Cezanne in America
What’s that you say? Cezanne never visited the United States? Very true—but like all seminal artists, his influence was strongly felt by early twentieth-century American artists. A current exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum, “Cezanne and American Modernism”, demonstrates convincingly that many American artists sought to emulate Cezanne, especially in terms of a new concept of pictorial space, freed from the constraints of Renaissance perspective. The exhibition doesn’t show the American artists at their best, however, since many works which show a direct legacy from Cezanne indicate that the painters picked up on the more superficial aspects of Cezanne’s work: the simplification of objects and the diagonal brushstrokes.
Cezanne represented different things to different people: he was seen as a materialist, a mystic, a realist, a formalist, a primitive savage, a paragon of European sophistication, and much more. But his position as the bridge between the Impressionist and the Modernists is unquestioned, with his perception of space, use of color, and contrasts of light and shadow. The works on exhibit in this show present a convincing case.
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