Cézanne exhibition in Budapest
Cézanne and the Past – Tradition and Creation
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
25 October 2012 - 17 February 2013
This exhibition, displaying around 100 works by the French post-impressionist, is intended to cast light on the painter's relationship with the Old Masters and on the role they played in his renewal of classical painting, and features 40 works by artists (such as Luca Signorelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, Poussin, Chardin, Goya, Delacroix and Courbet) who had a particularly strong influence on the art of Cézanne.
Works for this exhibition in Budapest - with its unique approach to Cézanne's oeuvre - have kindly been loaned by close to 40 collections from around the world, from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, taking in the Musée D'Orsay and the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich, London's National Gallery, British Museum and Tate Modern, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Albertina in Vienna, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Washington DC National Gallery of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and several major private collections (Basel, Zürich, Frankfurt am Main, São Paolo).
Among the hundred or so works by Cézanne on show, there are many compositions which the artist made from studying works by Old Masters. These classical works will be displayed side by side with Cézanne's own oil paintings, watercolours and sketches, allowing visitors an opportunity to identify the similarities and differences between them, and therefore to gain a clear insight into the impact of the distinguished Old Masters, Cézanne's sensitivity to problems, and his stylistic and compositional prowess. For the last century, Cézanne has been considered as the artist who digested the painting of the preceding centuries and laid the foundations for modern art. The exhibition also examines the way in which Cézanne made his own discovery of the art of the Old Masters, and how he used their help to create his own art. Through the major works on show at the exhibition, from the Paris Card Players (1893-96, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and the New York Card Players (1890-92, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), the Montagne Sainte Victoire (1882, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London), the Harlequin (1888-90, Washington, National Gallery of Art) and the Bathers (1899/1904, Art Institute of Chicago), to the Still Life with Fruit Basket (1888-90, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and the Boston Madame Cézanne (1877, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Cézanne's affinity with the traditions of classical painting is clearly visible, even while his unique character and his creative genius shine through.
Although Cézanne occupies a prominent place among the greatest masters in the history of art, the public at large is generally only aware of a very narrow range of his life's work. This new exhibition aims to present one possible interpretation of his forty-year artistic career, by investigating his works from an unusual perspective. The curator of the exhibition is Judit Geskó, director of the post-1800 collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, who has already overseen the exhibitions "Zeichnen ist Sehen", "Monet and Friends" and "Van Gogh in Budapest". The studies in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition have been written by some of the most outstanding international Cézanne experts and researchers into 19th century French art, including Richard Shiff, the American authority on 19th century French painting, Caroline Elam, professor of art history and former editor of The Burlington Magazine, Cézanne biographers Mary Tomkins Lewis, Inken Freudenberg and Peter Kropmanns, Linda Whiteley, lecturer at Oxford University, Nancy Ireson, art historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Lukas Gloor, director of the Bührle Collection in Zürich, Klaus Herding, professor of art history at Frankfurt University and Isabelle Cahn, art historian at the Musée d'Orsay. Colleagues from Budapest University and the Museum of Fine Arts are also among the contributing authors.
We suggest you to choose guided tour, to fully understand the whole concept of the exhibition and hear some little secrets about the paintings.