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Look! It’s Cezanne at the PMA
April 22, 2009 · 6 Comments
In the latest edition of our video series Look! It’s Libby and Roberta, we take a look at Cezanne and Beyond at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Videographer David Kessler is the wizard with the camera and so much more!!!
Look! It’s Libby and Roberta – Cézanne and Beyond from Look! it’s Libby and Roberta on Vimeo.
Tags: cézanne, david kessler, philadelphia museum of art, pma
Readers Comments (6)
really nice!
Thanks, Jen!!!
thanks, Jennifer! It’s a very large show and David distilled it down in the video to some salient images and some of our pithier thoughts. He’s great and the show’s great and we love the video!
I saw the show (great!) and decided, after seeing a small painting of the male bathers, (on the far wall behind the Picasso sculptures) that Cezanne must have had confusing feelings for men. There is one male nude form so incredibly, sensuously and lovingly painted, who brings your eye into the scene as he stares at another male frontal nude. You literally are brought into a world of staring at a man from afar. There is also a man in tight white shorts, seen from behind, also lovingly described. And just next to that gem of a little painting of mostly nude males at gathering at a watering hole… is a large painting of women bathers with all these nude female forms which somehow manage to look utterly unsexual and uninteresting, with random breast and behind circular shapes put on here and there. All these women and no sensuality, no sexuality. Put that information together with all the paintings of Cezanne’s wife in which she looks like a potato and you start to wonder…
Yes, it does make me wonder. What also makes me wonder is the way he has laid the bodies out like so many sardines in a tin! Not only are they completely unsexual, but they are odd and not about the bodies so much as about the massing of the bodies and their place in nature. It’s as if he has declared them unnatural, squeezed into the natural world by some machine or packer with no sense.
Hey, I don’t know what the dude was up to, but I doubt he was looking at a woman when he painted them. More likely, if he was looking at a figure, he was looking at a man, although I doubt he was looking at either. I think he was more interested in that mountain shape he created by packing them together.
Clearly he found women’s bodies unknowable–just where does that breast go (oops, there are hardly any in the painting), and that waistline is impossible so I’ll just paint them thick in the middle. My favorite part is the baby buns on the giant haunch.
Thanks. I feel better having put that out there and being taken seriously because the idea struck me so suddenly as so obvious when I compared the two paintings of bathers (one of males and one of females) and the bodies were treated SO differently. He really seemed to enjoy the male nude and portray it with such emotion and pleasure and wistfulness… and the female nudes… well, you are right. They are just these shapes to bunch together for compositional or allegorical purposes. I had never seen the idea anywhere before.