A brush with greatness - goal of the Cezanne exhibit is to get viewers to think like an artist

PAUL CEZANNE'S "The Large Bathers" may be the "beginning of modern art." So says Joseph J. Rishel, co-curator with Katherine Sachs of the exhibit "Cezanne & Beyond," which opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art tomorrow.

Richel says the monumental painting of nude figures under an arc of trees, which Cezanne worked on for 11 years, created ripples throughout the art world long after it was first shown in 1906 - even into the 21st century.

What inspires an artist to paint, draw or sculpt, especially after studying a master such as Cezanne, is what the museum and its curators want to impart to the public with this exhibit, continuing through May 17.

"Cezanne & Beyond," with its nearly 600-page catalog, also is a labor of love dedicated to Rishel's late wife Anne D'Harnoncourt. Beloved chief executive of the museum since 1982, she passed away only eight months ago.

In the exhibit, the viewer can learn to think like an artist - if you know what to look for. It may be subject matter or composition, the underlying structure of a work, abstraction or colors.

Consider the impact of Cezanne's "Bathers" series as displayed in the exhibit:

Henri Matisse, 30 years younger than Cezanne, painted his own "Bathers with a Turtle" in 1908, having bought Cezanne's "Three Bathers" in 1899. That purchase would inspire Matisse for a lifetime.

Pablo Picasso bought Cezanne's "Five Bathers" in 1956, about the time he was working on his abstract sculpture "The Bathers," using some of the same postures as Cezanne's figures.

And from 2000 to 2002, Brice Marden, a Cezanne devotee, used a postcard of the "Large Bathers" in his studio as inspiration for the monumental size and proportion of his "Red Rocks (1)," one of a series.

Marden called Cezanne "the greatest realist and greatest abstractionist at the same time."

With the aid of a free audio device, tour guides and notations identifying comparable works, you'll be guided to view 50 works by Cezanne and see how 18 artists were inspired by him in 100 of their paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures.

The works come from the museum, other museums and private collections. Among them is Picasso's "The Dream." Casino mogul Steve Wynn was trying to sell the painting in 2006 when he accidentally put his elbow through it. The damage has been repaired.

If you choose to delve deeper into Cezanne, art historians and curators have written 18 essays about how Matisse, Jasper Johns, Marden, Piet Mondrian and others developed their own creative ideas through his works.

Also planned are special programs, an art history course, concerts and a lecture series by art historians in conjunction with the museum and the Barnes Foundation, which has its own star-studded collection of Cezanne paintings.

Even the chef at the museum restaurant is getting into the act, designing dishes inspired by the show.

Though he's getting 21st-century celebrity treatment 103 years after his death, Cezanne couldn't have had a more difficult, or humble, beginning.

One can only imagine the horror that the timid 24-year-old must have felt when his innovative paintings were publicly ridiculed at the Salon des Refuses in Paris in 1863. It took 11 more years before he showed his first three Impressionist paintings at a Paris gallery.

But painters like Matisse saw immediately that Cezanne was taking painting in a new direction.

By 1936, Matisse, then 67, wanted to secure a home for his beloved "Three Bathers." In a letter to the director of the Petit Palais in Paris, to which he later donated the work, Matisse wrote:

"In the 37 years I have owned this canvas, I have come to know it quite well, though not entirely, I hope; it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and perseverance . . . [It] has grown increasingly greater ever since I have owned it."

American modernist painter Marsden Hartley, who was part of the artists' circle around Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery in New York City in the early 20th century, became a Cezanne devotee.

He followed in Cezanne's footsteps, painting similar subjects in his own style and even living in his mentor's hometown of Aix en Provence in the south of France.

Paintings by Hartley and his mentor are hung together throughout the exhibit.

In the 1940s, German expressionist Max Beckmann traveled to many U.S. art schools delivering a lecture, "Letters to a Woman Painter," in which he urged students to study Cezanne, calling him "my greatest love."

Like art students of yesteryear who copied the masters, Jasper Johns drew a series of six ink drawings on plastic in 1994, from a poster of Cezanne's "Large Bathers," but Johns playfully changed the bathers' positions and who they were talking to in his "Tracing After Cezanne."

The 1993 poster came from "Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation," the first worldwide tour of Impressionist paintings from the Barnes.

Asked to participate in "Cezanne & Beyond," plein air painter Francis Alys said he had just used bubble wrap to wrap some paintings and noticed that "the wrapping suddenly allowed me to spot exactly where Cezanne had left us: a place where one could no longer see nature with a virginal eye, nor look at a painting with a virginal eye.

"My answer to your invitation is to veil an original painting by Paul Cezanne with bubble wrap plastic for the time of the show. My proposal is not an act of iconoclastic disrespect; it is an act of homage and surrender," he said.

Through his career, Cezanne admonished other artists to "stick to your own style and ignore the critics," said Rishel.

This exhibit shows that artists continue to heed his advice. *

"Cezanne & Beyond," tomorrow through May 17, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway, 215-763-8100, www.philamuseum.org.