Cézanne, “The Card Players,” 1890-92, Metropolitan Museum of Art
I can’t wait to see the newly expanded “Card Players” when they return to New York!
According to Carol Vogel‘s report in today’s NY Times, the Metropolitan Museum’s iconic Cézanne painting, “The Card Players” has swollen eightfold! These guys have been sitting around too long and must have put on a lot of weight.
When last I saw them, the painting’s dimensions were a mere 25 3/4″ by 32 1/4 inches (as described in the museum’s online collection database). Now, Vogel reports, it measures a whopping 6-by-8 FEET! How did this happen?
The Met’s beefy card sharks are now in a temporary exhibition, Cézanne’s Card Players, at the Courtauld Gallery, London (which travels to the Met in February). So it must be the Brits who upped their ante. (Or was Vogel just bluffing?)
COMING SOON: a more serious report on another iconic Met Cézanne, related to a story published elsewhere yesterday but yet to make in onto the Times’ website, let alone its newspaper. (Meanwhile, my thanks go out to the devoted CultureGrrl reader who alerted me to the Cézanne expansion.)