GRE阅读写作分析--Apples and oranges

　　PAUL CEZANNE, who died in 1906, cast a long shadow across 20th-century art. Pablo Picasso, who, with Georges Braque, invented cubism, called him my one and only master. Henri Matisse, Picassos rival for supreme artist of the modern period, described him as a sort of god of painting.

　　Critics and scholars may disagree about pinpointing the first stirrings of modern art, but few deny Czannes pivotal role as midwife His fracturing of form and flattening of space, especially evident in his landscapes and still lifes, laid the foundation for cubism, the revolutionary movement that planted radical ideas firmly in the minds of young painters in Europe and America.

　　Czannes influence was strongest during the generation after he died, but it has proved remarkably persistent. Only now, a century later, when electronic media such as photography and video have wrested control of the vanguard from painting, is Czannes shadow beginning to fade.

　　However, until mid-May he continues to display his authority at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has mounted an enchanting exhibition designed to validate the claims of Picasso, Matisse and 14 other legatees whose art has been shaped by Czannes example.

　　Czanne and Beyond juxtaposes about 60 paintings and watercolours by the French master with roughly twice that many by the others: Europeans such as Piet Mondrian, Fernand Lger, Max Beckmann and Alberto Giacometti, and AmericansMarsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly whose Apples is shown above.

　　The aim is to illuminate stylistic similarities and show how Czanne expanded the way artists think. Confronted by such iconic subjects as Mont St Victoire near Czannes home in Aix-en-Provenceand his magisterial still lifes of apples, they could no longer simply reproduce nature, they had to deconstruct it. The cubists provide the most vivid examples of this transformation but the most contemporary of the 16, especially Mr Kelly, Brice Marden and Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, have devised more subtle ways of incorporating Czannes principles into their work.

　　Czanne and Beyond is a beautiful and powerful collection of modern and post-modern art by some of the most talented painters of the past 100 years. It is also the most impressive survey of Czannes painting in America since a 1996 retrospective, also in Philadelphia . This time it is three exhibitions in one, courtesy of the last Old Master.