Edited with text by Jodi Hauptman, Samantha Friedman. Text by Kiko Aebi, Annemarie Iker, Laura Neufeld.
Cézanne at his most modern: a major career-spanning appraisal of his extraordinarily experimental drawings
Winner of a PROSE Award | Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2022
A New York Magazine 2021 holiday gift guide pick
Although he is most often celebrated as a painter, Paul Cézanne’s extraordinary vision was fueled by his experiments on paper. In pencil and watercolor, on individual sheets and across the pages of sketchbooks, the artist described form through multiple probing lines; realized compositions through repetitions and transformations; and conjured kaleidoscopic color through layering of watercolor. It is in these material realities of drawing where we see Cézanne at his most modern: embracing the unfinished, making process visible and actively inviting the viewer to participate in the act of perception.
Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, this is the most significant effort to date to unite drawings from across Cézanne’s entire career, tracing the development of his practice on paper, exploring working methods that transcend subject, and devoting both curatorial and conservation-based research to these remarkable works.
Featured image is reproduced from ‘Cézanne: The Drawings'.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
New Yorker
Andrea K. Scott
Revelatory, underappreciated still-lifes, landscapes, and figure studies.
New York Review of Books
Jed Perl
Mindblower of a show… Cezanne’s work has the force of a call to arms.
New York Magazine: Vulture
Jerry Saltz
Cézanne’s objects and spaces are filaments; they shift and oscillate. Nothing is solid or stays in place. They are made of pirouettes of squiggles, squalls of color, lines always in motion. Everything is always wobbling. Almost all of his horizon lines make no sense at all and are broken. You are seeing some mitochondrial thread that moves in swells and subtle cadences of energy. This imparts a pictorial amplitude and visual grandeur to whatever he’s drawing. Cézanne said, “Paint it as it is.” Cezanne rendered this it as is as it ever was.
New Yorker
Peter Schjeldahl
Cezanne revolutionized visual art, changing a practice of rendering illusions to one of aggregating marks that cohere in the mind rather than the eye of the viewer...Cezanne drew nearly every day, rehearsing the timeless purpose—and the impossibility—of pictorial art: to reduce three dimensions to two.
Artforum
Paul Galvez
This subversion of expectations turns what could have been a staid, Old Masterish presentation of the work of an all-too-well-known canonical artist into something suspenseful and dramatic.
Brooklyn Rail
David Rhodes
Cézanne brings his radical and extreme engagement with the practice of painting to his work on paper, endowing what is ostensibly conventional subject matter—landscapes, portraits, interiors, and still lifes—with an unpredictable charge.
The Burlington Magazine
Susan Sidlauskas
The essays are instructive and wide ranging and the works are beautifully reproduced on matte paper that does justice to the subtle tonalities of the drawings and watercolours.
Art Journal
David Hockney
I have just received the very beautiful catalogue from MoMA on Cézanne’s drawings. It’s an excellent book I can recommend to anybody.
New York Times
Jason Farago
Distills modernism’s father figure to his essence, revealing the day-by-day, stroke-by-stroke scrutiny needed to make a piece of fruit as weighty as the Holy Family.
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FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 10.5 in. / 184 pgs / 254 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $75 ISBN: 9781633451261 PUBLISHER: The Museum of Modern Art, New York AVAILABLE: 7/13/2021 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited with text by Jodi Hauptman, Samantha Friedman. Text by Kiko Aebi, Annemarie Iker, Laura Neufeld.
Cézanne at his most modern: a major career-spanning appraisal of his extraordinarily experimental drawings
Winner of a PROSE Award | Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2022
A New York Magazine 2021 holiday gift guide pick
Although he is most often celebrated as a painter, Paul Cézanne’s extraordinary vision was fueled by his experiments on paper. In pencil and watercolor, on individual sheets and across the pages of sketchbooks, the artist described form through multiple probing lines; realized compositions through repetitions and transformations; and conjured kaleidoscopic color through layering of watercolor. It is in these material realities of drawing where we see Cézanne at his most modern: embracing the unfinished, making process visible and actively inviting the viewer to participate in the act of perception.
Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, this is the most significant effort to date to unite drawings from across Cézanne’s entire career, tracing the development of his practice on paper, exploring working methods that transcend subject, and devoting both curatorial and conservation-based research to these remarkable works.
