A Landmark Retrospective Of Works By Paul Cézanne Rises In The East. By Margaret Regan AS THE OLYMPICS swept into Atlanta last weekend, so did a major art exhibition, which purports to survey fully 7,500 years of art around the globe in a mere 125 artworks. But this dubious effort, called Rings: Five Passions in World Art, is not the only art blockbuster drawing throngs up and down the East Coast during the summer tourist season. Picasso, a perennial crowd pleaser, is packing them in with a show of portraits at New York's Museum of Modern Art, while the 19th century American painter Winslow Homer has a big exhibition uptown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A hop, skip south along the rail lines, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has mounted a gigantic, can't-miss Cézanne retrospective, the first major survey of the painter's work to be exhibited in this country in 60 years. And while Cézanne would never have claimed that his work matched the breadth of that strange Olympics art show, he might argue posthumously that the dramatic transformation in Western art between the 19th and 20th centuries--roughly the transition from the realism of a Homer to the modernism of a Picasso--couldn't have happened without his innovations. Paul Cézanne, a Frenchman who lived from 1839 to 1906, intially exhibited with the Impressionists; but his paintings, those familiar monumental still lifes, landscapes and portraits, were ultimately far more revolutionary than theirs. The superb Philadelphia show, consisting of some 100 oil paintings and 70 watercolors and drawings, documents how rapidly he abandoned his traditional academic training to become a fiercely original master who helped change the course of Euro-American painting. Organized in conjunction with the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris and the Tate Gallery in London, the show exhibits iconic Cézannes from collections around the world. Two of his grand bathers paintings are exhibited side by side for the first time ever. There are 15 paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the Provençal mountain whose sharp thrust against the blue sky of the Midi Cézanne painted again and again; there are 34 portraits, notably self-portraits and pictures of his wife. And there are repeated versions of his apples and oranges on draped white cloth, still lifes whose shatterings of conventional perspective are small revolutions in themselves. Even the earliest works in the show, made when Cezanne was in his 20s and still under the influence of his early teachers, presage the new way of seeing that characterizes his mature work. "Bread and Eggs," a dark 1865 still life, opens the show. Though the work seems conventional to our modern eyes, the young Cézanne was already rebelling: he painted his loaf and eggs and glass with unacceptably rough strokes, he made his background excessively black, and he depicted the plain bread of a poor man, an unsuitable subject for high art. That year's official Salon rejected the work. Chronologically arranged, the show demonstrates how quickly Cézanne adopted the fresh palette of the Impressionists, leaving behind the sombre studio tones of French academic painting for the vibrant blues, greens and fleshy pinks he found in the French countryside. But he became dissatisfied with the fleeting, transient impressions of light and color the Impressionists captured in their canvases. In a famous quote, he declared, "I want to make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums." As the Philadelphia show so ably demonstrates, Cézanne did exactly that. His solid forms suggest the essential, the permanent, the ideal. In his hands, the orange becomes Orange, the cardplayer Man, the disconsolate wife Woman. Though he steeped himself in the art of the past, Cézanne abandoned the rules of perspective that had held sway since the Renaissance, putting multiple viewpoints in each canvas, obliterating the distinction between near and far. In the 1877 painting "Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair," for instance, we see the painter's somber-faced wife from above, from below, from eye-level, all at the same time. As one art historian has suggested, Cézanne's paintings did what the then-new art form of photography, handicappped by a single viewpoint, was utterly unable to do. Cézanne once told a young artist that a painter should "treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone." It was this insistence on the underlying geometric forms of nature that give his works their solidity. Rendered solely through patches of pure color, Cézanne's simplified forms helped lead the way to the cubism of the early Picasso and Braque and to later artists' experiments in abstraction and contructivism. As Picasso once remarked, "He's the father of us all." No one disputes this role, but the current exhibition's broader sweep also links Cézanne firmly with the art of the past. Late in life, when he had already ruptured much of tradition, he wrote to a friend, "The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read." His work is immersed in the great art of the past, his bathers going all the way back to the stolid figures of classical sculpture, his studied landscapes to Poussin, his monumental piles of fruit to Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa." The beautiful late paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, gathered together into a single room at the end of the show, also testify to Cézanne's high-minded view of art as an heroic quest for truth, an idea that would seem positively quaint on today's scene. Painted again and again and again, the mountain comes to embody the artist's search. Quiet, massive, eternal, the mountain on the canvas proves something Cézanne himself once wrote. "Art," he said, "is a harmony parallel to nature." Cézanne continues through September 1 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the only U.S. venue. Tickets are avaialable only for specific dates and times, and they must be purchased in advance. With a service charge, tickets for adults cost $15.25; $3 discounts are offered to seniors, students and children. For telephone orders call (215) 235-7469. For more information call (215) 763-8100. The show can also be seen on the internet at http://www.libertynet.org/~pma; with additional info at http://www.pcezanne.com.

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