National Gallery of Art, Washington DC: Cezanne and Dada exhibits

Lisa and I checked out two exhibits currently in temporary residence at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC include "Cezanne in Provence" and "Dada."

The Cezanne exhibit included many paintings on loan from various museums. Although Paul Cezanne was born in Provence in 1839, he moved to Paris where he learned to paint. Ultimately he returned to southern France for good in the 1880s, where his paintings captured the landscape, people, and objects that represented his life in Provence.

The Dada exhibit provided a sharp contrast to the sensually appealling nature of the Cezanne paintings. The coldness and impersonal nature of the exhibit (sound as well as visual) is apparently exactly what the founders of this "anti-Art" movement wished to convey with their work. Dada was a movement spawned in Europe in protest to the immorality of World War I, and ultimately gave rise to surrealism.

Although the Cezanne exhibit was dominated by his landscapes, my two favorite paintings were actually portraits (shown below). The first is of his father, a stern businessman who never really gave outward approval to his son's decision to become a painter. Perhaps it was this approval from the figure captured in the painting that Paul Cezanne desperately wished to have. The second portrait was of his gardener, apparently the last work he completed before his death in 1906. You can almost imagine this weary gardener is a representation of Cezanne himself, reflecting on a life well lived.

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