Cézanne's world of influence

Stunning show makes a case for a stunning legacy

''Cézanne and Beyond'' includes Paul Cézanne's ''Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair'.'

PHILADELPHIA - There won't be a show anywhere in the world this year to compete - in ambition, scope, and sheer concentration of masterworks - with "Cézanne and Beyond" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The exhibition, which has only one venue, explores the influence of Paul Cézanne on succeeding generations of artists. To trace these influences, the organizers have borrowed paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from all over the world, as well as from close to home: Both the Cézanne on the cover of the catalog and the first painting you see as you enter the show have been lent by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. And a work by Jasper Johns has been lent by the endangered Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.

Treasured, rarely seen works have also been lent by such artists as Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly and such private collectors as Steve and Elaine Wynn. (Titillatingly, the Wynns have lent Picasso's "The Dream (Marie-Thérèse)," the portrait of the artist's sleeping lover, which casino mogul Steve Wynn accidentally punctured with his elbow on the eve of selling it for a record-busting $139 million in 2006. The deal was canceled, the painting repaired; Marie-Thérèse dreams on, as if nothing ever happened.)

"Cézanne and Beyond" has a simple, unarguable premise: that no artist had a bigger influence on art of the 20th century than Paul Cézanne. "He was like the father of us all," said Picasso. "Cézanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting," said Matisse. He was, said Bonnard, "the painter who was most powerfully armed in front of nature, the strongest, the most sincere."

Thus the show aims to trace the course of this influence by concentrating on 18 of his successors: Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Beckmann, Braque, Giacometti, Léger, Gorky, Giorgio Morandi, Liubov Popova, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Kelly, Johns, Jeff Wall, Brice Marden, Sherrie Levine, and Francis Alÿs.

If the idea is simple, it must be said that the exhibition teeters on the cusp of incoherence. Cézanne's works - about 60 of them - are scattered among works by the others, with no regard to chronology. Instead they are linked by affinities you may feel you need special qualifications to fathom.

What does a photograph by Wall have to do with the MFA's lovely Cézanne "Turn in the Road"? What does Kelly's blue and green painting "Meschers" have to do with Cézanne's "Large Pine and Red Earth"?

There are good answers to all these questions (Kelly's abstraction, for instance, was based on a view of the sea and sky through pine trees - exactly what the Cézanne depicts). But they are not always obvious, and the risk is that viewers become mired in games of "spot the connection" rather than feeling free to appreciate each work on its own terms.

It's a risk I'm glad the organizers took. This is a show you can feel your way around by instinct. The wall labels are few and far between. You are invited simply to gorge on the pleasures of looking. If certain art-history subtleties pass you by, no matter. You will discover things you have never seen or registered before just by keeping your eyes and heart open.

Why, oh why, was Cézanne so influential?

He is not, after all, the most instantly seductive of painters. His work lacks the gorgeousness of Monet, the emotional intensity of Van Gogh, and the exoticism of Gauguin. For a long time people said that he was too tentative and that he couldn't draw. And yet he was regarded as a kind of savior by the avant-garde artists who succeeded him.

In his 20s and 30s, Cézanne had seen Impressionism blow away centuries of cloying dependence on outworn conventions: the obligation to build up forms from dark to light, to obey the rules of single-point perspective, and to resort to symbols and allegories for validation.

But Impressionism, so attentive to the flux, the disorder, and the accidents of vision, was, as the late critic John Russell put it, "all treble and no bass." Cézanne, a classicist at heart, yearned for stability, for that sense of permanence that allows sensation to deepen. He set himself the challenge of squaring Impressionism's breakthroughs with the great French classical tradition.

By temperament, he was a conservative and a grouch. But he was ferociously, heroically independent. All his mature artistic efforts went into uniting the experience of seeing (no one was more conscious of the flux and contingency of the visible world) with an insistence on making each image as coherent and tightly structured as possible. He painted brush stroke by brush stroke, integrating each mark, each color, with the marks and colors around it.

In this way, he converted impressions into emotions.

All this had an incalculable effect on the art of the next century. When Matisse was trying to work out how to contain the Pandora's box he had opened with his boldly colored Fauvist paintings, he looked to Cézanne for calm and clarity. ("If you only knew the moral strength, the encouragement that his remarkable example gave me all my life!" he said later.) When, on their way to inventing Cubism, Picasso and Braque were struggling to digest the competing influences of Gauguin, Van Gogh, tribal art, and ancient art, they found answers in Cezanne's fascination with how objects can seem to escape their own contours.

Constantly seesawing between perception released from convention and the desire for lucidity, 20th-century art has the example of Cézanne imprinted in its very DNA.

Lucidity is lacking in the first two rooms of the Philadelphia show: It's a bit of a free-for-all. But there are some startling juxtapositions. Cézanne's great standing male figure "The Bather," for instance, hangs near Marsden Hartley's homoerotic homage "Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine." Both pictures combine monumentality and awkwardness, with uncanny results: The human figure seems freshly shucked, consciousness itself unbandaged after centuries swaddled in convention.

A little farther on, a corridor is devoted to portraits of seated women. The grouping is anchored by the MFA's great "Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair," after which hang, in stately procession, Matisse's "Woman in Blue," Cézanne's "Madame Cézanne in Blue," Picasso's "The Dream (Marie-Thérèse)," and Matisse's "Portrait of Olga Merson." Stupendous women: They seem like visual intelligence incarnate. The sense of poise, solidity, decorative expression, and clarity creates its own force field.

If Matisse, Kelly, and Marden can be thought of as some of the sensualists among Cézanne's progeny, Picasso, Braque, and Mondrian were their more cerebral classmates. These were the artists who first pushed the innovations of Cézanne toward abstraction.

When Picasso said, "Cézanne's uncertainty is what interests us. That is his lesson," he meant Cézanne's uncertainty about how to position what he saw on the canvas before him - an uncertainty that led to his marvelous patchwork compositions of blurred fragments that seem both to sit on the surface and to recede, creating a highly ambiguous sense of space.

Cubism cultivated and schematized this ambiguity. Mondrian purified and distilled it, finally rejecting appearances altogether as a distraction from "pure reality." (Cézanne, with his loyalty to the visible world, would not have approved. But then, sons do not always need their father's approval.)

I have not yet mentioned the most astonishing part of the show, a high-ceilinged gallery devoted to the pictorial challenge of painting monumental figures in the landscape. The section hinges on three of Cézanne's late paintings of bathers. These are among the most mysterious paintings in the history of art, with their inert and sexless figures so beguilingly integrated into an arcadian setting. So it's fitting that the accompanying works match their haunted, pressurized atmosphere.

Among them is an intensely private but richly suggestive painting by Johns; Picasso's surpassingly weird, proto-Cubist "Seated Female Nude" from 1908-09; and Matisse's "Le Luxe I" and "Bathers with a Turtle." The Matisses were inspired directly by a small Cézanne painting, "Three Bathers," that was Matisse's most precious possession; it hangs here beside them.

I wish I could put into words the cumulative effect of all these works hanging in the same room. The Cézannes, Matisses, and Picassos, in particular, take liberties with the human figure that were unprecedented in their day and still look strange today. Not unlike the Cézannes that inspired it, the Picasso looks boxy and unbalanced, at once flat and three-dimensional; the Matisses clunky, spineless, and surreally colored.

When they painted these works, all three artists may have been "pursuing their dreams," as the romantics would have it. But they were doing so under intense duress, certain of nothing except that the public would find their efforts ludicrous.

Thus, these pictures seem to have been squeezed out of psychic pressures we can only guess at. It's hardly surprising, then, that they have a muffled, thwarted air, which undermines the very ideal of art as a form of communication. Instead, painting feels transformed here into a kind of monologue - intensely poignant, deeply private.

One of this exhibition's great virtues is that it makes you reflect on the whole fraught business of artistic influence. Matisse was speaking as a recognized master when he said, "I have accepted influences but I think I have always known how to dominate them."

But you see another, more human side of the matter when you learn about Matisse's relationship with Cézanne's "Three Bathers." In a period of extreme poverty, he haggled over this little painting with the dealer Ambroise Vollard for months. It eventually cost him 500 francs - a whopping sum for him - and no less than 12 of his own paintings.

To pay for it, Matisse's wife Amélie agreed to let him pawn her emerald ring, a wedding present. When he finally tried to redeem the ring, he was told his pawn ticket was out of date. The ring was lost, and Amélie mourned it, according to Matisse's biographer Hilary Spurling, all her life.

When he gave "Three Bathers" to the French state late in his life, Matisse wrote a famous letter in which he expressed his indebtedness in terms that can bring tears to your eyes. Cézanne's painting, he wrote, "has given me moral support in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I drew from it my faith and perseverance."

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.