Renowned art historian Sister Wendy Beckett has said Paul Cézanne is as great an artist as has ever lived.

Judging from the "Cézanne and Beyond" exhibition now on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she's not alone in her opinion.

Although the exhibition focuses on Cézanne  (1839-1906), it's not so much about him as the influence he's had on other artists. True, there's a wonderful, worldwide gathering of more than 50 Cézanne paintings and drawings, but there's twice that number of works by his followers, including Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Lancaster's own Charles Demuth (1883-1935) and 15 other artists up to the present day.

It's fascinating to compare their work side by side with Cézanne's originals to see how the master artist's ideas and techniques have been incorporated into the works of his admirers.

Cézanne's "The Smoker" (1890-92) depicts a mustachioed, pipe-smoking laborer on the Cézanne family estate in Aix-en-Provence. We don't know exactly who the subject is, but that's not important; he represents a generation of workers on the land. Hung right next to it is "The Mechanic" (1920) by fellow French artist Fernand Léger (1881-1955). Similarly posed, mustachioed and smoking, Léger has brought Cézanne's anonymous worker forward 30 years and given him an industrial setting. Both paintings dignify the working man.

Cézanne's universally loved "The Card Players" (1890-92), depicting men engaged in a card game in a late 19th-century bistro, is brought into the present day by Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, using a giant transparency (4 feet by 5 feet) in a light box. Wall's "Card Players" (2006) shows three women playing cards in a modern-home setting complete with Blue Danube china teacups.

There are dozens of landscapes, still lifes and portraits by Cézanne's followers, spanning more than a century, from his death in 1906 to the present day. Each is inspired in some way by his work.

Charles Demuth readily acknowledged drawing on Cézanne, whose influence can be seen in all nine of the Demuth watercolors on display, particularly "Mount Gilboa" (1914-15), which bears a strong resemblance to Mont Sainte-Victoire, a subject Cézanne painted more than 60 times. Anne Lampe, executive director of the Demuth Foundation, said Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire series was held in such high esteem in the groups Demuth frequented that it was a natural subject for him to choose in progression toward his own unique style.

One of the appealing aspects of this exhibition is the collection of works by artists whose names might not be instantly recognizable. This was true for me with American abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly, who has several fascinating and unusual paintings hung beside the Cézannes that inspired them. "Meshers" (1951) consists of a jagged pattern of green and blue, which Kelly says represents looking up through a forest of pines to the sky above. He says he got the idea from Cézanne's oil painting "Large Pine and Red Earth" (1890-95), which he loved as a child. Kelly's "Lake II" (2002) is simply an enormous blue triangle. It doesn't make any sense until you see that it's the actual physical outline of the water in the bay from Cézanne's "The Bay of Marseille, Seen From L'Estaque" (1885).

The exhibition's central room dominates the show. It's filled with Cézanne's pictures of bathers in classical settings from London's National Gallery, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and numerous collections in Paris and the United States. Curator Michael Taylor describes them in the audio commentary as "canonical works in the history of art." Alongside these works are several bather pictures of Matisse, Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) and others. There's also a group of six bronze sculptures by Picasso, "The Bathers" (1956), which he said was directly inspired by Cézanne's painting. At first glance, Picasso's forms appear to be little more than angular blobs of metal, but the audio commentary assures us they depict a merry group of girls having the time of their lives tossing beach balls to each other. And after you look at them for a bit, so they are.

Allow two hours to do this show justice. The organizers have done a good job restricting the number of people getting into the gallery at one time. Unlike the Frida Kahlo retrospective last year, I didn't have to elbow through other enthusiasts to get a good look at the pictures. Included in the admission price is an easy-to-understand audio commentary guide, which neatly summarizes the significance of each major group of pictures. And be sure not to miss side gallery No. 164, which has a spillover of 22 paintings that couldn't fit in the main display area.

"Cézanne and Beyond" is not without humor. The final display, "After Cézanne" (2009), is a deceptively playful exhibit by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs. He's taken an original 1877 Cézanne still life and covered it in plastic bubble wrap. Alÿs explains in a note beside the picture that his veiling of the picture echo's Cézanne's perception of the world: "It is not an act of iconoclastic disrespect; but an act of homage and surrender." And that tribute to Cézanne's genius pretty much sums up the spirit of the entire exhibition.

"Cézanne and Beyond" runs through May 17 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For ticket information, call 215-684-7500 or visit www.philamuseum.org. blog comments powered by Disqus