"Magisterial work of a lifetime finished" (Rewald's Cézanne catalogue), The Art Newspaper, Apr. 1997, p. 33.

The Paintings of Paul Cézanne, 2-volumes, slipcased, more than 1,000 illustrations, 58 in color, 880 pages, 9 x 14. $400. Harry N. Abrams, NY (Abrams has sold Thames & Hudson rights to publish 1,250 copies in the U.K.).

by Jason Edward Kaufman

John Rewald (1912-94) was at the Sorbonne completing a dissertation on Cézanne and Zola when the Italian art historian Lionello Venturi published the first catalogue raisonné of the painter’s works. The German-born expatriate was embarking on a brilliant career that would take him to America where his final accomplishment would be to redo Venturi’s effort. Venturi himself had long been collecting material for a revised edition, and when he died in 1960, his archives went to Rewald who had produced important scholarly publications on impressionism and post-impressionism, and devoted considerable attention to his lifelong passion, Cézanne. After three decades, in poor health, in 1993 Rewald delegated completion of the project to Jayne Warman, a longtime assistant with whom he had published a Cézanne watercolor catalogue in 1983, and Walter Feilchenfeldt, a Zürich-based dealer whose parents were his lifelong friends. When Rewald died the next year, the estate signed a contract with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., the New York firm that had recently published new editions of his biographies of Cézanne (1986) and Seurat (1990). The result, just issued in a slipcased two-volume edition of 4,000, is a magisterial corpus of Cézanniana by the quintessential art-historical fact man.

"It is staggering the amount of information that Rewald added to Venturi, and even to Venturi’s revised state," says Ms. Warman. He appended 31 paintings to Venturi’s 839 and 80-odd addenda, bringing the total to 954. He established a definitive chronology, the feature he found most flawed in Venturi’s account, juxtaposing his own dates with those assigned by other authorities, and frequently arguing his case based on which wallpaper or baseboards appear behind certain sitters and objects. "He was a fact man, not an interpretive art historian," says Ms. Warman. "He believed in documentation, in laying out the facts so the reader can understand and feel closer to the artist."

Meticulous examination of sales books and correspondence from Vollard, Bernheim-Jeune, Durand-Ruel, Cassirer (Mr. Feilchenfeldt’s father was a partner in the firm), Knoedler’s, and Reid & Lefèvre, resulted in more than 12,000 bibliographic citations, 7,000 exhibition citations, and 5,000 ownership entries, all compiled and cross-referenced by Ms. Warman. The reader can look up Roger Fry and find pictures to which he refers in his writing, or identify an owner, say Dr. Gachet, then find out which works he acquired when. A list of temporary exhibitions provides the complete contents of some 175 shows from 1874-1996. And throughout the text volume appear more than 200 documentary photographs of sitters and the artist’s motifs, many taken by Rewald in the 1930s, making the book the most comprehensive picture corpus of Cézanne, surpassing even the lavishly illustrated catalogue of last year’s Philadelphia retrospective, which, incidentally, does not duplicate information from the catalogue raisonné database.

Ms. Warman, who worked with Rewald for 16 years, remains awed by her mentor’s visual memory: "He had seen probably 95% of the paintings, and he remembered little nuances about each and every one. After thirty years he would remember where he saw a picture and be able to say something specific about it -- particularities of color, a line that married together two elements. And this was not just with Cézanne! Plus, he drew from such an amazing wealth of knowledge that he could make connections that most people could not." This is evident in the illuminating essays Rewald wrote over the last 30 years on collectors, critics, admirers, and fellow artists of Cézanne, which are interpolated into the individual entries. There are long articles, for example, on Roger Fry (No. 482), Julius Meier-Graefe (No. 383), Gauguin (No. 391), August Pellerin (No. 507), as well as on the "bathers" (Nos. 854 ff.) and the issue of finished/unfinished in the artist’s work (No. 804). He had intended to write essays on Schukin and Morosov, on the Havemeyers, and the "Card Players," says Ms. Warman, but left about a third incomplete at his death. For many paintings lacking a Rewald commentary, she excerpted relevant passages he had published elsewhere. "Our mission was to bring this book out as Rewald had written it," says Ms. Warman, and that is precisely what they have done, adding nothing to his texts beyond explanatory notes and sections of the introduction.

Mr. Feilchenfeldt contributes a history of the project, essays on dating, chronology, authenticity, and a note on Cézanne’s use of a large-format canvas for 60 compositions deemed of special importance. Fifty-eight of these are illustrated in color (the Barnes Foundation refused photo rights for their two). The publisher felt an all-color catalogue would be time consuming and cost prohibitive, so the 954 plates are black-and-white, each accompanied by its catalogue number, title, date, and dimensions. Rewald himself laid them out to have the compositions relate to one another visually and thematically, as well as chronologically. Unfortunately, as is often the case with oeuvre catalogues, some reproductions are cropped and their relative scales misleading. Abrams has no intention to undertake an inexpensive color-illustrated CD-Rom at this point, but if anyone else would like to try, they can begin with the Rewald archives now on deposit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©