Description
Pines and Rocks (Fontainebleau?) – the canvas lent to a museum before the museum owned it
Three bare pine trunks rise the whole height of the canvas, and in front of them and behind them stands a dense blue-green wall of foliage, laid in short diagonal strokes. The lower third is taken up by large ochre and pink rocks, with undergrowth threading between them through the green. There is almost no sky; the blue we see is leaves. The hand-painted painting on canvas reproduces this work by Cézanne of about 1897, which in the original measures 81.3 × 65.4 centimetres and is kept under inventory number 16.1934 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The first exhibition of a museum that did not yet own it
From 8 November to 7 December 1929 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition the record calls the museum’s first loan exhibition: Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh. This canvas was there as number 22 – under the title Blue Landscape – lent by a “private collection, N.Y.”. The name, then, was not given. From 17 May to 27 September 1931 the same museum held the Memorial Exhibition: The Collection of the Late Miss Lillie P. Bliss, where the canvas was number 9, this time as Pines and Rocks. In 1934, from 14 May to 12 September, it was in the exhibition The Lillie P. Bliss Collection as number 10 – and the inventory number it still carries reads 16.1934.
An owner who is named once and not the next time
The name Lillie P. Bliss appears and disappears in the exhibition record. In April and May 1920 the work was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia as number 55, as Trees on the Mountain, and there Bliss is named as the lender. From 3 May to 15 September 1921 it was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as number 19, as Rocks and Pines, lent “anonymously”, with the record adding in square brackets that this is Bliss. In the summer and autumn of 1926 it was in Brooklyn, where the lender is again “Miss Bliss”. After her death the collection travelled: the 1931 memorial exhibition went on to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover and in January 1932 to the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, and in 1935 the Carnegie Art Institute in Pittsburgh and the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton showed works from her collection.
Two woods, six hundred kilometres apart
The title of this canvas contains a question mark, and it is not a slip. The catalogue raisonné records it as Pins et rochers (Fontainebleau?), and among the locales it enters two: Bibémus under southern France and Fontainebleau under northern France. Bibémus is a quarry above Aix-en-Provence, Fontainebleau a forest south of Paris; between them lie some six hundred kilometres. The alternate titles pull both ways as well: Sous-bois provençal, Provençal undergrowth, points south, while Trees on the Mountain and the question mark in the title point north. The dealer’s book was not certain either: in Vollard’s B stockbook the work is entered at number 3337 as “(?) Sous bois”, 81 × 65 centimetres. Where exactly these trunks stood the record does not say, and we shall not settle it in its place.
From Vollard to New York
The provenance begins with the dealer Ambroise Vollard in Paris and continues with the Dutch collector Cornelis Hoogendijk in Amsterdam. In 1920 the work is with Paul Rosenberg in Paris, then at the Galerie Barbazanges, then with Marius de Zayas in New York, and finally with Lillie P. Bliss. In 1934 it passed to the Museum of Modern Art. The dating lies far apart among scholars – Rewald gives about 1897, Venturi in the revised version 1895 to 1899 and in the original about 1900 – and to the museum’s year we add nothing here.
Nine names for one canvas
With every exhibition the name changed. In October and November 1911 it was at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, at the international exhibition of the group Moderne Kunstkring, as number 10, as Paysage boisé, wooded landscape, from the Hoogendijk collection. There followed Trees on the Mountain in Philadelphia in 1920, Rocks and Pines at the Metropolitan in 1921 and Blue Landscape at the Museum of Modern Art in 1929. In March and April 1936 the work was number 35 in the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, dated there about 1895 to 1900, and from May to September 1939 number 59 in Art in Our Time, for the museum’s tenth anniversary. In all the catalogue has gathered nine titles.
What the catalogue counts among the motifs
The list of headings for this canvas is short and entirely from nature: among the natural motifs it names the pine, the rocks, the trees and the undergrowth. Nothing man-made occurs – no house, no road, no figure – and neither water nor sky appears among the entries. The record therefore says that in this landscape only the ground, the stone and what grows on it count.
It is an upright, quiet work tuned to blue-green and ochre, which takes narrower walls and rooms with daylight well. The choice runs to fifteen sizes, from 40 × 50 to 145 × 180 centimetres, all measurements in centimetres; intermediates we stretch to measure, and how it will look on the wall is shown by our 3D application. Bibémus, which the index names beside Fontainebleau, returns in The Bibémus Quarry and in Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibémus, and the stone forms are carried on by The Red Rock.
- Subject: Pines and Rocks (Fontainebleau?), Paul Cézanne, about 1897, Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the title of the canvas contains a question mark, and the catalogue enters it among the locales under both Bibémus in southern France and Fontainebleau in the north
