HappenArt

Cezanne
The Art Institute of Chicago – Until Sep 05, 2022 Chicago (US)

This groundbreaking retrospective sheds new light not only on how this pivotal artist created his works, but also on why his art remains so vital today.

Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) pursued a pair of questions throughout his life: Could a painter create works of art one sensation at a time? And, if so, would images made this way be somehow more true to life than those made by other means?

Impressionist.

This approach to artistic creation was complex and set Cézanne apart from the Impressionist circle and modern art as a whole. It is perhaps unsurprising that his fellow artists were among the first to recognize the value of his singular and, at the time, seemingly unsophisticated approaches to color, technique and materiality. As such, he came to be considered an “artist’s artist”. Indeed many of his supporters and admirers. Whom Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro in the 19th century and Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso in the 20th century, called Cézanne “the greatest of us all. Today, more than a hundred years after the completion of Cézanne’s last works, artists always revere his commitment to upholding personal truth in the act of artistic creation.

Retrospective.

This exhibition is the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States for more than 25 years and the first exhibition on Cézanne organized by The Art Institute of Chicago for more than 70 years. Planned in coordination with Tate Modern. This ambitious project explores Cézanne’s work across media and genres with 80 oil paintings. 40 watercolors and drawings and two complete sketchbooks. This exceptional range encompasses the range of Cézanne’s emblematic subjects and series. Little known early allegorical paintings. Impressionist landscapes, paintings of the Montagne Sainte Victoire. Portraits and Scenes of Bathers and includes both well-known works and rarely seen compositions from the public and private. collections in North and South America, Europe and Asia.

The artist’s palette.

This extraordinary breadth of works is accompanied by a cutting-edge technical analysis of the artist’s palette. From the construction of composition and the creation of marks, deepening our understanding of how Cézanne conceived and developed his famous deliberate, non-linear process. The exhibition also sheds light on the pioneering path that Cézanne traced for successive generations of artists. Through these complementary perspectives. Art historians, practicing artists and curators. This unique exhibition in a generation reframes Cézanne, a giant in the history of art, for our own time.