Exhibit of the week: Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Through Sept. 3

Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse are not commonly associated with backward-looking movements, said Rachel Wolff in The Wall Street Journal. Yet at the heart of this summer-long exhibit in Philadelphia hangs a major work by each of these “radical turn-of-the-20th-century artists” that invokes Arcadia, that mythic land of nymphs and pastoral tranquility that has been a favorite subject of painters for centuries. Cézanne’s “sinewy and atmospheric” Large Bathers (1900–06), Matisse’s “fractured and experimental” Bathers by a River (1909–17), and Gauguin’s “Tahitian reverie” Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98) seem to be holding a conversation of their own in the show’s central room. Meanwhile, the Gauguin is so heavily influenced by Cézanne’s nearby Bathers at Rest (1877) that it might be “quoting Cézanne’s painting directly.”

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That’s probably because “Cézanne’s paintings of bathers have influenced the representation of the nude more than any other works since the High Renaissance,” said Jack Flam in ARTnews.com. Instead of giving us the sensuous, eroticized women of Renaissance pastorals, Cézanne’s Large Bathers shows us unclothed female bodies that are “angular and disjointed,” molded by loose brush strokes that let white canvas peek through. “They disturb rather than delight us.” Yet in their incompleteness, Cézanne’s nudes also efficiently convey the modernists’ acute awareness that human perception is unstable, that a “metaphysical void” underlies anything we might know about the natural world.

For my money, Matisse was the most successful at “translating the Arcadian ethos into modern language,” said Ed Sozanski in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Bathers by a River stands as “a tour de force, by itself worth the price of admission.” Yet Matisse’s contribution is also the only one of the three featured canvases that feels stripped of romantic longing, said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. It’s “a somber, analytic play with pictorial conventions,” nothing like the exuberant pastoral images that the artist would create as he flattened and simplified his imagery in later years. So what does the conversation among these celebrated works tell us about the human dream of a pastoral paradise? Not enough, really. There are only seven other works by the core trio included in the larger exhibit, so the context we get is thin. Instead, alongside a few beautiful Arcadian paintings by Georges Seurat and the 17th-century classicist Nicolas Poussin, we get the forgettable output of “some second- and third-rank” pointillists. This show’s title promises a blockbuster event—“can you say, ‘false advertising?’”