Cezanne at the National Gallery of Art

I went to see the exhibit "Cezanne in Provence" at the National Gallery in Washington. There is a show-within-the-show that arrives midway through the oils in the exhibit. In two rooms are 29 sheets of paper, each lightly touched. Their thoughtful, pale beauty -- tender and alerting -- refreshes the exhibit the way a demitasse of iced sorbet interrupts the feast.

Twenty-nine watercolors by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). He did the finest late in life. You seldom get to see so many. They're different from his canvasses, especially the early ones, whose thick and oily paint he spread like butter with his palette knife.

Cezanne's late watercolors aren't thick with color. They're largely white paper. That whiteness is, of course, the light source of these images, which appear, when you first see them, to be made of heart of light.

This is how he did them: With a bright sheet set before him, he would look at Provence. Sunbaked rock and tree, greenery and mountain. And while looking at the landscape he would touch the paper gently in two ways -- rhythmically, with a graphite pencil, and wetly, with a brush. His dripping brush left wet marks that, once they had dried, would leave stained into the paper tinted see-through veils in closely sequenced colors as thin as Chinese tea.

Lesser water color painters use their pencil for drawing the outlines of things, and for shading them, and their colors for coloring in. Not Cezanne. He didn't want flat, uninflected, Japanese-print colors. "Without volume," he insisted, "there are only cartoons." He didn't want outlines either. He called the tempting inclination to "circumscribe the contours with a black line" a "fault that must be fought at all costs." He had something else in mind.

Deconstructing beauty is usually a chump's game, but Cezanne's late watercolors seem to call for deconstruction, for the painter had a system, and he asks your eye to track it. You can count every separate pencil stroke. You can count each colored blotch.

Watercolors die. Many of Cezanne's, exposed too long to sunlight, have faded irretrievably. Those chosen for the show by curator Philip Conisbee are exceptionally bright. He could not have selected sheets much richer than these.