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Like yesterday's blazing upthrust flame-colored stalks of blossom, today's group of paintings by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) suggests another improvised tool of accommodation with this present lowest chasm and pit of of the annual planetary cycle. Because Cezanne's still-life compositions and portraits and views of mountains are always and everywhere reproduced, it is easy to forget another of his favorite (and relatively more eccentric) subjects, i.e. the Bathers. He painted Bathers – alone and in groups, clothed and nude, separated by gender or happily integrated – at intervals throughout his career. Right at the outset during Cezanne's so-called "dark period" of the 1860s and early 70s he was already painting Bathers. These earliest manifestations of the series, these dark Bathers, are really quite peculiar-looking, like the one below. A beach scene in the dark. But how gorgeous he makes it, and you end up not needing an explanation.
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