'Cezanne and Beyond' in Philadelphia, part three

On Monday I wrote about how Matisse and Giacometti absorbed the influence of Cezanne's still-lifes not by osmosis, but by expunging. The relevant Matisse paintings were from 1916 (one was in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's 'Cezanne and Beyond' show) and the Giacometti was from 1937. Continuing my discussion of the PMA's show as a narrative that reveals how succeeding generations of artists remove and eliminate more and more of a key influence...

Twelve years after Giacometti's painting, Ellsworth Kelly made this drawing (which is still in his possession). While in 1916 the picture plane was something that Matisse had to grapple with -- he used Cezanne's ascending, weightless apples as a way of understanding cubism -- by 1949 several generations of artists had grown up with the perversion of the picture plane. They didn't question it, they didn't have to work through it, it just was there in the toolbox.

This might have made Cezanne's apples and less relevant to a third post-Cezanne generation of artists. Instead Kelly, 26, found them a key to something else: his journey toward minimalism. Kelly eliminated even more from his still-life than the artists of the prior two generations. Gone is all context, including the table, the stage on which Giacometti, Matisse and centuries of still-life painters had relied.

In 1957, Jasper Johns also pared Cezanne's still-lifes down to a single essential element. While Kelly had chosen the most obvious part of Cezanne's still-lifes, those gravity-defying apples, Johns, 27, chose the least-obvious object in Cezanne's paintings: The knobby drawers that lie underneath Cezanne still-life after Cezanne still-life. Cezanne himself didn't seem too much interested in those drawers: He often covered up that drawer with a tablecloth.

Johns, who would spend the next five decades zeroing in on little things that everyone else mostly ignored and then re-making them large, made it the subject of Drawer, this painting-ish semi-sculpture from the Rose Art Museum's collection.