Cézanne gets a catalogue on World-Wide-Web!

The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné will be available in the virtual world.

Type in the keyword “olive” to search on google and you’ll find Portrait de l’artiste au papier peint olivâtre (Portrait of the artist against olive-colored wallpaper), 1880–1881.

National Gallery, London

Mostly black-and-white reproductions were found in the 1996 catalogue of the Post-Impressionist painter, compiled by the late John Rewald, with Walter Feilchenfeldt and Jayne Warman. This was unpleasant for the admirers of Cézanne.

It’s a problem that will be remedied this year, with the launch of a web-based catalogue raisonné featuring full-color images of every confirmed Cézanne painting in existence. The access to the catalogue will be free.

“David Nash’s brainchild, about eight years ago, was to publish Cézanne’s paintings in color,” Warman explains. “So he started to gather images from wherever he could get them, and he had planned to publish a picture book, as far as I could tell. Then Walter and I became involved and convinced him that, really, online is the way to go”.

Nash adds: “The advantages of doing it as a website were so immediately apparent”.

With the web catalogue, users can search with any keyword related to a painting’s content, colors, exhibition history, owner, or many other attributes. This can lead to surprisingly specific explorations.

“Any catalogue raisonné in book form is out of date the moment it is published, because there is always nearly immediately new information available”, says Feilchenfeldt. “The big advantage is that a catalogue online can be constantly upgraded”.

In addition to Cézanne’s own work, the site will have contemporaneous photographs and postcards of the places he painted, photos and film footage of his exhibitions from more than a century ago. Warman foresees that these items will only increase as the public learns about the online catalogue and sends more contributions.

The website is scheduled to have a soft launch on May 12 2014. “We’re anxious to get it out”, says Warman. “It’s the kind of thing that’s organic. It will never be finished. It can never be finished”.