Cézanne outshines Van Gogh, with Picasso his revolutionary pupil, in this absorbing hurtle toward modern art – smashing 500 years of tradition into cubist shards
ake it strange” is one of the slogans of modernism. The National Gallery’s show After Impressionism makes modernist art itself strange, by seeing it from the past – the Victorian salons where this revolution in the arts actually started. It is a flawed show but one I found hard to leave. European art in the 1880s and 1890s hurtles towards the “modern” before your eyes, yet also burrows away into recesses of nostalgia and pastoral – and you lose yourself, as modernism wants you to.
You can cut a line through the exhibition and follow the high road of the new, ignoring all those odd byways. Simply rush from Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire with its hypnotic field of broken, tentative, obsessive dapplings held together by an iron intellect, straight to Pablo Picasso’s 1910 portrait of Wilhelm Uhde. This writer and collector is the last man, the last bourgeois individual, in Picasso’s revolutionary portrait.
Cézanne initiated that. The biggest shock of the show is how much more serious he is than its other two supposed heroes, Van Gogh and Gauguin. Yes, that’s right – better than Van Gogh. That is the clear conclusion of a display of five works by each, facing each other. Vincent’s paintings are touching, intimate, yet traditional compared with Cézanne’s dismantling of art and nature. Gauguin meanwhile is brittle and strident, his art always trying too hard to be “mysterieux”.
Picasso is the gifted pupil Cézanne never met. You can see that by darting to the end to see Picasso’s Woman with Pears, a portrait of his lover Fernande Olivier done in 1909. Is it a portrait? Fernande’s head is massive and industrial. Like a taut spiralling girder for a modernist monument, her neck tendon shoots up in a curve of electrifying torsion. Her eyes are diamond studs in a face of jarring planes, her hair a heap of black croissants.
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