Further Reflections on Cézanne at MOMA

Abstract

Dear Ms. Editor:

Eunice Lipton's polemic, “Some Reflections on the Cézanne Events at The Museum of Modern Art” (summer issue), disseminates such fanciful “disinformation” regarding MOMA's exhibition Cézanne: The Late Work, the scholarly program that accompanied it, and my own role therein that it requires a response.

“Why,” Ms. Lipton asks, “a late Cézanne show in the fall of 1977, and why the intensity of its celebration?” (her word for the program of lectures and symposia). The only answer she proposes is “political necessity, the need to defend a faltering position. … Conceptual art and the revival of interest in realism have made late Cézanne problems and Cubism less relevant. * … Could it be that MOMA, the bastion of everything ‘modernism’ means, is frightened? Was their late Cézanne show, with its attendant symposia, a gauge of that fear? Was it their desperate attempt to keep everything just exactly as it was?” MOMA's “intention” in mounting the exhibition, as divined by Ms. Lipton, was to “entrench” a “vision” of art history which is “rigid, formalist, Francophile and ahistorical.”

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Notes on contributors

William Rubin

William Rubin is Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Adjunct Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York.