Seeing Cezanne at the Barnes, part three

The Barnes Foundation is rightly known for its iconoclastic installations. Selected by Albert C. Barnes himself, they're undeniably quirky: For example, the best painting in a gallery is frequently tucked into a corner, instead of in the center of a wall. Cases of antiquities or other objects frequently prevent a viewer from getting a good look at a canvas. And so on.

I've never fetishized Barnes' hangings. The installation now at the Barnes is the one Barnes left behind when he died. Barnes regularly changed the hang while he was alive, and so far as I know there's no particular reason to believe that this was The One he wanted to leave behind. Most of the installations are spectacularly uninteresting and sub-ordinary.

Except for one Cezanne hanging, which I think is extraordinarily smart. This week I've been talking about Cezanne's male Bathers and how much I think they're about balance. Yesterday I wrote about the Barnes' Bathers at Rest, pointing out the ways it is a dreamy painting with a tremendous equilibrium.

I think Barnes thought so too, and here's why: Directly across the gallery from Cezanne's Bathers he installed a fantastic still life from 1892-94. As you can see above, the surface on which the still-life sits is dramatically tilted, falling off to the left. But because this is a still-life the objects on the table remain in stasis, in a rather unlikely state of balance. It's still-life as stop-motion, as magical suspension in both place and time. It's the antithesis of Bathers at Rest.

(There are lots of Cezanne still-lifes, at the Barnes and elsewhere, in which Cezanne plays similar tricks. Usually he's up-tilting plates or objects toward the picture plane, flattening space. That's not what he's doing here.)

So why did Barnes place these two remarkable paintings across a gallery from each other? I think that he was trying to make a point about balance in Cezanne's art.

Related: Barnes and his curator Violette de Mazia wrote a book about Cezanne, but I don't own a copy and it's not searchable on Google Books.