Cézanne and the Modern, Ashmolean

The Ashmolean, Oxford is giving the inaugural European outing of the important North American collection by Henry and Rose Pearlman. Cézanne is the centrepiece, taking up the whole of the first room. The works on display illustrate the remarkable tensions which energise Cézanne: two drawings of a scene from The Aeneid reveal uncertain draughtsmanship combined with an obsession with form. And a remarkable series of watercolours bring other opposites into view: solidity against space; the figurative verging on abstraction; the freedom of the eye and the controlling hand. The oil painting of Monte Ste-Victoire, with its characteristic choppy brustrokes, conveys an effortful gathering together of a myriad sense impressions. Cézanne dramatises the act of looking, the intellectual processing of sensory impressions. I was struck by 'Three Pears' (initially bought by Degas), a beautifully tender observation of the sensory qualities of fruit and plate, balanced by an intense formal sense of complementary forms and patterns.

For some reason the Pearlmans didn't acquire Picasso and Matisse; but it was rather refreshing to see early modernist works without the presence of these two Masters. There were works by Lipchitz, van Gogh, Soutine, Modigiliani, Degas, Sisley (a lovely account of a river scene , colours rippling across the pictorial plane) and a remarkable relief piece by Gauguin, 'Te Fare Amu'. The show as a whole brought across the sense of intense exploration and excitement in the early twentieth century, as new pictorial vocabularies were being forged. And it convinced in its assertion of the centrality and patriarchal status of Cézanne. The opening reference to Virgil and the striking watercolour of a skull, together with references to the minotaur and the primacy of canonical genres throughout (portrait, landscape, still life) all reminded the viewer of modernism's deep roots in, and engagment with, the classical meditearranean tradition.