'Cezanne and Beyond' in Philadelphia, part two

In 1915, when Henri Matisse was struggling to address cubism, he decided that riffing on a still-life was one way to do it. He visited the Louvre and copied Jan Davidsz. de Heem's A Table of Desserts. Matisse's canvas, at MoMA, is a substantially faithful derivation, an acceptance of de Heem's medium, content, composition and even some palette, all translated into Matisse's visual language. That is one way of accepting influence.

Painters don't always accept quite so much from their forefathers. At the end of last week I wrote that it was riveting to see each succeeding generation of artists expunge more and more of Cezanne from their work, to see them accept Cezanne as a starting point, but then to reject Cezanne's subjects, his compositions, his palette, even his medium. The best narrative in 'Cezanne and Beyond' at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was that influence is as much about elimination as it is about acceptance.

Take Cezanne's still-lifes, those brilliant gravity-defying, tabletop compositions of apples, jugs and so on. They don't just challenge centuries of still-life painting, they defy the principles of physics and gravity. No wonder that artist after artist has found them an essential point of departure. [Above: An 1892-94 Cezanne still-life from the Barnes Foundation. Like many Barnes Cezannes, even if it isn't at the PMA it's an understood point-of-departure for the show.]

Take Matisse. A year after playing karaoke with the de Heem, Matisse painted both Bowl of Apples on a Table [at right] and its sister painting, Apples, which is at the Art Institute of Chicago. (The picture shown here was in the Philadelphia show. From the collection of the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va., it should be much better known. How closely related are the two 1916 Matisses? Look at the apples on the left-hand side of the bowls: Identical.) 

As I noted above, in the mid-teens Matisse was trying to solve cubism, and he thought Cezanne's floating apples might provide some guidance. In both 1916 paintings Matisse uses as little Cezanne as he can. accepts Cezanne's famed subjects and throws both the apples and the bowl they came in against the picture plane. He seems unsure of what to do with Cezanne's table, so he keeps it in both paintings, sort of. (In the Chicago painting it seems as if Matisse considers eliminating it altogether, but that he just can't make himself do it.)

Matisse banishes everything else, including Cezanne's palette, his textiles (which were so important to Matisse in so many other paintings over so many decades) and anything resembling a background. Matisse reaches Cezanne's achievement -- the apples are freed from a table or a bowl, they hover -- but Matisse's composition lacks the master's elegance and poetry. Both Matisses are abrupt, experimental, challenging and almost brutal. Their intensity derives in part from how difficult it was for Matisse to eliminate Cezanne as he tried to understand cubism. The pain of elimination almost seems reflected in the paintings' jarring colors and compositions. The 1916 Matisses feel like World War I-era paintings.

Next came Alberto Giacometti, who nodded to Cezanne's tabletops and apples in his 1937 Still Life with Apple. Giacometti wasn't a minimalist, but he was a reducer. Even though Giacometti eliminated more Cezanne than Matisse did, his still-life is much less anguished than the Matisses.

In the 1937 painting [at left] he reduces the still-life objects down to two. Cezanne's tablecloths, bowls, jugs, pots, wine bottles, plates and windows are gone. All that's left is one table and one apple.  Giacometti, ever grounded in gravity (consider the way those marvelous walking sculptures so often have heavy feet, feet that ground them on the earth), even rejected Cezanne's floating: Giacometti's apple is sitting down. Still, even as Giacometti resists the master, he nods to him too: That table has a Cezannian tilt, in this case left-to-right. The apple should be roll off of it, just like Cezanne's apples should in the Barnes painting. But it won't.

Tomorrow: Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns.