Peter Schjeldahl: Two Views

This show reminds us that the difficulty of Cézanne is the spiritual cornerstone of the Museum of Modern Art. In the early twentieth century, influential artists and intellectuals in Europe and America agreed to exalt Cézanne’s obstreperousness as the echt modern mind-set, thereby instituting a cultural oligarchy of experts which even now, though with mounting self-doubt, stands against popular tastes. You can’t say something bad about Cézanne in the discourses called “modernist” any more than you can gainsay Jesus with language from Christian liturgy. Such is the authority of Cézanne’s attitude that only palpable surrender to it may win another artist approbation. The humbling of Pissarro in this show is thus as foregone as that of Braque was in “Pioneering Cubism.” Braque, for all his extraordinary abilities, needed Cubism in order to enter the modern canon, as Pissarro needed Impressionism. Picasso, like Cézanne, needed only to show up. Writing in the exhibition catalogue, Joachim Pissarro doesn’t explicitly complain of a deck stacked by his employers against his ancestor, but he verges on it when he proposes to understand the dynamic of the show “as a spectacular chess game . . . rather than as the first step toward modernism.” This amounts to a plea, against ideological correctness, for values of old-fashioned connoisseurship, which are nugatory only for people who take no joy in using their eyes.