Joseph
, oil, late 1880s, was the most valuable work sold at the Armory Show, fetching
$6,700 (approximately $160,000 today) when it was acquired by the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. In keeping with this historical precedent, the value of
Cézanne’s paintings has endured; in 2011 a version of his
Card Player
, 1894-1895 (see lots
41 and 42), sold for $268 million dollars, becoming the most valuable painting ever sold.
Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence to a wealthy banking family and, like many other
artists from well-to-do families from this period, was expected to attend law school,
despite the artistic talent he exhibited from an early age. Encouraged by his childhood
friend and future writer Émile Zola, Cézanne abandoned law to study painting. Initially
influenced by Delacroix and Manet, he began to develop his Impressionist style by the
early 1860s while studying with his mentor and friend Camille Pissarro, whom Cézanne
felt was the true father of Impressionism. Cézanne’s works were included in the first
(1874) and third (1877) Impressionist exhibitions. Contemporaries like Pissarro and
Cassatt were early enthusiasts of Cézanne’s Impressionist paintings and would influence
dealers (like Vollard) and collectors (like the Havemeyers) to purchase his work (though
Cassatt developed a distaste for his later work). He had strong admiration for fellow
Impressionist painters, (he held Monet in high regard, saying he had, “the most
prodigious eye since painting began,”) but he was not satisfied with the tenets of
Impressionism and instead sought to unite color and form in his work, emphasizing
structure and solidity, and thereby shifting from Impressionism to Post Impressionism.
By the 1880s, he had evolved this approach, reducing his painting to simple forms, “the
cylinder, the sphere, and the cone,” positioned in perspective on a central point. During
this period, from the 1880s to the early 1900s, he produced works that would be pivotal
to Picasso and Braque as they developed Cubism.
Near the end of his career, Cézanne’s work profoundly influenced Matisse and the Fauves,
who would shock the art world with their first exhibition in 1905. The year after Cézanne’s
death, the Salon d’Automne in Paris mounted a memorial exhibition of his work. Artists
who would in turn develop Cubism, like Léger, Picasso and Braque, were extremely
moved by Cézanne’s use of color and planar forms. In 1908, with Cubism still in its infancy,
both Picasso and Matisse referred to Cézanne the artist as, “The father of us all.”
While the Cubists and Fauves glorified Cézanne, Armory Show critics decried Post
Impressionism (with Cézanne in the vanguard) as a “harbinger of universal anarchy.”
The Armory Show represented the first major American exhibition of the great Post
Impressionist triumvirate—Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. Many American critics had
heard of these artists but few had seen their works; those more familiar with the artists
felt they were not well represented qualitatively. Some critics were especially severe in
their treatment of Cézanne, characterizing him as a “misanthropic banker-recluse,”
claiming he was a, “sincere amateur,” who was “absolutely without talent and absolutely
cut off from tradition.”
Despite the criticism, Cézanne’s work fared well in the Armory Show, not only in terms
of sales but also his influence on American artists and collectors. Prominent collectors
Lillie P. Bliss, Louise Havermeyer and John Quinn successfully persuaded Metropolitan
Museum of Art curator Bryson Burroughs to purchase Cézanne’s
View of the Domaine
Saint Joseph
, oil, late 1880s, the first Cézanne to enter an American public collection.
There were 14 works altogether by Cézanne in the Armory Show, as well as lithographs
from Vollard, including numerous impressions of
Les Baigneurs
(lot 38), listed for sale
at $21 (around $500 today). Impressions of
Les Baigneurs
were purchased by all of the
major buyers in the Armory Show, including John Quinn, Lillie P. Bliss, Walter C.
Arensberg, Alfred Stieglitz and the show organizers Walt Kuhn and Arthur B. Davies.
