June 28, 2021 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his disappointing “Drawing Conclusions,” in this week’s issue, reviews MoMA’s “Cézanne Drawing,” a show of some two hundred and eighty works on paper, without describing a single one of them. He admits he’s not crazy about Cézanne’s art. He says, “I, for one, have struggled with him all my art-loving life.” He says,

You don’t look at a Cézanne, some ravishing late works excepted. You study it, registering how it’s done—in the drawings, with tangles of line and, often, patches of watercolor. Each detail conveys the artist’s direct gaze at a subject but is rarely at pains to serve an integrated composition. 

Okay, fair enough, but let’s hear about those details. Schjeldahl doesn’t give us any. Instead, he uncharacteristically opts for generalizations – albeit some pretty cool ones (“Thingness magnetized him”; “Cézanne’s scattershot approach triumphed in his conflations of surface with depth”). No wonder he struggles. He’s departed from his own dictum: “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap” (Introduction to Let’s See, 2008). Or has he? In the same piece, he also says, “Nothing ruins a critic like pretending to care.” 

For a tonic antidote to Schjeldahl’s Cézanne struggles, I recommend this superb description of Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks (1896-99) by John Updike:

Pines and Rocks, for instance, fascinated me, because its subject – these few pine trunks, these outcroppings of patchily tinted rock – was so obscurely deserving, compared with the traditional fruits of his still lifes, or Mont Sainte Victoire, or his portrait subjects and nude bathers. The ardor of Cézanne’s painting shone most clearly through this curiously quiet piece of landscape, which he might have chosen by setting his easel down almost anywhere. In this canvas, his numerous little decisions as to tone and color impart an excited shimmer to the area where the green of the pine shows against the blue of the sky, to the parts of the ochre trunks where shadow and outline intermix, and to the foreground, rendered in parallel diagonal strokes, of earth and grass. Blue, green, and ochre – these basic shades never bore him, and are observed and captured each time as if afresh. In the intensity of the attention they receive, the painter’s subjects shed their materiality: the pines’ branches here and there leap free of the trunks, and the rocks have no heaviness, their planes all but dissolved in the rapid shift of grayish-blue tints. What did it mean, this oddly airy severity, this tremor in the face of the mundane? It meant that the world, even in such drab constituents as pines and rocks, was definitely rewarding of observation, and that simplicity was composed of many little plenitudes, or small, firm arrivals – paint pondered but then applied with a certain nervous speed. Cézanne’s extreme concentration breaks through into a feeling as carefree and unencumbered as that which surrounds us in nature itself. In its new, minimal frame, Pines and Rocks seems smaller than the canvas I remember from the Fifties – but the grandeur of its silence, the gravity with which it seems to turn away from the viewer toward some horizon of contemplation, is undiminished. [“What MoMA Done Tole Me,” Just Looking, 1989]

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)