Getty Purchases a Classic Cezanne

Less than a week after announcing its acquisition of a $22.5-million High Renaissance masterpiece by Fra Bartolommeo, the J. Paul Getty Museum has purchased “Still Life With Apples,” a slightly more expensive painting by French Postimpressionist Paul Cezanne, from a private collection in Switzerland.

Reportedly the finest still life by the artist in private hands, the work is a classic image painted in 1893-94, during the last phase of Cezanne’s career.

The museum declined to disclose the price of the painting, but sources close to the deal said it was about $25 million. A similar still life from the same period was sold for $26 million in 1993 at a Sotheby’s New York auction.

The Getty’s two most recent acquisitions are “an embarrassment of riches,” said Deborah Gribbon, the museum’s associate director and chief curator, but the Cezanne was crucial. “As we plan the installation in the new [museum at the Getty Center in Brentwood], we are aware that we have a small collection with many gaps. We desperately needed to make important additions where the collection begins, which is where the Fra Bartolommeo fits in, and at the end in the late 19th century. This is a major addition in that late period.”

News of the Getty’s latest coup drew praise from scholars.

“Good for them,” said Charles Stuckey, the Patrick and Aimee-Butler curator of paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and a leading Impressionism specialist. “I know they have been looking for a Cezanne of this caliber since the ‘80s. It has all the elements of one of his most impressive, mature still life compositions. It’s a very beautiful and important acquisition, and it’s certainly worthy of the Getty’s collections.”

Gribbon characterized the Cezanne as a “mega-acquisition” even for a museum that buys 50 to 100 artworks a year. “We are intensely pleased,” she said. “If there is one picture that was offered to us that we had to have, this is it. It is a picture of such weight and intellect, it’s beyond being beautiful. It’s exactly what Cezanne was known for, a concentration of observation and pictorial interpretation.”

“It’s not as if there are no other great paintings by Cezanne in Los Angeles,” she said, referring to works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Norton Simon Museum.

“But to acquire a painting made at this moment in his career adds significantly to the city’s already strong holdings. For the Getty Museum itself, it’s a tremendous acquisition. Our collection in this period has grown very slowly because the finest examples simply do not appear on market very often.” The Getty has two earlier paintings by Cezanne, “Portrait of Anthony Valabreque” (circa 1866) and “L’Eternal Feminin” (circa 1877) and a late watercolor, “Still Life With Blue Pot” (1900-06).

Cezanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a prosperous merchant. He received little public acclaim until late in his career, but he is now recognized as among the greatest 19th century artists. An inspiration to both Picasso and Matisse, he linked traditional representational painting with modern abstraction.

Measuring about 26 by 32 inches, “Still Life With Apples” is a relatively large work for the artist, said David Jaffe, the Getty’s curator of paintings. It depicts a green ceramic vase, a darker green bottle of rum, a gray ginger jar, a flowered sugar bowl and a porcelain bowl of apples on a table covered with blue drapery and a white napkin.

Jaffe said the painting is among Cezanne’s most fully resolved and finished works. “Every form is carefully worked and reworked, with a sense of majestic monumentality and deliberateness. It’s the opposite of the Impressionistic Cezanne,” he said, referring to sketchier works that include blank areas of canvas.

Although “Still Life With Apples” has been in private collections since its creation, it is well known because it has been on long-term loan to the Kunsthaus in Zurich and exhibited at other European museums.

It also is featured in a major retrospective of the artist’s work that opened at the Grand Palais in Paris last fall and will make its final appearance at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from May 30 to Sept. 1.

The painting will go on view at the Getty Museum in Malibu in late September, then move to the new museum in Brentwood when it opens in 1997.

Despite appearances, the museum is not on a buying spree, Gribbon said. New acquisitions are sometimes announced in close succession because of the coincidental completion of long-term negotiations or granting of export licenses, as in the case of the Bartolommeo.