Boy in a Red Waistcoat

Pablo Picasso called Cézanne a "mother hovering over"; Henri Matisse said he was a "father to us all." As much as it is a portrait of a wistful young man, this painting is equally, and perhaps as essentially, an arrangement of colors and shapes. We can see it as a kind of inflection point for modern art -one with direct links to those younger artists’ work. For example, the greens and mauves Cézanne used in the boy’s face and hands are like the “wild” colors that won Matisse and his colleagues the title “fauve” (wild beast) -arbitrary touches with little connection to human flesh. The background —it is hard even to “read” it as floral-patterned drapery— is fractured and flattened into a kaleidoscope of angles and arcs in a way that foreshadows the reconstructed spaces of the first cubist experiments by Georges Braque and Picasso.