Paul Cézanne. Vollendet - Unvollendet

The great merit of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) consists in forms built up from patches of color. Mocked during his lifetime as a painter ‘with a broom and a toothbrush,’ today he is regarded as the artist who transcended Impressionism and as the forerunner of Cubism. Cézanne boldly captured natural phenomena in geometric elements such as cylinders, cones and spheres. Cézanne also left certain areas unpainted. According to the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, these ‘unfinished’ works were considered to be of inferior quality until the post-war period but had already been held in high esteem by Matisse and Picasso. In 2000, the Kunsthaus devoted a wide-ranging exhibition to the question of finishing the work in the case of Cézanne. When is a work intentionally, when accidentally unfinished? The exhibition explored this question through 141 oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings spanning four decades. The focus was on works from Cézanne's last twenty years; they feature blank spaces, whereas before them Cézanne generally completed all his works conventionally. On view were portraits (for example, ten portraits of his wife Marie-Hortense from a period of seventeen years), landscapes, still lifes, and figure compositions such as the famous ‘Bathers.’ Also included were three oil paintings and nine watercolors of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the limestone mountain range east of Aix that repeatedly fascinated Cézanne in the last years of his life. The juxtaposition of multiple versions of a motif allowed for comparative viewing and illustrated that a painting in Cézanne's work potentially always has multiple states and that painting is a process. The most expensive exhibition in the history of the Kunsthaus, with a budget of 2.7 million, was curated by Felix A. Baumann, who thus took his leave as director after a quarter of a century. Even if the subject matter has a somewhat didactic flavor from today's perspective, the project's success with the public proved it right: with almost 200,000 admissions, it was the best-attended exhibition after those of Klimt, Munch and Dalí.