One of the best shows in recent months lasted less than a week. I mean the exhibition in November of ten paintings by Paul Cézanne at Sotheby’s, New York, prior to their sale. This dazzling array of little pictures spanned the first two decades of the painter’s career, from the early 1860s through 1880. At one end was a fierce, hallucinatory self-portrait, painted when Cézanne was not yet twenty-five; at the other, a cool, carefully observed head of his friend, Victor Choquet, painted in 1880. The emphasis was on eccentric early efforts: witness a thickly troweled portrait of Uncle Dominique (c. 1866), posing patiently in a turban; the brutal L’Autopsie (1869), with its livid, propped-up corpse; and the first version of Une Moderne Olympia (c. 1870), Cézanne’s rock-hewn commentary on Manet’s celebrated nude, here folding in on herself instead of boldly displaying her assets, as though retreatin ...

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