For whom the past is a real treasure trove

The exhibition Cézanne and the Past: Tradition and Creativity can be seen in Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts from 26 October. It is perhaps the largest undertaking in a series of exhibitions which the museum launched in 2003. The series has featured the oeuvres of 19th-century artists such as Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Ferdinand Hodler and Gustave Moreau, all of whom had a major influence on the development of fine arts. As with Cézanne and the Past, a number of those exhibitions were curated by art historian Judit Geskó, head of the museum’s Department of Art after 1800. MúzeumCafé interviewed her while the exhibition preparations were still underway.

Let us begin with the facts. How many works of art will be displayed at the exhibition and how many will actually be by Cézanne?

All in all 160 works of art will be on display. Of these 43 paintings, 37 drawings, 16 watercolours and four prints are by Cézanne himself – these happen to total exactly one hundred. Among the works by others, yet with a close connection, there will be 16 paintings, 10 sculptures, 15 prints, three watercolours and eight drawings, namely a total of 52 works from the collection of the Fine Arts Museum and from collections abroad. Cézanne often sketched on both sides of a sketch-book sheet and since both the recto and verso of many are presented thus we reach the figure of 160 works altogether.

How long have you been working on this exhibition?

I and my colleague Melinda Erdőháti began compiling works for the exhibition four and a half years ago. Anna Zsófia Kovács joined us last year. I first decided in 1986 that if I ever had the opportunity to curate such exhibitions I would do it specifically with the idea that one day when we had a decent permanent 20th-century exhibition it would be seen by an appreciative public. So what the Museum of Fine Arts is giving me as a ‘present’ with organising the Cézanne exhibition is that on the very same day when it opens so does our new permanent 20th century exhibition, a selection presenting some 50 masterpieces with the opening work being, by the way, one of Vera Molnár’s paraphrases of Montagne Sainte-Victoire.

During the past decade you have curated three large exhibitions, Monet in 2003-2004, Van Gogh in 2006-2007 and now Cézanne. What was the museum’s intellectual base which you could build on for this series?

With regard to Monet and Friends, it was clearly the exhibition Zeichnen ist Sehen curated by Josef Helfenstein and myself in Bern in 1995, as well as processing Majovszky’s collection of graphic art which lasted eight years. A significant part of the latter presents the 19th-century history of landscape primarily through French works. In the case of the Van Gogh exhibition, it was the span indicated by the Fine Arts Museum’s three Van Gogh’s drawings. These works are from three different periods of the artist’s life and the main aim in selecting each was to connect them to different types of pictures in the museum’s already existing collection of Dutch and Flemish old masters and to the tradition of their collection. Thus a genre painting and two landscapes were included. One of the most interesting ‘stories’ of the present Cézanne exhibition will no doubt be the following. In the mid 1880s Cézanne came across a reproduction of a work by Adriaen van Ostade in Le Magasin Pittoresque, the most important art journal of the time. He generally adored reproductions – which I refer to only as ‘stupefied works’ – and there is a painting by Ostade that Ostade himself made an etching of, and there is a reproduction made of this Ostade etching. Cézanne could not have known the painting because of its location, since it was held in the Pálffy collection in Budapest. He can’t have known very much about the etching, at least none of the great Cézanne researchers have referred to the fact that the etching itself could have been owned by Cézanne. However, it is known that in 1912 Emil Bernard recorded that when he visited him in 1904 Cézanne led him into his bedroom and there took from the shelf a copy of Le Magasin Pittoresque which contained a reproduction of the etching made of the Ostade painting held in Budapest. He told Bernard that as a work of art it was the sum of all his wishes. That sentence expresses all that our exhibition is about, since in giving it the title Cézanne and the Past: Tradition and Creativity we don’t want to show that Cézanne simply copied. That’s not what his connection with the past is; rather he visited both real and ‘imaginary’ museums – in Aix-en-Provence, the Trocadero Museum, the Luxembourg Museum, the Louvre – in the pages of his own library and among his own chromolithographs, and he tried to assess the artistic problems. While he analysed them and transferred them to paper and canvas he was able to develop his own art.

If you recall the great Bathers or the late still lifes you can see that he was looking for forms or was shaping the large directions or the space in these compositions. He was concerned with the pictorial problems he had ‘learnt about’ from earlier masters. Or there is the work by the aforementioned Ostade. If you look at some of the portraits of pipe smokers you see that the modelling sequence he used, modelling with ochre, blue, black and white, is both a very interesting experiment with abstraction (he reduced the figures to certain geometrical shapes) and a very interesting compositional experiment – which perhaps happened to be inspired by Ostade’s work. Incidentally, about Bathers – the one in the Barnes Collection can never travel and the other in America would have cost an impossible fortune to bring over. A NATO plane would have been needed since it is so large. We did have discussions about the one in London, but on the one hand there has been the very important year of culture in the UK due to the Olympics and, on the other, when they last lent it for an American exhibition they said afterwards that they would not let it go anywhere for the following 10 years.

Where are the works coming from?

From at least forty places. Just to mention the most important: from the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, the Musée de l’Orangerie and the Petit Palais in Paris, the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, the Kunstmuseum and the Beyeler Collection in Basel, the Kunsthaus, Zurich, the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, the National Gallery and the British Museum, London, from Oxford and Cambridge, from the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, the Phillips Collection, Washington, the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, the Albertina, Vienna, the Metropolitan Museum and the Pierpont-Morgan Library, New York, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as several internationally renowned private collections in, for example, Basel, Zurich, Frankfurt, London and Chicago.

The title of the Van Gogh exhibition was Van Gogh in Budapest, so it was an exhibition with a concept designed specifically for the Museum of Fine Arts (and in addition was accompanied by a ‘side show’ about Van Gogh’s influence on Hungarian painters). To what extent is the current Cézanne exhibition unique?

An exhibition like Cézanne and the Past has never before been held anywhere. There were some exhibitions in the past few years which examined the relationship between modern and old masters. Of those Picasso and the Masters in the Grand Palais in Paris was the most famous (or notorious). Although it attracted 750,000 visitors between October 2008 and February 2009 not a single appreciative review was written about it by a major expert. The reason was that the curators approached the issue on an anecdotal basis. The most significant Cézanne scholar of our times, Professor Richard Shiff of Texas University in Austin, and Professor Theodore Reff of Columbia University fight against that mentality like lions. To put it crudely, they would exterminate this anecdotal, if you like poetic, motivic approach from art history research. From the USA to Tokyo, from Italy to Paris, you can find dozens of articles in the specialist literature which resound with the happy joy of a discovery in connection with say Degas, Seurat or Cézanne, proclaiming that a certain painting by Veronese has a figure exactly like one ‘copied’ by one of these artists in his works. However, with revolutionary and inventive artists such as Cézanne or Seurat this says nothing, just as it would not mean anything if you said that the famous English painter Bridget Riley, who learnt much from the painting of both Seurat and Cézanne, ‘studied’ these masters. (Incidentally, our museum will have a Bridget Riley exhibition next year.) It is not accidental that such prominent personalities in the literature of art history as Ernst Gombrich or the present director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, (who is going to open the Cézanne exhibition in Budapest) engaged in a dialogue with, for example, Riley, because artists always see things a bit differently – the most outstanding may also perhaps see better. They often discover things that in many cases remain hidden for art historians. If you look at studies by 19th-century theoreticians who were Cézanne’s contemporaries you can hardly even then find one or two who would have reacted, for example, to Michelangelo or Dutch and Flemish still life painters in the way that Cézanne did. So the exhibition shows how Cézanne processed the past, how he developed his own art. The relationship between Cézanne and the past is academically analysed in the catalogue by authors such as Richard Shiff, Klaus Herding, Mary Tompkins Lewis, Inken Freudenberg, Peter Kropmanns, Linda Whiteley and Caroline Elam.

So let’s talk about the catalogue and its authors.

When I was inviting authors to write for the catalogue I was thinking the following: due to the complexity of this exhibition with its 160 works of art it would be appropriate for the staff of nearly all the Fine Arts Museum’s departments to join in. On display will be old engravings, classic old drawings, old masters’ paintings and statues, and even a couple of plaster copies. Thus colleagues of the Collection of Graphic Art, the Collection of Old Sculptures and Collection of Art after 1800 worked together on the catalogue. Moreover, even a colleague from the Hungarian National Gallery contributed to the catalogue in connection with the historiographic literature. Eszter Seres is a superb expert in old masters’ prints, as is Zoltán Kárpáti in Renaissance drawings, Zsuzsa Gonda in 19th century etchings and drawings, and Miriam Szőcs in old statues. Apart from the introduction, the fifteen studies in the catalogue are divided into three large sections. Five studies present the relationship between Cézanne and the old masters in the first section, three recount the relationship between Cézanne and museums in the second, while the third section has contributions by two experts from Oxford, three Hungarians including Ferenc Gosztonyi and Péter Molnos, as well as a Swiss expert. They analyse how authors and critics have regarded Cézanne’s oeuvre in the past 140 years, namely during Cézanne’s lifetime and up to the 2000s, how they considered Cézanne’s relationship to the old masters and what works by Cézanne reached Hungarian collections. These fifteen studies together represent the current standing of Cézanne research. However, researching these issues does not end with the publication of the catalogue, since after the exhibition opens a great number of experts will come to Hungary over the following three and a half months and we can talk about everything that can be seen at the exhibition.

What do you think the public will like best in the exhibition?

His masterpieces. All Cézanne’s emblematic works. I can mention The Abduction coming from King’s College, Cambridge, which belonged to the famous economist Keynes, who is much talked about as his writings are constantly referred to because of the economic crisis. Or The Robbers and the Donkey from Milan’s Gallerie d’Arte Moderna; the famous Leda and the Swan; the painting Afternoon in Naples from Canberra, the composition Breakfast Outdoors which will be displayed in the same cabinet as Manet’s watercolour Breakfast in the Open Air. The latter was made after the famous painting because Manet wanted to make a lithograph and for that he created a large watercolour of the painting. Cézanne copied Titian’s Breakfast Outdoors and this picture is included in the section with the engraving Raimondi made of Raphael’s Le Concert Champétre. Then there will be several portraits which depict the Cézanne family – his son, two portraits of Madame Cézanne and also a self-portrait. And of course, the aforementioned Ostade reproduction will also be exhibited, as will copies of the Louvre’s famous sculptures; Houdon, Bernini, Desjardins and so on. But I think that if only Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego and the two related drawings were exhibited in Budapest that in itself would represent an art historical sensation which visitors can rarely encounter. The Ionic Hall and the adjoining part will host the early, problem-seeking works through which Cézanne arrived at his great symphonies. In continuation, Watteau’s L’indifférent and a Harlequin from Chicago reflect on one another and are followed by a magnificent Chardin painting, which is coming from a Genoese private collection. The still life section of nine works is built around it. The two most beautiful of The Card Players will be loaned from New York and the Musée d’Orsay, and will be paired with a Daumier watercolour from a Frankfurt private collection and card players painted by Mathieau Le Nain from Aix-en-Provence. The compositional experiments and those related to the use of space connected with the Poussin engravings, which Cézanne kept returning to for decades, can be seen in the landscape section. This section will focus on two paintings: Montagne Sainte-Victoire from the Courtauld Institute of Art and Gardanne from the Brooklyn Museum. Naturally, not just one Montagne Sainte-Victoire is to be displayed but four in total: one from Wuppertal, another from Edinburgh and, immediately opposite the entrance to the exhibition, another from Washington’s Phillips Collection. On the same first panel there will be a landscape hanging by Poussin loaned from Liverpool, which Cézanne studied, and a Braque work of 1909. This is the tiny, fine signal by which we raise our hats to the ‘pair’ of our exhibition which was held in Philadelphia’s Museum of Modern Art in 2009 under the title Cézanne and Beyond. That demonstrated Cézanne’s influence on artists of later periods (presenting works of artists such as Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti, Giorgio Morandi, Pablo Picasso, Arshile Gorky and Jasper Johns). Our exhibition examines what lessons Cézanne learnt from studying, analysing and examining masters who preceded him. To return to the arrangement of the exhibition, the landscape section is followed by a unit presenting the late portraits, and they are followed by studies preceding Bathers. This was the period when Cézanne studied Michelangelo, Luca Signorelli and antique statues with a view to transferring to his oeuvre their motifs, the body postures of certain figures or the lessons he drew from the composition of the original work. Here I must also say, precisely in connection with Bathers, that Cézanne’s oeuvre shows two main lines of interest: one is studying the old masterpieces of an architectural character and the other is studying masterpieces based on the play of light and shadow. So Cézanne views Poussin and a sculptor called Puget for different reasons. But then the two things, Poussin’s spatial layers and Puget’s ideas about light and shadow, add up in his works. If you look at a large Bathers, everything that Cézanne learnt about space perception from the old masters appears, as does what he contemplated in connection with the composition. The figures of a Bathers can often be put together like a puzzle from figures he transferred from other works; such drawings were actually made for Basel’s Bathers catalogue. The starting points for the transfers may be copies of engravings, of drawings, figures taken from statues or paintings. Cézanne puts them together but he never slavishly copies them. At this exhibition – I suppose artists will love it for this – you are shown what a copy is, what interpretation or imitation means, or what independent invention involves.

You hardly need to be a great fortune teller to foresee that this exhibition will undoubtedly draw many people (as with the Van Gogh, which attracted 483,000 visitors). For you as an art historian, curator and a museum expert, when you organize such an exhibition what is more important: to add something to scholarship that no one has done before or provide a unique experience for the many hundred thousand people who will come and see the exhibition?

That is definitely not what you have in mind. One thing I would have always wanted – if an exhibition is held, it should be seen by visitors. In an academic sense it is worth being precise and if possible innovative, because it can all be significant in the event that the matter becomes a public treasure and enters people’s soul. Of course, we can talk about shaping and developing visual culture, but it is not only about that. It’s about the fact that when people see such an exhibition they will think in more sensitive ways.

To what extent do you think these exhibitions – the Monet, Van Gogh and now the Cézanne – teach people to ‘go to museums’? Will visitors who saw the Monet and the Van Gogh view the Cézanne exhibition differently?

And the new 20th century permanent exhibition – after all, that’s what it’s all about. Yes, I also think that. And let’s add that we not only crown the past almost ten years with the Cézanne exhibition but with a whole series of events. The 19th-century permanent exhibition of the Fine Arts Museum has been rearranged, the 20th-century permanent exhibition is going to open, a cabinet exhibition presenting Rodin’s sculptures and the related correspondence, a monographic show of Günther Uecker is opening – so that we have a cutting-edge contemporary exhibition at the same time – and the Department of Graphic Art is also opening a superb exhibition of Daumier’s lithographs, which in addition is extremely important from the aspect of the Cézanne exhibition.