AGH lands coveted Cézanne exhibit

By: Alex Florescu

This past Saturday, Nov. 1 marked the opening of The World is an Apple at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, an exhibit dedicated to nineteenth century French painter Paul Cézanne.

Benedict Leca, the exhibit curator, has studied Cézanne for years and said the artist “has got this kind of power that is very hard to put your finger on. Even the Impressionists right from the get-go when he arrived in Paris in the 1860s were [thinking that] this guy [was] packing something.”

While avant-garde artists like Picasso, Monet and Matisse revered his talent, the general public was not of the same opinion. Leca recounted how “even in 1906, he was big enough by that time that people were talking about the need to include his still lives in the French national collections and they were still all sorts of heavy museum people in France who were like ‘over my dead body.’”

Looking at Cézanne’s Apples and cakes (Pommes et gateaux) hanging on the wall, it is clear to see that his method of painting wasn’t exactly conventional.

“He paints this apple in rough strokes and he paints the background, the wallpaper, in the same way. Usually a regular painter would paint this dish with a tiny brush so that the surface becomes smooth like ceramic.” Back then, this kind of rule-breaking left “people absolutely shocked…they were thinking that this guy is crazy and needs to be locked up.”

Even today, Cézanne is “an acquired taste, he is not as immediately beautiful as say, Monet’s Water Lilies.” This is exactly what makes him so idiosyncratic. Leca would argue that “he communicates a rich imagination and intuition that people still respond to.” With Cézanne, the details of each painting are as important as the painting as a whole.

“Every single touch that he puts down means [something], it’s not just random.”

When asked what the one message he would want people to take away from the exhibit is, Leca responded by saying that “[Cézanne] is a really imaginative guy. I have taught college classes before where students have said they see the face in the clouds, and with any other artist I would [have to tell them] no, there are no portraits in the clouds.”

With Cézanne it’s different, “he allows you to do that, whatever you see is like poetry.”

Leca recognizes that it might be hard for university students to relate to Cézanne’s work, recounting how he wasn’t into art history as an undergrad and would skip classes as a result of that.

The exhibit is open to the public until Feb. 8, 2015. A trip to see Cézanne’s exhibit between now and then would engage the imagination of even those who don’t consider themselves into art.