How we came to love Cézanne

Loan exhibitions are the lifeblood of museums, and even blockbusters have their place, but the first obligation of any art gallery is to preserve, display, study and interpret the works in its permanent collection. Over the past year or so, the Courtauld Gallery has mounted small but near-perfect exhibitions inspired by paintings it owns, including Sickert and Renoir.

Now, to mark the Courtauld’s 75th anniversary, comes a display of all the gallery’s holdings of Cézanne’s paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints. It is a model of what an in-house show can be.

The Courtauld has the largest and finest collection of Cézanne’s work in this country, but only about half of it is normally on view at any one time.

The manufacturer and philanthropist Samuel Courtauld owned eight oils and three watercolours, and these were supplemented by a small group of works Count Antoine Seirlern bequeathed to the Courtauld in 1978. In addition, the gallery owns nine letters Cézanne wrote to the artist and critic Emile Bernard. On display for the first time and newly re-translated by John House, these represent the clearest statement of his artistic practice we have.

The integration of Cézanne’s work in all mediums would in itself have made a significant exhibition, but the close technical examination of the works and the catalogue essays by House, Barnaby Wright and Elizabeth Reissner break new ground in Cézanne studies. Though the exhibition fits comfortably into one not-particularly-large gallery, it will become a landmark in the study of this great artist’s work.

The show tells a number of stories. The first is how Samuel Courtauld came to acquire so many works by an artist whom the British were slow to take to their hearts. It is hard to overstate the importance for this country of Courtauld’s enthusiasm for Cézanne in the 1920s: without him, we would not have such iconic masterpieces as Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine (c.1887) and The Card Players (1892), or the complex late Still Life with Plaster Cast on public view.

Courtauld first came across Cézanne in 1922 and was eventually to acquire a number of the artist’s most beautiful works ranging in date from L’Etang des Soeurs, Osny, executed in the early years of Impressionism, to Cézanne’s last watercolour – the richly coloured and fully worked Apples, Bottle and Chairback (1904-06).

Like most collectors, though, Courtauld has his blind spots. He was indifferent to Cézanne’s early work, and he never acquired one of Cézanne’s bathers. At one point, he owned a bust-length portrait of a woebegone Madame Cézanne, but he sold it.

Then there are the pictures themselves. Looking closely at how Cézanne painted at different stages in his career, the curators reveal the complexity and improvisatory quality of the artist’s painting technique. He seems to have had no single method of painting, but rather was entirely open-ended in his approach to each picture.

For example, around 1875 he painted L’Etang des Soeurs, Osny with a palette knife. Broad swatches of lime and forest green laid in diagonal downward strokes to the right suggest the heavy movement of dense foliage and its reflection in a running stream, while the curved tree trunk creates an opposing upward diagonal to the left.

But, in Tall Tress at the Jas de Buffon (c.1883), he first established the essential planes of the picture with flat areas of thin translucent colour. Then, he applied a screen of delicate parallel brushstrokes over the entire surface of the canvas to create a shimmering all-over effect of air, light and movement. The paint varies in thickness in different parts of the canvas, from fairly thick at the trees at the top, to thin washes in the sky and at the bottom right.

In the late watercolours, instead of concealing the pencilled under-drawing with paint as was the conventional practice, Cézanne allows us to see it under the transparent colour applied with the brush. Sometimes it is difficult to tell whether the drawing is over or under the paint.

One of the most famous remarks the artist ever made (indeed, one of the most famous quotations in the history of art) is his advice to Bernard to “treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone”. This has usually been taken to mean that Cézanne was a formalist who looked at the world and saw geometric forms, not trees, lakes, apples, bottles and glasses.

In my youth, someone published a book analysing his pictures by diagramming the hidden cones and spheres the author assumed were there. But that line about the sphere, cylinder and cone was a standard part of preliminary training for young artists in 19th-century art education manuals. It was the first thing any young artist learned. Cézanne was telling the 37-year-old Bernard to go back to basics, to start again by looking at nature.

Bernard was one of a number of young artists and critics who were more interested in theories about painting than its practice. In these letters, Cézanne rebukes him, insisting that art begins and ends with the observation and study of nature. His message was: stop talking about art and start making it.

As this show makes us realise, in his own work Cézanne was the opposite of a formalist. In his attempts to capture the sensation of seeing, he used whatever approach seemed to him useful for that particular picture. It’s a simple insight, but it clears away a lot of misconceptions that have accumulated about this great artist. What more can you ask of a show?