Oranges are not the only fruit
Annie Blinkhorn, Thursday, 26th June 2008
Yesterday’s was a rare fine summery evening and a pleasant one to walk through the courtyard of Somerset House, home of the Courtauld Collection. I told Nicola, my drinks companion earlier in the day that I was going along to visit ‘The Courtauld Cézannes’. She was not particularly impressed and rolled her eyes sighing, ‘All those wretched oranges’. (I think she was subjected to a roomful of still lifes at a mid-90s Cézanne retrospective somewhere.) It’s safe to say she’s not a fan. Last night, however, I found that I was.
In the upstairs galleries were the exhilarating blues and greens of his Aix-en-Provence landscapes, an endearing self-portrait and marvellous watercolour sketches where a few blocks of colour describe as much as an oil painting could. This is a small exhibition and its aim is to put the Cézanne paintings in the Courtauld Collection in the context of the painter’s ‘revolutionary’ technique that would later see him acclaimed as the father of modern art.
One thing that struck me was the translation of a letter from Cézanne to his friend and fellow painter Emile Bernard, dated 21 September 1906, in which he says, ‘I have sworn to die while painting, rather than sinking into the degrading senility that threatens old men.’ It is particularly poignant that just weeks after writing the letter the artist contracted pneumonia after he was caught in a storm whilst working, and died only a month later on 22 October. This combination of nature, art, life and death would suggest the painter as hero of Romanticism as well as father of Modernism.
The exhibition is complemented by a room of the Courtauld’s Impressionist and Post-Impressionist prints (written about extensively by Joanna Selbourne in the July/August issue of Apollo). And a note to Nicola: there are quite a few apples and a couple of garlic bulbs, but no oranges, I promise.
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