A Cold Plunge

It was the most precious French prize to fall into English hands since Joan of Arc. At 2 o'clock one morning last July, a large crate was off-loaded at London airport. Inside was a 51-in. by 76-in. oil painting by Paul Cezanne. Called Les Grandes Baigneuses, or The Bathers, it had been purchased by Britain's National Gallery for $1,400,000, the highest published price ever paid for a French painting. Unlike Joan of Arc, the English were not altogether sure that they wanted it.

While The Bathers underwent routine restoration, British critics debated the extravagance. To buy the work, a real estate developer, Max Rayne, had put up $700,000, and the tax-supported National Gallery and the Crown had kicked in the rest. British Art Critic Douglas Cooper carped that it was "an inordinate amount of the taxpayers' money." He wrote: "I can only laugh at the gullibility of those who are so blinded by shame and the magic of a name that they cannot recognize a most undesirable failure."

Margarine Purchase. Certainly the newly acquired Bathers is less finished --in academicians' terms--than the others. A much more highly modeled, carefully shaded version was bought by Pennsylvania's Barnes Foundation from Cezanne's dealer, Ambroise Vollard, in 1933. Another, and the largest version, was purchased three years later by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for $110,000. By comparison, the British buy (on which Cezanne worked from 1897 to 1906) seems sketchy, leading some critics to call it crude, while other experts see it as perched on the threshold of cubism.

Nonetheless, to the French, the sale was an irreparable loss of national patrimony. Both the Philadelphia Bathers and the National Gallery's new acquisition were sold from the collection of a staunch Gaul, the late Auguste Pellerin, margarine magnate and one of the original collectors of Cezanne. But French fury focused on Culture Minister Andre Malraux, who has had the power since 1961 to instigate the refusal of export permits for outstanding works of native art. "Doesn't he like Cezanne?" asked Critic Pierre Cabanne in the weekly Arts. "This painting belonged first and foremost to la France, to all of us."

Consolation Prize. Actually, of course, the painting belonged to the Pellerin family, which has already given five Cezannes to the Louvre (which has a total of 26). To sweeten the deal that allowed The Bathers to leave France, the Pellerins gave still another Cezanne, an 1868 portrait of a minor artist, Achille Emperaire, whose name is oddly stencilled on the canvas. Said a Culture Ministry official: "One would say that one was a counterpart to the other." Few Frenchmen were satisfied by what they thought a paltry pre-impressionist consolation prize by a man who laid down ground rules for cubism.

With the new Cezanne now up on the wall, British critics are beginning to concede that the prize was worth capturing. London Observer Critic Nigel Gosling, who had thought the black and white reproduction, first released by the National Gallery, suggested "something intellectual and contrived" about the painting, took it all back when he examined it in color. "Over every inch of the canvas the colors are laid on as lavish and delicate as the feathers on a tropical bird."

Some critics suggested that The Bathers' size was the justification of its high cost. Says National Gallery Director Sir Philip Hendy of the more than 6-ft.-wide Bathers: "Size is of no great value in a mediocre work. In a great artist, it spells adventure: thinking big, feeling big, painting big." Hendy attributes his museum's sudden jump of 26,000 in attendance chiefly to the new Cezanne. However proud, he is taking no chances. The controversial Bathers hangs alone in a guarded room, protected by a bulletproof Perspex plastic screen.

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