Promised Gift of Julian and Josie Robertson.
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, 2011.
Text by Curator, Mary Kisler.
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No doubt a wonderful gift.
A few words only about the reception of it in the AAG’s booklet.
Nice to have quality colour reproductions – except maybe the colour-saturation in the Cézanne.
I doubt though whether one can expect such a collection of fifteen pictures to carry the weight of a coherent discourse, a history of art, in its pivotal defining moments from the 1870s to 1960. The effort towards that in the booklet is focussed on broad biographies of the artists. For the most part these are unexceptionable, though also unexceptional, taken, as they seem to be from standard accounts in the literature.
The notes are mainly citation of secondary sources for the quotes, not the original published sources, used in the text.
Cézanne – La route.
For instance, Cézanne’s reported and often misunderstood remark about wishing to "redo Poussin from nature" which has now become "re-do Poussin over again according to nature." The authenticity of the statement was questioned about 50 years ago by Theodore Reff (I don’t have the reference at hand). There is some general similarity perhaps between the trees in La Route and the trees in the Poussin Diogenes or the Arcadian Shepherds in the Louvre.
Pontoise is not a ‘coastal town’. That was where Camille Pissaro painted for many years. If Derain was also there, it was not at the same time as Cézanne, though that is the impression that one gets from the text. & the only ‘route’ in or near Pontoise [as distinct from ‘rue’] is the Route d’Auvers. There is an earlier painting of a similar scene by Cézanne (National Gallery of Art.,Washington) with only 2 much slighter trees. I guess Cézanne did what Poussin would have done, in the Robertson painting, taken them from some other place, or simply made them up. It might have been useful, since the ‘development’ of Cézanne’s style is in question, to note the different colouring and drawing of the earlier painting. But when it comes to critical precisions of style, Mary Kisler tends to use some variant of a phrase, like: ‘the way he has treated the buildings’, without actually saying what that way is.
As for the road: [ “there isn’t one to see” ], surely that is it, that dark area in front of the wall. 19th century paintings, and there are hundreds of them, by Pissaro & others, show the roads around Pontoise and Auvers as no more than large cart tracks – one lane highways.
I am not to sure that the ‘repoussoir’ is anything more than a frame for the middle and distant grounds. And I’m nervous in case it really ‘pushes your eye through the central space to the village'.
Pontoise is not a ‘coastal town’. That was where Camille Pissaro painted for many years. If Derain was also there, it was not at the same time as Cézanne, though that is the impression that one gets from the text.
Picasso – Mère aux enfants à l’orange.
Checking on the orange as symbol. Not, it appears, “a symbol of fertility”. In Christian symbolism it usually stands for purity, chastity & generosity. More to the point for Madonna paintings is the pomegranate, which, because of its abundance of seeds, is commonly a symbol of fertility and of the Resurrection and eternal life. It is reasonable to suspect that Picasso had, if not a specific, at least a generic, Madonna & child with the young Sty John in mind.
Braque – La Tasse
I have already noted that there is no apparent cup in the painting. The prominent white rectangle centre left , since it has a ‘handle’ and spout and open oval for the top, a coffee –pot. I should add that there appears to be a woman’s head with hat, upper right centre, and suggestions of a pyramidal figure. Next to this putative head there is something that could be feathers of a hat. In th left foreground, a repoussoir figure with one eye, a waiter? In the central area a table. Like many of the other figurative suggestions, this is seemingly transparent to alternative versions of itself and knobbly rounded edges. In this as in the other large Braque painting, there is little fragmentation of coherent objects, but plenty of effects in the little still-life of transparency.
Braque
It is strange to read in the bio-piece about Georges Braque that ‘Works particularly those of the early period defined as Analytical Cubism…. may incorporate found materials such as newspaper or sheet music’. Apart from there being no agreement, let alone definition, of ‘analytical Cubism’, the collage comes in only in 1912, & is not present in the ‘early period’. Also strange to read that Braque’s statement that he & Picasso were like mountaineers roped together, becomes in this text “a kind of artist’s duel". Duelling mountaineers, how ineffectual that would have been?
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