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COPYRIGHT 1998 College Art Association
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. Vol. 1, The Texts: 592 pp.; 58 color ills., numerous b/w. Vol. 2, The Plates: 335 pp.; 955 b/w ills. $400.00
To establish the corpus and chronology for Paul Cezanne's art: this daunting task dominated John Rewald's professional life, especially toward the end. Having been involved for nearly six decades with revisions to Lionello Venturi's 1956 catalogue raisonne, Rewald died in 1994 with the project still not quite completed. To be sure, for much of his career, research on "Venturi revised" (as it was called) was no more than a supplemental activity. Not only had Venturi and his publisher, the dealer Paul Rosenberg, already tracked most of the artworks and documents before Rewald joined the pursuit, but the young scholar would proceed with his own succession of projects, including monographs on major artists, edited collections of letters, and, most fatuously, groundbreaking histories of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
Rewald did not create the Cezanne project but inherited it, and then re-created it to accord with what he thought a catalogue, when raisonne or reasoned (a favorite word of his), should be. It seems that production of "Venturi revised" began virtually upon publication of the initial "Venturi," with Rewald's very "reasoned" review of it.(1) Recognizing that prospective Cezannes were continuing to appear on the art market, Venturi himself had resolved to extend his catalogue and update it. Rewald, his astute and appreciative critic, did not become a rival in this enterprise, but a valued unofficial contributor.
After Venturi's death in 1960, Rewald assumed primary responsibility for the work, which expanded significantly. Preferring to operate by consensus, he formed a small consultative committee, yet reserved the right to be autocratic.(2) It was decided that there should be separate catalogues for the oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings (the original "Venturi" was comprehensive). Rewald took on the watercolors and the oils as somewhat independent projects; Adrien Chappuis would assess the drawings. The actual committee consisted of the art historians Chappuis and Fritz Novotny, along with Leo Marchutz, a painter residing in Aix-en-Provence. Marchutz had befriended Rewald in 1933, after which the two set about to locate Cezanne's motifs and photograph them. The new catalogue features a generous selection of these and many other informative photographic documents.(3) Marchutz died in 1976, Chappuis in 1979, Novotny in 1983; but the loss of his committee did not necessarily alter the character of Rewald's catalogue, because he had already composed many of the individual entries during the 1960s and early 1970s. He also had other significant consultants, chief among them his friend Lawrence Gowing, whose influence on the catalogue probably increased during the final years of research (Gowing died in 1991, not long before Rewald.
Cezanne's oeuvre will frustrate any archivist: the virtual absence of paintings dated by the artist's hand (Rewald found only one) accompanies a confusion of repetitive, genetic rifles often assigned by dealers. Imprecise designations such as "Paysage" or "Quelques pommes" convert otherwise informative inventories into riddles. In his early review of "Venturi," Rewald set about to list all works that he could date without resorting to stylistic analysis, which he regarded as unscientific. In establishing his list, which grew slowly over the years, he traced the artist's movements as they were indicated by external documentation. Another of his schemes was to rely on portrait sitters' memories as to when they had posed - all the better if those memories had been recorded during Cezanne's time or had been conveyed through interviews Rewald himself conducted during the 1930s. Among works that proved to be securely dated were Cezanne's portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, attributed by the sitter (as well as by others) to 1895, and a view of the Lac d'Annecy, to which the painter traveled only once, in 1896. Rewald did not fail to note the necessary complication: any painting was subject to being reworked by the artist at a later date, away from the sitter or the site.(4) Once his review had set the foundation, it would have been natural enough to complete the chronology by drawing stylistic analogies to the paintings already occupying fixed positions. Indeed, most scholars proceeded this way, filling gaps inductively. Rewald instead continued his elaborate search for documentation, attempting to eliminate the need for any speculation. He accepted deduction, but found induction risky and tantamount to guessing (see p. 12).
What about the factor of aesthetic quality? Although Rewald believed he would always recognize quality, it was reliable neither as a marker of the artist's stage of development nor, ultimately, of the authenticity of the work. He trusted conclusions drawn from aesthetic sensibility, including his own, no more than he trusted inductive guesswork. He would nevertheless act upon his aesthetic sense when the situation required. Known to many for his strong opinions and occasional stubbornness, he was actually quite a pragmatic scholar, willing to change his mind, or waver, or suspend the operation of a principle. He could accept works he himself deemed aesthetically shallow, if provided with some assuring fact of provenance or other testimony. In response to La Faience italienne, a highly problematic work, this conflicted archivist-connoisseur suggested that Cezanne's oeuvre had probably suffered a number of off days and regressions: "As the French say: 'Even Homer slept sometimes'" (R205).(5) Here, as in most analogous cases, Rewald chose to allow a document (or witness) to overrule the mute object and the subjective aesthetic judgments it generated in himself and others. He realized that artists, as much as connoisseurs, were fallible.
When irresolvable doubt arose from any quarter, it was Rewald's tendency to include rather than exclude, so as to accommodate the fallibility. This view of his method has been affirmed by one of those closest to him, Walter Feilchenfeldt, who with Jayne Warman edited the final catalogue copy and contributed knowledgeable, candid introductions (p. 16).(6) My personal exchanges with Rewald and experience with his writings lead me to concur with Feilchenfeldt. Yet this position is at odds (although not entirely) with one of Rewald's own clearest (but not eminently clear) methodological statements, which introduces his parallel project, the catalogue raisonne of Cezanne's watercolors:
Scholars are sometimes divided as to what is worse: to accept as authentic a work that is...
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