Word: picassos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ironies of art history that Paul Cézanne used to warn young painters, "Beware of the influential master." Could there have been a more influential master than he? "The master of us all" is what Henri Matisse once called him, by which he surely meant himself, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian and any of the other pioneers of modernism. Fernand Léger once told an interviewer about his "battle to quit Cézanne," as though he were a narcotic. "Then one bright day," Léger insisted, "I said, 'Zut!'" (See pictures of Cezanne...
...builds them up, dissolving them into a force field of shimmering hatch marks. Look at his 1877 portrait of his wife Hortense. Cézanne conferred on her a monumental stability that's constructed somehow out of a field of pulsing strokes. More than a half-century later, Picasso painted his young mistress Marie-Thérèse in The Dream with the same weighty decorum, hands in lap just like Madame Cézanne. With her lavender flesh and gentle contours, Marie-Thérèse is a more yielding figure. But Picasso also lends a pulsating charge to her image--the pulse...
Almost everybody learned from Cézanne. Braque pored over the great still lifes--all those apples and bunched tablecloths--and took from them ideas about distorted forms and tilted planes that he and Picasso would carry into the profound thickets of Cubism. The serene heft of Cézanne's many views of Mont Sainte-Victoire inform the muscular Maine landscapes of the American painter Marsden Hartley. The enduring reach of Cézanne can even be felt in Ellsworth Kelly's Lake II, a color-field wall panel from 2002 that distills and abstracts the visual experience of water, just...
...auction market, of course, has its own unique calculation, driven as it's said by the incalculable "price of two people's desires." Surprisingly, the only disappointment on Monday was that a late Cubist work by Picasso - Musical Instruments on a Table, which had the highest presale estimate, of some $30 million - went unsold. The Saint Laurent-Bergé auction continues on Tuesday and Wednesday with the sale of rare furniture and antiquities, including two Chinese animal heads that Beijing says were pilfered and must be returned to China. Earlier on Monday, a Paris court rejected China...
...that somehow achieves a visual harmony. An imposing Fernand Léger dominates the far wall with a Matisse nude tucked away nearby; on the other side of the broad rectangular room, where Renaissance objects of bronze and silver intermingle with sumptuous art-deco furniture, an elaborate cubist Picasso masterpiece - Instruments de musique sur un guéridon, 1914 - hangs above a Cézanne watercolor of a French landscape, which hangs over a sleek, black bookcase hosting a perfect little female portrait by the 19th-century master Ingres...