French painter Paul Cezanne, a contemporary of the impressionists but not popular at the time, is now widely credited as the father of modern art. Paul Solman takes a look at an extensive exhibit of the painter's work now showing in Philadelphia.
PAUL SOLMAN: "With an a
Paul Cezanne once said, "I want to astonish Paris." And astonish Paris he
did a hundred years ago, the same way great artists usually do, by painting
the world differently than it had ever been painted before. For Paul Cezanne,
that meant abandoning the imitation of reality to create his own peculiar
sense of what he saw. In the process, he led the 20th century to what we now
call Modern Art. The Grand Boulevard, not of Paris, but Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
where until September 1st, the Museum of Art is hosting the first major retrospective
of Cezanne's work in 60 years. (music in background) For viewers, probably
the chance of a lifetime to see at a shot 200 plus oil paintings, water colors,
and drawings by the master who inspired so much of modern art. For Cezanne
expert Joseph Rishel, the exhibit's co-curator, the chance of a lifetime,
to showcase a subtle revolutionary.
JOSEPH RISHEL, Philadelphia Museum of Art: He helps us to see things in a different light. I mean, the greatest gift art can do for anybody is to reinvent the obvious, and that very happy feeling once you get it, and there will be that little click, and then you'll love it because it will seem so obvious. And you won't feel dumb; you'll feel very happy, and then you'll find something else to get.
PAUL SOLMAN: Cezanne grew up in Aix, in Southern France, a provincial backwater far from the sophistications of Paris. Son of this bourgeois banker, the young Cezanne was forced to study law and work in his dad's bank before being free to pursue art full-time. He began at art school drawing with passion, and almost from the start, he put his passions into his painting. His early images were often imagined, romantic, sensational, as in this orgy scene. The "Murder" is melodramatic. So too the "Abduction" painted at age 27. Phase one of Cezanne then, portraying his emotions with brush, palette knife, and large, expressive smears of paint.
JOSEPH RISHEL: A friend of his said, Cezanne, you paint like a brick layer. I mean, it's just really souped up, high--sort of a great high--full boil emotion, within control, I mean beautifully within control.
PAUL SOLMAN: Control. It's apparently what Cezanne was working to achieve throughout his career. 
He next struggled with it when he picked up his easel and went outdoors. He was in his 30s when he came in contact with a group of contemporaries known as the Impressionists--Monet, Renoir, and his good friend Camille Pisarro, on the left. They helped focus him and his sensations on the world right before him. To make progress, Cezanne now wrote in a letter, there is only nature. Out in his native French countryside, the so-called brick layer began to build his inner vision from the world as he actually saw it. It was in this phase, says Joseph Rishel, that Cezanne first came into his own. The Paul De Massey is a case in point.
JOSEPH RISHEL: There's great magic to this picture. There's great romance and magic, because it seems so tender and private in this cool little glade in the long history of finding cool places of great seclusion that were yours and yours alone like all kids love, you know, and he must have felt very much that and wanted to do that for us.
PAUL SOLMAN: It's pretty, isn't it?
JOSEPH RISHEL: Oh, I think it's very enchanting.
PAUL SOLMAN: But as Rishel points out, behind 
the
prettiness lies a painstaking, complex and almost wholly new way of fiddling
with a natural image. The "Bridge," for example; it isn't quite supported
by these stone arches on either side. The leaves aren't leaves at all, but
short, diagonal patches of paint. The tree in the left foreground gives the
picture much of its sense of depth. The scene, itself, at least as it now
appears, shows how much Cezanne altered it to fit his own feelings of shape,
of color, and of line, what he called his sensations.
JOSEPH RISHEL: It's really wonderful if you look right here. You see, he had sort of scored a line down the--the old perspective game--corner of the building--
PAUL SOLMAN: That's right.
JOSEPH RISHEL: See that he's just pulled a lot of green right in there, just to tease you into this green so it starts sort of weaving together. A lot of Cezanne's like woven textiles, but then taking that building corner and just inventing a new, very sensual, enchanting problem out of it seen through the trees, also at the same time playing off something over here.
PAUL SOLMAN: So--
JOSEPH RISHEL: It's like juggling a lot of things all at once.
PAUL SOLMAN: Cezanne juggled and built with lines and colors. And the process virtually never stopped. Cezanne's was a continual quest for an image true to what he saw and how he experienced it. 
The art dealer, Ambrose Volard, experienced Cezanne's quest first hand when he sat for a portrait. "After 115 sittings," Volard wrote, "Cezanne abandoned my portrait to return to Aix." The front of the shirt is not bad. Such were his last words on parting. Volard also wondered why two spots of canvas on his hand remained unpainted. Cezanne said he was waiting to find just the right tone. "Don't you see, Monsieur Volard, that if I put something there by guesswork, I might have to paint the whole canvas over starting from that point?" "After so many sittings, the prospect," wrote Volard, "made him tremble." (music in background) At the Philadelphia Museum, however, there's no trembling, no fear, just sell-out crowds to celebrate a painter who gave his all to see the stuff of everyday life in a fresh light. It was in his still lifes, many feel, that Cezanne was at his most original, constantly adjusting and re-adjusting the scene before him. Fruit, a blue ginger jar, a teapot, a tablecloth, a basket - all balanced precariously on a table that is itself, it turns out, somewhat askew, some might say distorted.
JOSEPH RISHEL: You start here.
PAUL SOLMAN: Right.
JOSEPH RISHEL: Edge of the table. You get in here, you kind of lose track.
PAUL SOLMAN: Right.
JOSEPH RISHEL: You end up at the other end. Where do you end up?
PAUL SOLMAN: Oh, it's way down here.
JOSEPH RISHEL: Way down there.
PAUL SOLMAN: It's like six inches or a foot closer in to us than that end of the table is there.
JOSEPH RISHEL: Even to the point that you would think, would you not, that this is an angle like this--
PAUL SOLMAN: Right.
JOSEPH RISHEL: And this is really at quite a different angle.
PAUL SOLMAN: Yes. Oh, I see. This is here and oh, yeah.
JOSEPH RISHEL: And it's as if in some deep and wonderful way there was kind of a magnetic pulling and shifting. The train's going through the tunnel as people used to love to say that - Cezanne comes out differently from where you think it does - but it all still holds as a whole.
PAUL SOLMAN: The German poet Raynor Maria Rilka saw in Cezanne still lifes
the net effect of all this effort, an almost mystical experience put into paint. "He lays his apples down on bedspreads," wrote Rilka, "that his housekeeper certainly misses one day, and puts his wine bottles among them, and whatever he happens to find, and like Van Gogh, makes his saints out of things like that, and compels them, compels them to be beautiful, to mean the whole world and all happiness and all glory." Of course, not everyone waxes quite so poetic when it comes to Paul Cezanne, even these days, as we found out in Philadelphia.
WOMAN: I'm not real fond of the nudes.
PAUL SOLMAN: Oh, there are some nudes behind you.
WOMAN: I think his figures are just not the nicest looking. In fact, I wasn't even going to come because I thought, oh, all of these nudes and so on, but when they said, oh, no, you'll like the still life, you'll like the green trees and pictures of color, and I have, and I know that's his best picture and they like that and it gets so much praise and so on. But it just doesn't appeal to me.
PAUL SOLMAN: To Cezanne, however, bathers were a favorite subject, the theme
of some of his last and largest paintings. Many commentators say these are
the bridge to the artists that came after him. 
Picasso,
for instance, who owned several Cezannes, the bathers clearly influenced his
famous painting of Avignon prostitutes, with its multiple points of view,
and in Cezanne, many have also seen the start of purely abstract art. Mount
Saint Victoire in Provence, a long loved subject for a man who lived in its
shadow. In the last of his mountain studies, the various elements, houses,
fields, the mountain, itself, almost disappeared into an intense field of
geometric masses and pure colors. The last painting in the exhibition--an
unfinished view of the garden outside Cezanne's last studio. To Duncan Phillips
of the famed Phillips collection, the model for modern art.
JOSEPH RISHEL: Every generation takes and reinvents Cezanne and certainly in the 1920's when a very progressive collector loved that painting, what he loved in it was its quality of abstraction. Did Cezanne intend that and have a clue of that abstraction as we thought of it, no, of course not, I don't think. He was still worried about his sensations and putting dashes of paint on to - and they are color sensations he was experiencing, sitting and looking out into a landscape.
PAUL SOLMAN: Ultimately, to Joseph Rishel, as perhaps to the artist, himself, this is the essence of Cezanne, trying with humility and patience to paint the world as it looked and felt to him.
JOSEPH RISHEL: I will tell you one of my revelations about working on this show. There is, if not piety, 
there is a quality of innocence about Cezanne. There is never anything manipulative or cheap or sensationalizing. He's just--he is so keen to get it right.
MS. FARNSWORTH: As Paul said, the Cezanne exhibit closes on September 1st. A museum spokeswoman told us this afternoon that it is sold out through the end of its run.
