One of my favourite paintings in the National Gallery’s collection technically breaks the rules: Paul Cézanne’s Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) was painted in the last decade of his life, its date given as about 1894-1905. It was probably finished after the gallery’s cut-off date of 1900, a cut-off the gallery has just announced it will be jettisoning.
To say that I am pleased is an understatement. It always struck me as bizarre that the end date occurs just at the exact point in history when painting is about to become very interesting. Just look at the Baigneuses and what they represent: the leap towards abstraction in the representation of the human form; the composition and its unidentifiable, but unified landscape; the use of colour, and the lack of discernible religious or mythological subject matter. The painting and its two sisters cast a significant influence on the onward march of 20th-century painting, particularly cubism, as they made a strong impression on both Matisse and Picasso. Yet one leaves the building without much of a sense of how these revolutionary developments ever played out. To stop at 1900 never made much sense. Weird altarpieces have their place, but there are only so many in the world to acquire, and the public’s appetite for them is likely to be limited.
