These days, the trouble with the art world, as the painter Vija Celmins put it, is too much Duchamp and not enough Czanne. In other words, there are too many clever text-and-video installations around and not enough well-crafted painting and sculpture. That’s why the big Czanne show that just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (through Sept. 1) promises to be such a tonic. It’s sure being hyped like that: extra-strength art medicine in blockbuster size. But for many of the 500,000 expected visitors who’ll pay $12.50 a ticket, ““Czanne’’ won’t go down that easily. His paintings aren’t light-intoxicated Monet’s Cinema- Scope water lilies. He’s not Picasso, maniacally demonstrating his cubist slicer and dicer like the pitchman on an infomercial. And he’s certainly not Matisse, who almost makes you believe he paints those sexy, perfumed harem scenes in three easy brushstrokes. Czanne plods from one modest bowl of apples or landscape of Mont Sainte-Victoire to another, painstakingly building each picture stroke by stroke. He’s practically a scientist, conducting experiments on the painting of nature by painting the same subject again and again. His hard work requires hard work from the viewer, too. He’s one of those artists – like Jackson Pollock – whom you have to ““get’’ before you can enjoy. But once you can see him trying to reconcile the world beyond the picture with the self-conscious act of piling paint on a canvas, you’re in the fan club for life.
Early on, Czanne was a clumsy, morbidly self-indulgent romantic. But in his mature work he treats the picture plane like a slab of clay. His paintings function like relief sculptures modeled with color. Each daub of a warm hue makes part of the apple or mountain he’s depicting pop out a little; each cool stroke pushes it back. To make the receding, horizontal real world jibe with the flat, vertical canvas, Czanne pries apart the perspective lines of country roads or edges of tables and tilts them up, toward the viewer. To bring the viewer back from the far distance, he leaves remindful little patches of canvas untouched by paint. And to keep you coming back for another look, Czanne plants deliberate ambiguities: is that green splotch leaves on a branch in the foreground or a copse in the background? Does the wainscoting behind the still life really enter lower on the left than it exits on the right? You find yourself making as many separate glances back at his pictures as Czanne did while he painted them.
None of this was a game to Czanne. He had a grander purpose: to reclaim painting from both the academy grown rigid and impressionism gone soft. Czanne went to Paris from Aix-en-Provence to study art and fell in with the impressionists. In the 1860s and ’70s, they were mounting an offensive against what they considered the decadent art of the official salons. They painted contemporary life from direct observation; they put daubs of bright color next to each other and let the viewer’s eye do the mixing. Most important, they rejected the accepted rules of composition and subject matter as antithetical to art. Czanne agreed with all that. But as the only major impressionist who never had even a token painting admitted to a salon exhibition (the juries thought his work plain ugly), he became bitterly convinced that impressionism had gone limp. He wanted to put some bones back into it. He did, and later Picasso turned them into cubism.
Except for raves from his old school chum mile Zola and a few friends, Czanne got bad reviews. One critic saw him as ““violently impressed by two things: spinach and cobbling.’’ He didn’t have a solo show until he was 56. Finally, in 1904, the official Salon d’Automne admitted a whole roomful of his pictures. But success came too late to console him. In September 1906, he wrote: ““Will I reach the goal so long sought after, so long pursued?’’ Painting outdoors that October, Czanne collapsed in a rainstorm and was brought home in a laundry cart. A week later, he died of pneumonia.
Despite the hoopla, the Philadelphia show isn’t the Czanne show. No show could be. Czanne didn’t paint to produce a short list of masterpieces. Still, these spacious galleries – filled with still life after still life and mountain after mountain documenting Czanne’s obsessive, even heroic, struggle to discover the nature of painting – are as definitive as we’ll get for a long time. Since this is the show’s last stop (after Paris and London), art lovers should think of a trip to Philly as mandatory – even if they have to go by skateboard and work like hell when they get there.
