Ancestor of Cubism

The Orsay canvas had a calmer life than its famous price suggests, with one alarming interruption. It passed through Cézanne’s dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who handled most of the painter’s late sales, and into the great Paris collection of Count Isaac de Camondo. On Camondo’s death the painting came to the French State as part of his 1911 bequest, entering the national museums, the Louvre first and eventually the Musée d’Orsay.

The interruption: the canvas was stolen in 1961 and later recovered. The detail is reported through secondary sources, so take it lightly, but it adds a strange footnote to a picture this quiet, that for a while it was simply gone.

In 2010 and 2011 the Courtauld in London and the Metropolitan in New York mounted a two-venue exhibition that gathered the largest grouping of the series ever shown (the Barnes and Qatar canvases appeared as reproductions, since neither could travel). It let people see, for the first time in one place, the whole arc of subtraction the series performs.

And the verdict that settled is the one that matters most for this app: The Card Players is read as a direct ancestor of Cubism. The way Cézanne builds solid form out of flat planes of color, rather than out of line and modeled shadow, is exactly the door Picasso and Braque (Georges Braque, who co-invented Cubism with Picasso) walked through a few years later. The two silent men at their small table are, quietly, where modern painting’s next revolution begins.