The Whitworth Art Gallery exists for “the perpetual gratification of the people of Manchester”, in the words of its Victorian founder, and in that spirit it has one of the most democratic approaches in the country to its collection of prints and drawings. Anyone can make an appointment to explore its boxes of works by the likes of Turner and Blake. Its new exhibition Cézanne at the Whitworth celebrates that collection, and a remarkable gift to it that proves the spirit of Victorian philanthropy is alive.
The story starts with a radical masterpiece the Whitworth bought in 1927 when many Britons would have regarded it as a worthless scrap of paper. Paul Cézanne’s Study of Trees still challenges today. Black strands like fluttering seaweed mark the tracks of thin, twisting branches in empty space while watery touches of olive and orange hint at foliage. The art of summer is usually imagined as a sensual picnic beside a sun-kissed sea – Luxe, Calme et Volupté, “luxury, peace and voluptuousness”, as Matisse, quoting Baudelaire, called an ecstatic nude beach scene. There’s a romp of a drawing by Picasso in the Whitworth’s show that delivers that Riviera vibe, and then some. Two women are bathing naked in an abundance of curvy lines that communicates the artist’s greedy delight in their bodies. But this gleefully erotic Mediterranean scene just underlines that where Picasso leaps in, Cézanne holds back, staring, thinking, and alone.
If there’s a melancholy undertow to this exhibition, that is appropriate, for it commemorates the generosity of art dealer Karsten Schubert who died in July. Before his death at the age of 57 from cancer, Schubert gifted the Whitworth his collection of works on paper by Cézanne.
These are true treasures. Subtle masterpieces of drawing and printmaking, they pack more thought and feeling into the merest sketch than most artists have ever been able to communicate in a massive installation. Cézanne once claimed his contemporary Monet was “only an eye”. No one could say that of the drawings here. Cézanne is never just eye but a complex brain, and an even more complex soul. Everything he ever drew is a silent, still explosion of insight and passion. Two drawings given by Schubert portray Cézanne’s young son, Paul junior: in a little sketch on blue paper he watches Paul sleep and all the tenderness, anxiety and hopes of parenthood seem to fill each pencil mark.
That intensity and clarity transfigures a drawing of a skull that Cézanne made in the 1890s into a shattering modern memento mori. Skulls and skeletons were an artistic cliche by the late 19th century. Even Van Gogh lapses into morbid tomfoolery in his 1886 painting of a skeleton smoking a cigarette. But Cézanne sees it as planes of shade and shadow. Flat blocks of pencil work create the solidity of its cranium and the pools of its vacant eye sockets. It is a dazzling still life study – an intensely fresh act of observation. By seeing it like this he frees the skull of hokey symbolism. Paradoxically, that lets the reality of death hit us afresh.
About 20 years before he drew that proto-Cubist skull, Cézanne etched his 1873 print Armand Guillaumin with the Hanged Man. This image of a fellow artist haunted by an executed corpse in the background is typical of Cézanne’s romantic obsession with death and crime – the dark side of himself that he conquers in his study of a skull only to make its mortal menace more real. Cézanne turned symbols into things, and things into art. In the process he invented modernism. His art is electrifyingly tense because the transformations his pencil creates are never easy. Death is still death when you see it objectively. And the human body is still the human body, however hard you try to see it as a formal nude.
At the heart of this exhibition are works in which Cézanne tries to master his turbulent and enigmatic sexuality. His study After the Antiquity: Crouching Venus, which dates from about 1894-7, is a close-up drawing of a broken statue. He looks at it formally, mapping its shape with apparent objectivity. Yet the marble seems alive. Venus has a creased, rucked-up stomach. Is she stone or flesh? Can the artist bring his nude to life, like the sculptor Pygmalion in ancient myth?
In two copies given by Schubert of Cézanne’s great lithograph The Bathers (Large Plate), his attempt to transcend the pain of desire and enter an abstract realm of pastoral peace produces a modernist masterpiece. Four young men who’ve been bathing pose and cavort in a fiery Provence landscape. Behind them is an extinct volcano whose flat top is oddly truncated, maybe suggesting impotence. The heat has broken everything into hot hard impulses of colour. Only the bodies of the youths are soft and flowing. Is this a memory of the artist’s own youth in this southern landscape? Here it becomes an Arcadia where everything is suspended. Cézanne has taken care to hide every penis, but one young man is gazing at another who is pulling on his pants.
Cézanne was a confused and troubled man whose anxieties shudder through his Mediterranean Arcadia. This makes him not just the godfather of modern art but one of the truest chroniclers of modern anguish. What a gift to Manchester and to us all.
