Exhibition Notes

FROM TURNER TO CEZANNE (The Albuquerque Museum)

The paintings displayed were selected from the collection amassed by sisters Margaret and Gwendoline Davies, now the property of the National Museum of Wales, which organized the exhibition in concert with the American Federation of Arts.

Romanticism tinges the earlier works, while stylistic formalism creeps in after Cezanne. Painterliness becomes a theme. Vlamink copies Cezanne’s brushstrokes without regard to his capture of nature’s essence. Van Gogh, before that, turns painterly brushstrokes into hieroglyphics.

Joseph Mallord William Turner: Only the watercolors make you see how delicate and precise a draftsman Turner was. Living in big-sky country, I appreciate more than ever the huge, turbulent skies of Turner . In his watercolors, he uses blotting and scratching-out to help attain his effects.

Daumier was a decent painter as well as a master illustrator. I observed beautiful, consciously formed negative spaces in one of his paintings. Millet was even better. In a storm scene, a tree is at the point of being uprooted. Water gurgles in the foreground. Everything is bent by the wind.
Manet snow scene: The roof of the church is missing, not because it isn’t there, but because, it being covered with snow, he does nothing to distinguish it from the white scene behind. It is startling even today for the looseness and minimalism of the rendering. Monet’s painting of Charing Cross Bridge at morning—one of many he did--evoked the sounds, the grind of wheels, the bells, the smells, the cries of London as the sun is rising through a reddish haze. Berthe Morisot spins a fine web of light as a woman and child sit among tall grasses.

A Cezanne from the 1870s was hard even to glance at, whereas I went, “Wow!” on seeing his Provencal Landscape from 10 years later. It hit me in the gut. There was no symbolism of nature, no leaves, no bark, no grass. It was a parallel universe, a gestalt of nature, made entirely out of paint; its placement and optical qualities.

If there is one image I take away from the rest of the museum’s permanent collection (a very impressive one, by the way), it is the Model T Speedster of 1912 in the museum’s history section. It is red. It is modern. Crank-started, a free-standing circle of glass for a windscreen, it is an example of form which follows function.