Cézanne’s Card Players at Courtauld Institute of Art on artrepublic.com

The exhibition brings together the most comprehensive group of these works ever staged, including three of the Card Players paintings, five of the most outstanding peasant portraits and the majority of the exquisite preparatory drawings, watercolours and oil studies.  Cézanne’s Card Players stand alongside his Bathers series as the most ambitious and complex figurative works of his career.

The first mention of the Card Players series was in 1891 when the writer Paul Alexis visited Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence and found the artist painting a local peasant from the farm on his estate, the Jas de Bouffan.  Cézanne’s depictions of card players would prove to be one of his most ambitious projects and occupied him for several years.  It resulted in five closely related canvases of different sizes showing men seated at a rustic table playing cards. Alongside these he produced a larger number of paintings of the individual farm workers who appear in the Card Players compositions. 

Cézanne devoted himself to his peasant card players, often repeating his compositions, striving to express the essence of these sun-beaten farm workers whom he found so compelling.  Rather than posing his models as a group playing cards, Cézanne made studies of them individually and only brought them together as opponents on the canvas itself.  For him, the local peasants of Aix were the human equivalent of his beloved Montaigne Sainte-Victoire that presided over the town – steadfast, unchanging and monumental.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Cézanne’s card player and peasant works is that their evocation of unchanging traditions was achieved by pushing the boundaries of painting in radical new directions.  Cézanne painted freely and inventively, rendering his peasants through a vibrant patchwork of brushstrokes which animates the surface of the paintings.  For most nineteenth-century viewers his technique would have appeared as coarse as his peasant subject matter but the Card Players would prove an inspiration to later generations of avant-garde artists.  For Pablo Picasso, Cézanne’s peasants were a touchstone for his Cubist portraits and their example resonates throughout the twentieth century with particular homages paid to them by artists as diverse as Fernand Léger and Jeff Wall.                  

Cézanne’s creation of a relatively large number of preparatory works for the Card Players paintings was highly unusual and indicates his commitment to this ambitious series.  In preparation for the exhibition, The Courtauld and the Metropolitan collaborated on the first technical research project to look systematically at this group of works.  This has shed fresh light on Cézanne’s working practice.  Most importantly, by examining the extent of underdrawing on each canvas it has challenged established views about the sequence in which he produced the paintings.  Whereas it has traditionally been assumed that he worked from the largest paintings to the smallest, gradually simplifying the scenes, it now seems clear that he started the series with the smaller canvases, using them to establish his iconic compositions.

OPENING HOURS: Daily 10.00 – 18.00

Image Credits:

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), The Card Players, c.1893-96, Oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm, The Courtauld Gallery, London, © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Man in a Blue Smock, c.1896-1897, Oil on canvas, 80.5 x 64. 8 cm, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, APg 1980.03. © 2010. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), The Smoker, c.1892, Oil on canvas, 91 x 72 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, © Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia/ The Bridgeman Art Library