Mark Stevens is the art critic for "New York" magazine, the author who infamously perpetrated that monument to hatred, disrespect and nonsense writing in form of an op-ed piece in The New York Times called “Form Follows Fascism”. In that text, Mr. Stevens trashed, with Fascist violence and irrationality, Philip Johnson´s seventy years career of architecture and arts for having embraced the Nazi aesthetics in his thirties. That piece automatically set a new low, despicable record for opinionated, absurd writing with no purpose in life except gratuitous harming to a dead public person (brave you are, Mr. Stevens!) and a very low, open-for-all level for the Times to publish any pulp and bloody bowels arrived in an envelope to the office. Want to kill the Pope with words? Need to denigrate an ex-boyfriend? Have personal issues, something burning inside your tormented soul? Call the Times, insult the dead! No reason, pure cussing! Feel better, or worse!
Reviewing the “Cézanne and Pissarro” blockbuster at MoMA for the July 18 issue of “New York” magazine, in a piece called “Waking the Dead” (what is with him and the dead??), Mark Stevens gets seriously confused:
““What makes Cézanne the modern touchstone?” The answer is elusive—visual rather than verbal. When you stand before two juxtaposed paintings, however, you’ll see what I mean, even if you can’t explain it. I can’t imagine a better introduction to what makes the modern modern.”
Well, certainly you can’t, Mr. Critic. For Cézanne IS the father of Modern Art. But you have said nothing. Just "go and see what I mean". An art critic lazy word to not explaining the pictures.
Picasso himself, never open to talk about his art or methods or influences, told his friend Brassai: “As if I don't know Cézanne! He was my one and only master. Don't you think I've looked at his paintings? I spent years studying them, Cézanne. He was like the father of us all. He was the one who protected us.”
In a famous letter to Emile Bernard, 1904, Cézanne exhorts his pupil and correspondent to “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone”. Is a stronger summoning for Cubism to come conceivable? And to Russian Suprematism, and Mondrian, and Geometric Abstraction, even the Minimalist movements of the Sixties!. Revolutionary Cézanne opens the Twentieth Century; his innovations remain alive and look alive today. His enseignements must be followed by any serious painter.
(Father of Matisse, too, who called Cézanne, “the master for all of us”.)
So, why has it Mark Stevens so difficult to explain the essence of "le peintre des peintres"? This wordly impotence (actual or deceiving) comes from the author of a highly-praised biography of Willem De Kooning, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Is the myth of De Kooning easier to write about than Cézanne´s illuminating but obscure paintings? Or does he in his book say the sort of “De Kooning paintings are, like, you know, painted, with colors, pretty, or not” explanation he gives in his Cézanne-Pissarro review?
What makes Cézanne modern?
The furthest a major art critic like Mark Stevens can get is:
“His (Pissarro´s) landscapes are prettier than Cézanne´s and describe the countryside more exactly. You might think, I wish I could walk down that lovely country lane, or wonder who lives in the handsome stone cottage.”
Lovely! Pretty! Sappy Crappy! Enter the realm of Thomas Kinkade, Inc.! Is Mr. Stevens writing an introduction to Impressionism for toddlers? Is he treating the readers of “New York” like toddlers?
Being at MoMA, pairing a Cézanne and Pissarro with your eyes, you really can´t see and write how Cézanne deconstructs the landscape and reconstructs it in volumes and facets, turning houses and trees into cubes and squares and flat surfaces, sketching but solidifying the picture, creating abstraction whilst Pissarro is painting pretty, tidy Impressionist landscapes that a Norman Rockwell-loving Midwestern grandma would happily approve?
Cézanne made of painting a painful matter of life and death, a quest for profound meanings. Totally devoted-obsessed, his eternal quest never saw an end. He almost never signed a work, for they were all temporary stations in a continuous, existential search. The High Priest of Painting was probably aware of his eminent mission: ”Je vous dois la vérité en peinture et je vous la dirai”.
Honestly, Mr. Stevens, if explaining all this goes beyond your capacity or willingness, I think you should step down, go back to college, learn some basic art history and writing and hand me your position.
For I learned how to narrate the difference between Pissarro and Cézanne beyond prettiness and lovely cottages at the age of twenty. And I have no Pulitzer for that.
