#SERIAL NUMBER SPENCER 1865 SERIAL NUMBER#52 caliber, serial number 32550 to rear of the frame near the hammer. Case Study: Carroll Cloar (Janu– April 10, 1993)īurnside Contract Model 1865 Spencer Repeating Carbine.Case Study: Anna Catherine Wiley (Knoxville, TN, 1879-1958).Case Study: Richard Jolley (Knoxville, TN).Case Study: Great Road Pottery of East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia.Items that are not a fit for Case auctions.The one we’re shown here, on loan from the National Gallery (circa 1894-1905), feels at once very classical and so modern you’re left wondering if Picasso, the boy wonder of the next generation, was left with much to add to the deconstruction of human form. He was still working on them at the time of his death, endlessly shifting the abstracted figures around the canvases like immense girders. What began as a youthful notion to create an imaginary composition using figures copied from other artists’ paintings and sculpture resulted in three monumental paintings. A lifetime wasn’t long enough for everything he had to say about clusters of apples on tabletops or, indeed, another of his great compulsive projects, The Bathers. Tate’s superb 2018 exhibition Picasso 1932 showed the Spanish painter, who was in many ways Cezanne’s great inheritor, relentlessly repeating images until he’d utterly exhausted them, and himself. It’s a concept that projects us forward to Picasso and even to Warhol. Seeing several of Cezanne’s apparently endless still lifes of apples, stone jars and bits of cloth, you start to appreciate how he was glimpsing the universal, through minute variations in the form and gravitational weight of these objects and their relationships to the surrounding space.Ĭezanne’s “research” gives rise to another of Modern Art’s great ideas: the “series” as an end in itself. In the second half of the show, we feel we’re coming much closer to Cezanne, as the focus narrows towards his “research”, as the exhibition calls it: his obsessive scrutiny of a few tightly defined subjects. Paradoxically, and entirely typically, his desire to “make out of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums”, led to the shattering of traditional notions of form and space. It’s as though the moment he got off the train in Aix, Cezanne was hit by an urgency to “treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone”, as he famously put it. His earlier northern landscapes, indeed the whole of mainstream Impressionism, look grey and woolly in comparison. The dam itself is barely visible, but angles and contours become harder and sharper in the blazing southern light, the spatial intervals between objects, such as the olive trees dotted over the parched earth, more precise. But in The Francois Zola Dam (1877-78) it’s as if an immense light has gone on – in the artist’s head as much as in his surroundings. Paintings done in and around Paris, such as Auvers, Panoramic View (1873-75) have a drab, rainy-day-in-the suburbs look redolent of Cezanne’s early mentor, the great Impressionist Camille Pissarro. But it’s hard to imagine it as the starting point for the blasting apart of everything art had stood for over the previous 500 years. Showing, well, a basket of apples, with some more apples spilt over a white cloth and an empty wine bottle, it’s a lovely painting. This eagerly awaited major survey opens with a trophy loan, The Basket of Apples, from the Art Institute of Chicago. To the casual viewer, though, it can be hard to see what singles Cezanne out from the many other major and minor Post-Impressionist painters crowding the café tables of late 19th-century Paris. His peerlessly incisive landscapes, still lifes and portraits offer us not only the roots of everything radical that has come since, from Cubism to conceptual art, but an uncompromising rigour that has set the gold standard for what the artist can and should be. Even today, artists of whatever stamp tend to doff their hats at the mere mention of Cezanne. Both Picasso and Matisse are said to have claimed him as “the father of us all”. This grumpy Provencal workaholic was dubbed “the greatest of us all” by no less a figure than Claude Monet. People either get Cezanne, or they don’t.
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