Museums have traditionally served as repositories for the past. But younger generations are avoiding the chance to slow-walk through history, so museums are exploring new ways to attract visitors.
Some are incorporating performance art like dance, concerts, or film series related in some way to their exhibitions. Others are offering a further stretch: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has hosted a “Museum Workout” in which participants could jog past Washington Crossing the Delaware, do jumping jacks in front of Madame X, or try some squats in the European sculpture court.
There is also a push for interactive spectacle. In a few days, the National Air and Space Museum will open an immersive spring show in which visitors can use a timed-entry ticket to wander around an installation depicting a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Renwick Gallery is currently hosting a “participatory” exhibition that showcases art from the Burning Man Festival, including one artist’s “virtual reality” enclosure.
So while the popular trend is for museums to dish up entertainment, it can still boggle to come face-to-face with great art that inspires—and this is what the National Gallery of Art’s new Cézanne Portraits exhibition is doing wonderfully.
As someone who spent a career organizing exhibitions, I was instantly struck by how well curated the show is. The first exhibition to study Paul Cézanne’s lifelong commitment to portraiture, it argues that “capturing likenesses [was] part of his constant search for a pictorial language.” Out of the nearly 1,000 works in Cézanne’s oeuvre, only about 160 were portraits—but they were always an integral part of his art. He was working on a portrait when he died.
The 60 portraits in this exhibition have been selected with a keen curatorial eye from private and public collections around the world. Arranged chronologically, they convey how Cézanne’s artistic voice evolved over time, ranging from early works when he used a palette knife and applied paint thickly, to later portraits when he lightened his paint to create a greater sense of luminosity. Cézanne was always searching for the new, and his portraits deftly reinforce the argument that he opened the door to 20th-century modernism—that he was the figure whom Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso both reportedly called “the father of us all.”
Cezanne’s ‘Boy in a Red Waistcoat’ (1888-1890) [National Gallery of Art]
How did this extraordinary exhibition happen? It was first suggested in 2007 by Sandy Nairne, then-director of the British National Portrait Gallery. Curious about why there had never been an exhibition of Cézanne’s portraits, Nairne persuaded John Elderfield, now chief curator emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art, to begin organizing such an exhibition. Over the next several years a collaboration was forged among the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The exhibition is hitting each of those locations; it first opened in Paris last year, then traveled to London, and is now in Washington.
Cezanne’s ‘Woman with a Cafetiere’ (ca. 1895) [RMN-Grand Palais (Musee d’Orsay) / Herve Lewandowski]
Mary Morton, the curator and head of the NGA’s department of French paintings, has written wall labels that are exceptional: Neither clipped nor ponderous, they impart exactly the information needed to explain a particular portrait. One excellent example is the text for a later Cézanne portrait, Woman with a Cafetière (pictured above): “The plain face, no-nonsense costume, and large, rough hands evocative of manual labor do nothing to diminish the stately presence of this unknown woman from Aix.” The label also explains how an emphasis on geometrical shapes in the cylindrical coffee cup and rectangular doors “is tempered by softer passages such as the wallpaper of cascading flowers.”
The overall exhibition design virtually embraces visitors. NGA chief of design and senior curator Mark Leithauser has drawn colors from Cézanne’s palette throughout the exhibition, and his team has lighted the portraits with subtle brilliance. The entire installation radiates with warmth and revelation.
The supreme level of curation and design has created an exhibition that resonates with wonder; the spectacle is in the works themselves.
Cézanne Portraits will be at the National Gallery of Art through July 1, 2018. It is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue edited by John Elderfield, Cézanne Portraits.
Amy Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery.
