Cezanne, Cezanne

Cezanne, Cezanne

In Elkins Park, an otherwise undistinguished suburb of Philadelphia, Millionaire Joseph Early Widener occupies a stiff Georgian mansion known as Lynnewood Hall. Leathery, spick & span Mr. Widener owns one of the crack racing stables of the world, has Godfathered two swank racetracks--Long Island's Belmont Park and Miami's Hialeah. Less familiar facts about Sportsman Widener are that his Lynnewood Hall contains the choicest private collection of Old Masters in the U. S., that he himself is a cultural servant of Philadelphia. In that capacity last week 64-year-old "Joe" Widener became the centre of one of the best comedies of art controversy in years.

For about 15 years Mr. Widener has been administrator of Philadelphia's Wil-stach Fund, income from which must be used to buy paintings for the city's Pennsylvania Museum of Art. With the seven-year accrual of $160,000 in his drawing account and his usual pearl-grey fedora on his head, Turfman Widener set out for Europe last year to scout for bargains. "I am not sympathetic with modern art," said Mr. Widener blandly. "What I think we should do is acquire the classics--those paintings which have lived through the centuries." Uppermost in Mr. Widener's mind, he said, was his favorite period-- the French 18th Century -- and particularly two paintings by Franc,ois Boucher, who, had he lived two centuries later, would have made a fortune painting dimpled ladies for the covers of sentimental magazines. The Philadelphia Artists' Union hotly demanded that someone fire the Wilstach administrator. Even moderate Philadelphians took alarm.

Fortnight ago Joseph Widener had his little joke. He announced that the large canvas which he had conveyed in great secrecy from Paris last spring was no Boucher but a painting by Paul Cezanne which has been regarded as one of the great masterpieces of modern art, Les Grandes Baigneuses, the longest-meditated of Cezanne's numerous studies of nude figures against landscape. Its title, The Big Bathers, distinguishing it from others in the Bathers series, refers to the size of the canvas: 6 ft. 10 in. by 8 ft. 3 in. It was acquired by Mr. Widener from the private collection of the Pellerin family in Paris. Price: $110,000. After Mr. Widener's formal presentation, the Pennsylvania Museum put the painting on display, predicted proudly that "no person informed in the field of modern art will be able to miss the opportunity of seeing and studying a picture which has been described [by Critic Lionello Venturi] as 'the master invention of Cezanne's architectural imagination.' "

Only discordant note was an editorial in the Philadelphia Record, which carefully expressed gratification at the purchase itself, but made a sociological point on behalf of the "non-bathers." "No less than 41,000 of the city's dwellings--one in every ten--are without bathtubs," said the Record. "One hundred and ten thousand dollars would buy bathtubs for nearly half of these bathtubless dwellings.''* Meanwhile, tubbed and untubbed Philadelphians flocked to see the Cezanne. Mellowing Mr. Widener extended an invitation to all members of the Museum to come out to Lynnewood Hall for a look at his renowned Van Dycks, his Raphael Room, his magnificent Rembrandts. Upon these scenes of public congratulation and goodwill there dropped last week a large and sputtering bomb. It was tossed from nearby Merion, Pa., by one of the master bomb-throwers of the art world, none other than the terrible-tem-pered Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes, millionaire inventor of Argyrol and owner of the finest private collection of modern French paintings in the U. S. Dr. Barnes was incensed by the Museum's statement that "a second version, and a slightly smaller picture" of Les Grandes Baigneuses was in the Barnes Foundation collection. In response he roared that the Barnes Bathers had been painted eight years before the Widener Bathers, that the latter was "monotonous, dry and lusterless" by comparison. Cracked "Argyrol" Barnes:

"The opinion of discriminating collectors and dealers generally, that the unfinished Museum Bathers is of about fifth-rate quality for a Cezanne--in contrast to the newspaper statement that it is his 'greatest masterpiece'--explains why this picture went begging for a buyer for more than five years. ... Its former owner, in the presence of witnesses, offered to sell the picture to me for $80,000. . . . The painting's presence in Philadelphia represents not the intelligence and cultural levels of the general population, but the evil of having an absentee dictator of the local official art situation, who functions principally at the racetracks of Miami, Saratoga and Deauville."

When this blast had passed over, Mr. Widener was reported by his butler to be "very busily engaged," but it was not difficult for others to find the dates given for the paintings in the definitive catalog of Cezanne's works published nearly two years ago by Venturi. For the Barnes Bathers: 1900-05; for the Widener Bathers, 1898-1905. Collector Sam A. Lewisohn, who happened to be in Philadelphia, was saddened by the dispute. "Art is too beautiful to argue about," said he. Critic Sheldon Cheney opined that Les Grandes Baigneuses was not Cezanne's "best" but could not be called "fifth-rate" either. Philadelphia newspapers solemnly baited Dr. Barnes with the discovery that whereas there were 16 nude figures in the Museum's painting, the Barnes Bathers numbered only eight.

Les Grandes Baigneuses has 14 figures in the foreground, composed in a pattern which strengthens and connects the pattern of tree trunks arching above them. The trunks on the left are slenderer and soar at a greater angle than those on the right, thus endangering the balance of the picture. It is because Cezanne kept his painting in balance despite this powerful asymmetrical movement that visitors to the Pennsylvania Museum last week found Les Grandes Baigneuses as full of an exciting repose as first-rate critics have found it. To most people $10 or $1,000,000 would have been as fair and as meaningless a price for this simple artistic effect as what Mr. Widener paid or what Dr. Barnes did not pay.

*Actually, for about one-sixth.

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