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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.

Blake Gopnik

Updated Jul. 11, 2017 9:09PM ET / Published Aug. 15, 2013 8:55PM ET 

(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.

For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

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