Cezanne's Card Players United In New York Exhibit

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Feb 10th 2011 at 6:01AM

A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City brings together a full house of Paul Cézanne's famous card players. The Metropolitan Museum was, in 1913, the first public institution in the United States to acquire a painting by the artist and has a healthy collection of his works. The new exhibition brings together the "The Card Players" 1890-92 shown above left and "Study for The Card Players" at right among other works. The Card Players belongs to the Metropolitan while the Study is on loan from the Worcester Art Museum inWorcester, Massachusetts.

The artworks were created in the 1890s while the artist was living at his family's estate outside Aix-en-Provence and showcase Cezanne's appreciation of the local people as well as tracking his progress as a painter. He used peasants and laborers at his family's estate as models. The sittings resulted in five closely related canvases of different sizes, three of which will be reunited in the exhibit. Reuters reports that this exhibit was previously on display at the Courtauld Gallery in London. A fourth painting belongs to the Barnes Foundation and cannot be loaned out and the fifth is in a private collection which opted not to show it. Cezanne also produced a larger number of paintings of the individual farm workers, major examples of which will be on view along with oil sketches and watercolor studies for these paintings.

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Courtauld Gallery, London. A variety of educational programs will accompany the exhibition, including gallery talks, film screenings, and a Sunday at the Met lecture program on April 3. The exhibit runs from now through May 8. More information is available at the Museum's website at www.metmuseum.org .

Tags: metropolitan museum, metropolitan museum of art, paul cezanne

Subscribe to these comments

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Spectacular Bid Feb 10th 2011 2:02PM

It is a shame that the Cezanne card players owned by the Barnes Museum could not join the exhibit. However the rules of Albert's will preclude that from happening. Thankfully during the one (and only) time its left that Museum's walls for its blockbuster tour I was able to see it. This is one of Cezanne's greatest subject series and well worth making a trip to The Met to see this unique exhibit.

For the record the Met received their painting as a donation from Stephen Carlton Clark Sr. a former Met trustee and founder of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Clark's to this day continues to be one of the most philanthropic, yet shunning publicity, families in this nation.