Paul Cezanne's maverick side explored in first-ever United States portrait show

What happens when an artist who devoted most of his career to painting landscapes and still lifes turns to the people he knows best? That is the central premise of an international show of 59 portraits by France’s Paul Cezanne on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the first ever dedicated to this aspect of his oeuvre. Of the 1,000 paintings the 19th century Provencal painter created during his lifetime, only about 160 are portraits, mostly of his close friends, family and domestic servants. But it is perhaps in that collection that the evolution of Cezanne’s individualistic, revolutionary vision is clearest, as he deconstructs space by boldly painting his wife with vanishing lips or applying layer upon layer of thick paint with a palette knife. He may have studied Old Master works, but Cezanne “exploded” traditional ways of representing space and volume on a picture plane, said Mary Morton, co-curator of the show and head of the National Gallery’s department of French p