Paul Cézanne is the painter’s painter par excellence, or so it emerges in a sparkily clever, sensuously displayed exhibition at the National Gallery in London that sees great art through through the eyes of great artists.
Cézanne’s dappled geometries, slices of solid sunlight and obsessively seen bodies, male and female, have long made him a hero of modern art, but this show reveals how intimately, how passionately artists have studied him – and still do.
Bather with Outstretched Arm (Study), painted in 1883-85, hums with heat and desire. The muscular body of a near-naked youth posing in his swimming trunks in front of a cool lake breaks up into fierce shards of light against the jagged sky. This formidable little masterpiece was owned by Edgar Degas, who bought it from the first ever exhibition of the troubled Cézanne’s paintings at Vollard’s gallery in 1895. Today it is owned by the great American artist Jasper Johns.
Other tremendous Cézannes in this exhibition were bought by Lucian Freud and Henri Matisse. Looking at their purchases, you glimpse what one brilliant artist can learn from another. Freud fancied a Cézanne brothel scene whose fleshy sprawl mirrors his own painterly violence. Matisse owned a more sublimated and decorous nude, Three Bathers, as well as a moving portrait of Madame Cézanne. The first few rooms of this exhibition see painting as a glorious conversation between the greats, whose works mingle and play off each other with mutual and electric creativity.
Who knew the National Gallery got its late sumptuous, red-saturated Degas La Coiffure, one of the most glorious paintings in its collection, from Matisse? He bought it in 1918 and sold it to the gallery, through his dealer son Pierre, in 1936. How wonderful to imagine Matisse, whose own painting The Red Studio goes similarly bonkers for red, owning this throbbing, hallucinatory masterpiece.
Matisse was an exquisitely sensitive collector who also owned an incredibly tender, homoerotic portrait of a young Tahitian with a white flower in his hair by Gauguin. Two of his Picassos are here too: wartime portraits of Dora Maar, their darkness and dislocations expressing the terror of Hitler’s Europe. One of them is personally inscribed to Matisse from the artist.
But Degas was the most enthusiastic collector of all. He bought paintings to support his friends and fellow impressionists, to research his own style, or simply to pay homage to heroes. It takes two rooms here to do his collection justice, from his passion for Delacroix and Ingres to his heroic efforts to buy all the pieces of Manet’s vandalised masterpiece, The Execution of Maximilian (1867-88), and painstakingly restore it. He could only find parts of the painting, but its broken, ruined state only adds to its melancholy and irony.
This painting of death by firing squad is another painter’s painting that has found its way into the National Gallery collection. Yet this is not one of those exhibitions that try to turn a few paintings from the free collection into a ticketed show. Not only are its delvings into the National Gallery’s treasures genuinely insightful, it also has plenty of high quality loans, from that Jasper Johns Cézanne to Matisse’s Self-Portrait (1918) from the Musée d’Orsay.
The curators have found a simple but liberating way to shake up the way the sometimes awkward Sainsbury Wing works by running time backwards. The exhibition starts with Freud and goes anticlockwise into the past. This is great – until you reach the Victorians. I can see why GF Watts and Lord Leighton are here. These rich Victorian artists collected great art that ended up in the National Gallery. But who cares?
After following the genius of Matisse and Degas and the artists they loved, Watts’ minor Renaissance pictures are a bit drab. Fewer people still will have heard of the regency portraitist Thomas Lawrence, although it’s a joy to see the vast Carracci drawing he owned, an exuberant vision of sea monsters and nymphs designed for the great frescoes of the Farnese palace in Rome. Owning great art does not automatically make you a great artist. Joshua Reynolds had some truly majestic paintings by Bellini, Rembrandt and (so he thought) Michelangelo, yet his own art is not really exciting enough for us to be excited he owned them.
But it all comes together again in the final room – the furthest away in time – where some of Van Dyck’s most moving portraits are set against the Titians this 17th-century court painter collected. In Van Dyck’s 1638 portrait of Thomas Killigrew and William, Lord Crofts, two cultured men sit among classical architecture and fine drawings. Crofts wants to talk of lofty things but Killigrew stares bleakly out at us, head on hand. The portrait was painted soon after he lost his wife and his sadness sears the centuries. This exhibition celebrates the chains of inspiration that make art a conversation through time, yet it ends with a sense of art’s uselessness. Not even all the paintings in the world can replace what Killigrew has lost. It is a fittingly serious end for a refreshingly grown up show.
• Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck is at the National Gallery, London from 23 June to 4 September
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