Visual Art
Cézanne to Giacometti at the NGA, which pairs renowned pieces from the Museum Berggruen in Berlin with similarly inspired Australian works, complicates the linear logic of Western art history. By Neha Kale.
Cézanne to Giacometti at the NGA
The scene is so vivid. I feel as if I’ve crossed an imaginary threshold, accidentally encroached on a world of sensual pleasure. I have left behind politeness and entered another realm.
In the small painting in front of me, two lovers lie on a tangle of white sheets. Beside them, through an open window, is a lozenge of blue sky. There is a feeling that these figures, flesh rendered in a patchwork of creams and browns, have all the freedom in the world to laze, post-coitus, in bed, to be waited on by the servant, who enters the composition, holding up a drape, proffering a pot of tea, his hours restricted, curtailed, even as theirs expand.
I can’t stop looking at Afternoon in Naples, an 1875 painting by Cézanne, in the first room of Cézanne to Giacometti: highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie, on show now at the National Gallery of Australia. Yet when I try to locate the source of its strange magnetism, it seems to have almost nothing to do with the precision of its brushstrokes, or with technique. Instead, in the painting, Cézanne captures the way an experience of a moment can stretch or contract, how we can encounter it differently depending on where we’re standing.
The Black servant, who may have been part of the Mediterranean slave trade, the traces of which persisted in Naples at the end of the 19th century, occupies a different temporal register to the lovers. The past always hinges on our perspective. Time and perception are intertwined.
Cézanne to Giacometti brings together more than 80 works from the Museum Berggruen in Berlin – one of the world’s most significant modern art collections. It pairs these with works by Australian artists shaped by aesthetic innovations in Europe during the course of the 20th century. It traces what it calls a “genealogy of influence”, a constellation of connection, exchange and resonance.
Spending time with this exhibition, I marvel at how the works feel electric, like they have something to show us, not just about the turbulent history they responded to but also about our current moment, riven as it is with traumas of the past. It is a moment undone by its own narratives of progress and upheld by art history, forged in the centres of power, obsessed with great male visionaries who supplant each other.
The exhibition begins with Cézanne, a touchstone for the artists in it, credited with challenging linear perspective, which relies on a vanishing point to create the illusion of depth and was central to art since the Renaissance. This question – how to represent space –has long flourished in different contexts outside the West but was revelatory in Europe.
Cézanne was under-appreciated in his lifetime, widely rejected from the Paris Salon. In front of his paintings, I’m struck less by their confidence than by their sense of searching. In Young woman with her hair unfastened (1873-1874), the young bookbinder Marie-Hortense Fiquet, whom the artist would later marry, appears in miniature, her head tilted, wearing a dreamlike expression.
On a nearby wall she appears again in Portrait of Madame Cézanne (1885), her face a picture of stillness and concentration. Cézanne often required his subjects to sit more than a hundred times and the painting, to me, grapples with the problem of rendering a person, each brushstroke a failed attempt to capture the way our interiors are mysterious, ineffable. Patches towards the bottom of the canvas remain unfinished.
The painting’s mood, its sense of quiet duration, echoes across the room in The student (Nina Christesen) (1947) by Lina Bryans. The artist, part of a circle of Australian modernists, admired Cézanne’s works in the Exhibition of British and French Contemporary Art when it travelled to Melbourne in 1939.
In the work, Christesen, a Russian-born intellectual who was married to Meanjin founder Clem Christesen, is portrayed with her head bowed, absorbed by a book. Made from daubs of brown and cobalt blue built up on cardboard, applied with verve and intensity, the image conveys a sense of hours passing. It captures the way the inner world can eclipse the outer world, give it a new kind of form.
Moving through the show, I return often to the idea of perspective, what it allows and what it limits. The show opens with a timeline, mapping the historical markers of the 20th century – World War I, the moon landing, et cetera, alongside leaps in art history, such as the rise of the Bauhaus, the advent of cubism. The art I see refuses to belong in the past, however. It bristles with the contemporary, laden with tension. I stand in front of a wall of Picassos from the late 1930s, an era, like ours, marked by rising fascism.
In that decade, the Spanish artist, emboldened by Cézanne, would fragment his subjects. In Woman seated in an armchair (1939), Picasso’s lover Dora Maar appears face split, seen from two angles. World War II is about to dawn, and she clutches the armrest, crosses her legs, her limbs and head and chest disparate. Here, the same inventiveness – the ability to splinter pictorial space – makes the woman in the picture appear tense, brittle. It is as if she’s pinned to the canvas, only ever the sum of her elements.
Across the room, near Maar’s mesmerising photograph Portrait of Ubu (1936), which depicts an armadillo fetus, hangs the surrealist artist’s Portrait of Pablo Picasso (1938). Brown lines bisect his face. His eyes are a hard yellow, a cat-like glare that coolly appraises viewers. Maar’s relationship with Picasso was famously destructive but, rather than pass judgement, the show attempts to grant their voices equivalence. We laud breakthroughs, artistic and otherwise, but what about the bodies that are collateral damage? The show ends with Giacometti’s elongated figures, trembling in the darkened space. The question hangs in the air, as powerful as ever, then and now.
Picasso himself looped back on the past, embracing a neoclassical style in the early 1920s. In Cézanne to Giacometti, history recurs. Heinz Berggruen, the collection’s founder, was a young Jewish journalist who fled from the Nazis, seeking exile in America, before starting his gallery in Paris.
One of the show’s high points is a series of paintings by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. The artist studied at the Bauhaus under Paul Klee, where he learnt colour theory. He was deported to Australia in 1940 as an enemy alien and interned in Orange and Hay before teaching art at Geelong Grammar. In Internment Camp (1941), an intense watercolour, two figures watch stars in the night sky over the fence that contains them. The artist captures, like Cézanne, how time can contract or stretch to infinity depending on where you’re placed in history – and the power of art to imagine another fate.
Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie is showing at the National Gallery of Australia until September 21.
ARTS DIARY
MUSIC Festival of Voices
Venues throughout lutruwita/Tasmania, until July 6
CULTURE Yolŋu power: the art of Yirrkala
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until October 6
EXHIBITION Wonderstruck
Gallery of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, until October 6
CLASSICAL Indie Symphony II: Video Games in Concert
Hamer Hall, Naarm/Melbourne, July 3-4
EXHIBITION Mr Squiggle and Friends: The Creative World of Norman Hetherington
National Museum of Australia, Ngambri/Canberra, July 4–October 13
LAST CHANCE
DANCE The Standing Room
Studio Underground, State Theatre of Western Australia, Whadjuk Noongar Country/Perth, until June 28
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
