Cézanne: Drawing - by Jodi Hauptman & Samantha Friedman (Hardcover)

About the Book

Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 6th June-25th September 2021.

Book Synopsis

Cézanne at his most modern: a major career-spanning appraisal of his extraordinarily experimental drawings

Winner of a PROSE Award Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2022

A New York Magazine 2021 holiday gift guide pick

Although he is most often celebrated as a painter, Paul Cézanne's extraordinary vision was fueled by his experiments on paper. In pencil and watercolor, on individual sheets and across the pages of sketchbooks, the artist described form through multiple probing lines; realized compositions through repetitions and transformations; and conjured kaleidoscopic color through layering of watercolor. It is in these material realities of drawing where we see Cézanne at his most modern: embracing the unfinished, making process visible and actively inviting the viewer to participate in the act of perception.

Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, this is the most significant effort to date to unite drawings from across Cézanne's entire career, tracing the development of his practice on paper, exploring working methods that transcend subject, and devoting both curatorial and conservation-based research to these remarkable works.

Review Quotes

Distills modernism's father figure to his essence, revealing the day-by-day, stroke-by-stroke scrutiny needed to make a piece of fruit as weighty as the Holy Family.--Jason Farago "New York Times"

Cézanne brings his radical and extreme engagement with the practice of painting to his work on paper, endowing what is ostensibly conventional subject matter--landscapes, portraits, interiors, and still lifes--with an unpredictable charge.--David Rhodes "Brooklyn Rail"

The essays are instructive and wide ranging and the works are beautifully reproduced on matte paper that does justice to the subtle tonalities of the drawings and watercolours.--Susan Sidlauskas "The Burlington Magazine"

This subversion of expectations turns what could have been a staid, Old Masterish presentation of the work of an all-too-well-known canonical artist into something suspenseful and dramatic.--Paul Galvez "Artforum"

I have just received the very beautiful catalogue from MoMA on Cézanne's drawings. It's an excellent book I can recommend to anybody.--David Hockney "Art Journal"

Cezanne revolutionized visual art, changing a practice of rendering illusions to one of aggregating marks that cohere in the mind rather than the eye of the viewer...Cezanne drew nearly every day, rehearsing the timeless purpose--and the impossibility--of pictorial art: to reduce three dimensions to two.--Peter Schjeldahl "New Yorker"

Cézanne's objects and spaces are filaments; they shift and oscillate. Nothing is solid or stays in place. They are made of pirouettes of squiggles, squalls of color, lines always in motion. Everything is always wobbling. Almost all of his horizon lines make no sense at all and are broken. You are seeing some mitochondrial thread that moves in swells and subtle cadences of energy. This imparts a pictorial amplitude and visual grandeur to whatever he's drawing. Cézanne said, "Paint it as it is." Cezanne rendered this it as is as it ever was.--Jerry Saltz "New York Magazine: Vulture"

Mindblower of a show... Cezanne's work has the force of a call to arms.--Jed Perl "New York Review of Books"

Revelatory, underappreciated still-lifes, landscapes, and figure studies.--Andrea K. Scott "New Yorker"