Cézanne: Drawing

Although he is most often celebrated as a painter, Paul Cézanne's extraordinary vision was fuelled by his experiments on paper. In pencil and watercolour, on individual sheets and across the pages of sketchbooks, the artist described form through multiple probing lines; realized compositions through repetitions and transformations; and conjured kaleidoscopic colour through laborious layering of watercolour. It is in these material realities of drawing where we see Cézanne at his most modern: embracing the unfinished, making process visible, and actively inviting the viewer to participate in the act of perception.

To date, exhibitions devoted to Cézanne have tended to focus on a single genre, a specific theme, or an isolated moment within the artist's oeuvre. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this is the first major effort to unite drawings from across Cézanne's entire career, tracing the development of his practice on paper, exploring working methods that transcend subject, and devoting research to conservation as well as curatorial fronts.

“This subversion of expectations turns what could have been a staid, Old Masterish presentation of the work of an all-too-well-known canonical artist into something suspenseful and dramatic.”

Distills modernism's father figure to his essence, revealing the day-by-day, stroke-by-stroke scrutiny needed to make a piece of fruit as weighty as the Holy Family.--Jason Farago "New York Times"
Cézanne brings his radical and extreme engagement with the practice of painting to his work on paper, endowing what is ostensibly conventional subject matter--landscapes, portraits, interiors, and still lifes--with an unpredictable charge.--David Rhodes "Brooklyn Rail"
The essays are instructive and wide ranging and the works are beautifully reproduced on matte paper that does justice to the subtle tonalities of the drawings and watercolours.--Susan Sidlauskas "The Burlington Magazine"
--Paul Galvez "Artforum"
I have just received the very beautiful catalogue from MoMA on Cézanne's drawings. It's an excellent book I can recommend to anybody.--David Hockney "Art Journal"
Cezanne revolutionized visual art, changing a practice of rendering illusions to one of aggregating marks that cohere in the mind rather than the eye of the viewer...Cezanne drew nearly every day, rehearsing the timeless purpose--and the impossibility--of pictorial art: to reduce three dimensions to two.--Peter Schjeldahl "New Yorker"
Cézanne's objects and spaces are filaments; they shift and oscillate. Nothing is solid or stays in place. They are made of pirouettes of squiggles, squalls of color, lines always in motion. Everything is always wobbling. Almost all of his horizon lines make no sense at all and are broken. You are seeing some mitochondrial thread that moves in swells and subtle cadences of energy. This imparts a pictorial amplitude and visual grandeur to whatever he's drawing. Cézanne said, "Paint it as it is." Cezanne rendered this it as is as it ever was.--Jerry Saltz "New York Magazine: Vulture"
Mindblower of a show... Cezanne's work has the force of a call to arms.--Jed Perl "New York Review of Books"
Revelatory, underappreciated still-lifes, landscapes, and figure studies.--Andrea K. Scott "New Yorker"

Jodi Hauptman is Senior Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Samantha Friedman is Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at MoMA. Kiko Aebi is Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints at MoMA. Annemarie Iker is the Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints at MoMA. Laura Neufeld is Assistant Conservator at MoMA.

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