For its first post-pandemic blockbuster exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art chose an obvious name: French post-impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). But this isn’t the usual audience-pleaser: although Cézanne Drawing includes a handful of oil paintings—including one of the artist’s most famous, The Bather, from MOMA’s own collection—many of these works, from other institutions and private collections, are decidedly not among his most familiar.

 

But this isn’t to say the exhibit is second-rate: just the opposite, in fact. Cézanne Drawing is as revelatory as the comprehensive exhibit I saw in Philadelphia in 1996 by putting into context Cézanne’s entire output: these drawings—some mere sketches or just a few lines in pencil, while others beautifully realized watercolors—become the backbone of his entire oeuvre. 

 

Best of all are dazzling drawings like The Apotheosis of Delacroix (right), in which one great artist pays homage to another, as astonishing in its complexity as the finished canvas at London’s National Gallery. And there’s the seemingly offhand sketch of a plaster Cupid, endlessly charming and alive.

 

This exhibit, crammed with hundreds of artworks that some might consider lesser, or even inferior, is so full of the life, emotion, idiosyncrasies and vigor we associate with Cézanne that it truly earns the label “can’t-miss.”