Why modernist artists owe an immeasurable debt to Cezanne

This latest exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, named for Cezanne and Giacometti, highlights the unbreakable bond between art and history.

Pablo Picasso, Large reclining nude (Grand nu couché),1942.

Art history is not a discipline separate from history in the broader sense, let alone a genteel pastime disconnected from the great themes of social development. In fact, if the greatest theme in the story of humanity is the character of different cultures and civilisations, the history of art, literature and music – as Jacob Burckhardt was one of the first to understand in the 19th century – offers perspectives at least as profound as those we gain from the study of military, economic and diplomatic history.

But the art historian must always be mindful of the political and economic circumstances in which any form of artistic expression arises.

The Renaissance arose from the dynamic and competitive spirit of the medieval Italian city states, just as the culture of classical Greece arose from the polis-culture of the archaic period. Baroque art is inseparable from the Counter-Reformation and the emergence of the modern state in the guise of absolute monarchy.

More recently, the most remarkable expressions of modernism appeared in a flurry of energy but also of increasing anxiety in the decade before World War I. Fauvism, Expressionism, Abstraction, Cubism and several minor movements all seem in hindsight like premonitory cultural tremors anticipating the catastrophe of the war and the crisis of modern civilisation that it represented. The war itself led to the nihilistic Dada movement and Surrealism and the new Realism arose in its aftermath. The febrile gaiety of the ’20s was followed by the increasingly grim ’30s, with the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarianism across Europe, culminating in the new disaster of World War II.

The Berggruen collection at the National Gallery of Australia reminds us of these historical events at several levels. The story of the collection itself, and how it came to be part of the Berlin State Museums, is inseparable from the political tragedy of Germany in the mid-20th century. Its founder, Heinz Berggruen (1914-2007), was born into a Jewish family in Berlin at the start of World War I and grew up happily there, completing school and then undergraduate studies at university, until the rise of Nazism. He pursued his studies in France from 1933 and left Germany for the United States in 1936.

Paul Cézanne, Portrait of Madame Cézanne, c 1885.

Alberto Giacometti, Tall nude standing III (Grande femme debout III), 1960 (cast 1981.

In later years Berggruen became a successful art dealer in Paris and amassed a large collection of modern art. In the mid-’90s, a large part of this collection was exhibited in Berlin, and by 2000, the German government decided to acquire it for the state; Berggruen agreed to sell the pictures for about 25 per cent of their market value, because, as he says in a short video shown at the beginning of the exhibition, he considered this as an act of reconciliation, and as marking his own return to the city of his birth, symbolically ending a long period of exile.

The works in the exhibition belong to specific historical periods too. The earliest are by Paul Cézanne, and are from the least historically active period of the whole exhibition – the mid-1880s, in the Third Republic, a decade before the Dreyfus Affair and the eruption of anti-Semitism in France which foreshadowed much worse to come in Germany in the following century. There are a couple of very fine portrait sketches from this period, but the masterpiece – in fact the most memorable picture in the exhibition – is his portrait of Hortense (c. 1885), then his mistress but about to become his wife in the following year in order to legitimise their son Paul.

All of Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense have a certain ambiguous and even inscrutable quality, but this one is remarkable for a kind of serene stillness that recalls the abstract simplicity of Piero della Francesca’s heads; the difference is that Piero’s figures always seem at once impassive, inwardly focused and yet intent on some transcendent purpose, while it is quite a different and purely personal sensibility that we glimpse in Hortense’s ­features.

The Cézanne works are supplemented by some prints from the NGA collection, in order to make sense of the Australian pictures that have been added as illustrations of his enormous influence on modernists in this country.

A very early work by Drysdale is superficially related to Cézanne’s example, but only via the rather formulaic teaching of George Bell’s school in Melbourne. John Passmore’s style is visibly based on a direct study of the master, but it has none of the decisive strength evident even in Cézanne’s awkward early period – he was in a sense the ugly duckling of the Impressionist movement – or ultimately any deep understanding of what was at stake in his implicit critique of the classical tradition of modern painting.

There is a substantial group of Cubist pictures, in which as usual those of Picasso stand out as clearer in intention and thinking than those of Braque.

The best of these is Still life on a piano (1911-12), parts of which are among the most interesting and absorbing passages of painting in the exhibition. Here we see Picasso bringing a laser-like concentration to the study of space, volume, edges and voids, in what is in effect a kind of deconstruction of the whole rational model of space represented by the early modern system of perspective.

Paul Klee, Black magician (Schwarzmagier), 1920.

It is in fact impossible to understand Cubism or the remarkable paintings made by Picasso in the space of just a few years before World War I, without having deeply pondered the origins of modern spatial representation in the work of Giotto and then of the great masters of the early renaissance in Florence, Masaccio, Brunelleschi and Alberti. Giotto and Picasso represent, in effect, the two ends of an arc that is fundamental to the understanding of the modern period itself, well beyond the sphere of painting.

Few people understood these deeper implications of Cubism, even in France where it soon turned into an academic style in the 1920s, and even less in the English-speaking world, which had been so deeply severed from connection with the continental mainstream of modern art by the iconoclasm of the Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Hence the Australian pictures that have been added to the exhibition are generally weak, whether by Dorrit Black, imitating the formulas of André Lhote and Albert Gleizes, or by Roy de Maistre, a painter of some talent but whose works show no evidence of understanding what was really at stake in Cubism.

Picasso himself was endlessly inventive, and other aspects of his remarkable talent are also illustrated by works from his pink and blue periods, and the fine neoclassical pencil drawing Two Bathers (1921), but he was also careless and painted too much, and the exhibition suffers from having too many female heads that repeat the same stylistic mannerisms in the treatment of eyes and nostrils.

A final striking picture by Picasso is a large reclining nude, painted in monochrome during the Nazi occupation of Paris. The format consciously recalls the lineage of Giorgione, Titian, Goya and more recently Manet, but all sensual pleasure has been banished from a painting that evokes dislocation, tension and suffering.

Paul Klee is represented by the largest number of pictures in the exhibition, although they are all very small. Klee’s work is always varied, formally imaginative and, as it is often characterised, whimsical, but it is also ultimately rather introverted. This tendency, if anything, seems to have been exacerbated by his period at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, which encouraged abstract and formalist design. His work is also seemingly disconnected from the social and political world in which he was living, like a kind of personal spiritual practice or even game, but perhaps this very aspect of his painting illustrates the diminishing power of art to engage with history by the second quarter of the 20th century.

Pablo Picasso, Two bathers (Deux baigneurs),1921.

The exhibition culminates with the work of Giacometti, and indeed with the largest sculpture he ever made, although he had plans to reproduce it in an even bigger version. Like all modern artists, Giacometti was acutely aware of his historical predecessors, and one of his most famous works is the figure of a walking man, inspired by Rodin’s famous headless Walking man (1907), recalled here by another similar piece from the collection of the NGA.

But Giacometti’s historical sources extended much further back in time. He was particularly influenced by the archaic Greek sculpture of the 7th and 6th centuries BC, which during the early modern period had been considered merely as a primitive forerunner of the classical figure. By the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, these archaic figures were being rediscovered and appreciated anew, both because they were models of direct carving in stone, which had reappeared as a modernist theme, and because their stylised and simplified forms appealed to an age that was seeking to renew the arts of painting and sculpture from older sources than the traditions that had been monopolised and turned into routines by the 19th century art schools.

In 1908, Rilke published his famous sonnet on an archaic torso in the Louvre collection and there is a subsequent photo of Matisse drawing the same statue. The aesthetic rediscovery of these sculptures coincided with a renewed scholarly interest, and the Kouros and Kore statues began to be researched and published; the Metropolitan Museum acquired its famous kouros in 1932 and Gisela Richter’s fundamental study of the Kouros statues appeared in 1942.

Pablo Picasso, Still life on a piano (Nature morte sur un piano), 1911- 1912.

Giacometti’s standing figures are immediately recognisable as new incarnations of the archaic form, with their feet together yet one a little in front of the other, and their hands closed into fists and hanging tightly by their sides. And yet there are important differences, for unlike his walking man, the standing figures are women; and yet he follows the model of the archaic male figure, not the female, which was always clothed and was usually holding a flower rather than having both arms by its side.

Giacometti’s monumental nude is thus a direct descendant of the archaic Greek form, and yet at the same time an original creation, both in the respects already mentioned and, of course, most conspicuously in its enormously elongated and emaciated form. He began to make work in this style in the years just after the end of World War II, and there is little doubt that the aesthetic form is closely connected with the historical period and the unimaginable sufferings that Europe and the world had once again witnessed, so soon after the horrors of World War I. It would be simplistic, however, to relate the emaciation of the figures too literally to images of concentration and extermination camps; no doubt these images evoked a horrifying inhumanity, and yet Giacometti also finds in the simplicity of the standing archaic form a symbol of strength and human endurance.

Cézanne to Giacometti

National Gallery of Australia

Until September 21