l.
ELIZABETH FRANK
629
visual pleasure is in some sense an analogue, Fragonard becomes
merely a purveyor of lovely decorations. Some of these, of course,
are wonderful, simply as painting. When the works in this show are
sent home, it is nice to know that the paintings Madame du Barry
rejected as old-fashioned are always available at the Frick, capable of
refreshing eyes bored to death by the deadhanded slickness of so
much of what passes for advanced painting today.
•
•
•
For the exhibition of Cezanne drawings this spring at the
Museum of Modern
Art,··
Sir Lawrence Gowing and Bernice
Rose, Curator, Department of Drawings at MOMA, selected 114
out of 152 sheets of Cezanne drawings in the collection of the Basel
Kunstmuseum. Originally forming part of five sketchbooks, the
"Basel Museum carnets," as Adrien Chappuis, author of the
catalogue
raisonne
of Cezanne's drawings, termed them, the drawings
are first-rate and should dispel the notion, never entirely put to rest
since Cezanne's "distortions" were first remarked, that he could not
draw with academic correctness. A richly tonal charcoal study of a
male nude done at the Atelier Suisse in 1865 is, with the exception of
the model's upper left arm, perfectly "correct," and the numerous
drawings of sculpture, both antique and "modern" (Renaissance
through nineteenth century) are similarly accurate with respect to
proportion and volume. Correctness, of course, is hardly the issue
with Cezanne. The Basel Sketchbooks present him as a complex,
enigmatic figure, obsessed at first by private, sometimes violent fan–
tasy, and then increasingly by nature and the art of the museums.
The line in early pencil studies for romantic "machines," such as the
"Study for
The Eternal Feminine,
"
which looks like a reverse cartoon of
Delacroix's
The Death of Sardanapalus,
or "Studies for
The Orgy,"
becomes what Sir Lawrence Gowing felicitously calls Cezanne's
"generative linear broth," quick, squiggly, broken and rhythmic,
seeking out dynamic passages and contiguous unified forms very
much in the manner of Delacroix. Goya also seems present in
Scene of
Violence
(also known as
The Murder),
an ink-and-wash drawing of a
man bending over a woman's supine body. Its thick, almost blud-
• '"Paul Cezanne: The Basel Sketchbooks," The Museum of Modern Art, March
10-June 5, 1988. Directed by Bernice Rose, Curator, Department of Drawings,
The Museum of Modern Art. Catalogue essay by Lawrence Gowing.
