An Extraordinary Journey or Hello Again, Cézanne!
April 12, 2007
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City owns the largest collection of French masterpieces from the 19th century. Extensive renovation and remodeling of the 19th-century galleries made this an auspicious time to send some 150 of the top masterpieces by the period's most prominent artists on tour - paintings by Ingres, Corot, Courbet, Manet, Degas and Pisarro and sculptures by Rodin and Maillol. They will be on display in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie from June 1 to August 7, 2007. Included is Paul Cézanne's "The Fishermen (Fantastic Scene)", acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001. It could have been on permanent exhibition in Berlin. What happened not quite 100 years ago?
The Germany of the Wilhelminian Era was scandalized by the appearance of modern French art in the Nationalgalerie. Not enough that the curator of the time Hugo von Tschudi would buy art from Germany's historical arch-enemy for a museum intended for German works - the creations themselves were highly controversial. Impressionism was a bad word then. Von Tschudi bought the very first Cézanne ever owned by a gallery. He was not to be so lucky when he attempted to purchase a second one. It was listed under various titles. Once, it was a "Day in July", once a "Sunday Afternoon", another time a "River Landscape with Fishermen". Berlin Art Dealer Paul Cassirer was obliged to take it back from von Tschudi, who had incurred the Kaiser's displeasure. Instead, the impressionist painter Max Liebermann bought the "Cézanne with the white sail". Liebermann came from a German-Jewish mercantile family who had settled in Berlin and exerted a certain influence on the Prussian capital's artistic and cultural life. Max Liebermann died in 1935. But what happened to his Cézanne?
Journalists Ulrike Sommer and Hanne Schön set off on an extraordinary journey. Where was the painting created? Who were its successive owners? What do the locations look like today? What connections with that era remain from today's perspective? Have the modernist classics become Avant Garde once again?
Cézanne's "The Fishermen (Fantastic Scene)" has become a symbol of an art and art market, of a love and passion for painting, of the controversy over modernism. "So old, so new".