paul

Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers, 1898-1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art Cézanne worked on The Large Bathers , now owned by the Philadelphia Art Museum, during the last 8 years of his life.  He did about 200 paintings of bathers, and another one in the National Gallery of London is also called Large Bathers . Its French name, Les grandes baigneuses,  pays homages to the grandest of Cézanne's compositions of this subject, which may be his final statement of the theme as well.  To me it seems truest of an Arcadian dream, as witnessed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's recent exhibition . The composition was clearly important to Cézanne in the search to find his truth. Through making art, he explored, subjectively, that which is true and everlasting in nature and in human existence.  In his early paintings he used heavy brushwork, but as time went on he thinned the paint and applied it tentatively, as if his vision was changing. Planes of various colors overlap, but ou...

One of the first 'pastoral ' paintings(not in the exhibition) was The Pastoral Concert, 1509, by Titian and/or  Giorgione, originator of  the pastoral, where landscape is on par with figures. Shepherds and musicians are frequent in this theme. Good things always end, including summer and a chance to see how the greatest modern artists painted themes of leisure as Arcadian Visions: Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse , ends Labor Day. The exhibition highlights 3 large paintings:  Gauguin's frieze-like Where do We Come From?...,  1898, Cézanne's  Large Bathers , 1898-1905 and Matisse's  Bathers by a River , 1907-17. Each painting was crucial to the goals of the artists, and crucial to the transitioning from the art and life of the past into the 20th century. These  modernist visions actually are part of a much older theme descended from Greece and written about in Virgil's  Eclogues.  Nineteenth-century masters were very familiar with this tradition from...