous, storybookish painting, displaying colours and brushstrokes which are immediately identifiable as by Van Gogh.  Similarly unmistakeable is the Degas painting from his extensive series of studies of women bathing.  Unlike many in the series, here the subject is in an awkward, contorted, unstable pose; an inelegant but daring piece, enjoying touches of violent red.

It is entirely appropriate that the exhibition is topped and tailed with two portraits of Henry Pearlman, by Oskar Kokoschka and Jacques Lipchitz; it is a deeply personal collection, drawn together through love of the dialogue that art can be.  This is a rare chance to engage this collection of beautiful, interesting, curious, political, unusual and legendary works in conversation, and I recommend you grab it with both hands.