Paul Cezanne at the Morgan Library is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik
The Daily Pic: A watercolor shows how the great painter mixed the radical and the trite.
(The Morgan Library & Museum, Thaw Collection; photo by Schecter Lee)
Cezanne's "Terrace at the Garden at Les Lauves", a watercolor painted sometime between 1902 and 1906 and recently acquired by the Morgan Library in New York. It strikes me as unusually conventional in its spatial framework for a Cezanne, as though the artist is keeping space anchored as he unmoors his colors. The repoussoir plant pot at left seems especially trite, but it illustrates a crucial point we tend to loose track of (and the market wants us to ignore): That even the greatest artist can have moments of weakness, and is likely to build on cliches.
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