Thirteen years ago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a serious retrospective of Paul Cézanne’s work, featuring 100 paintings  and 80 of his drawings and watercolors in a huge blockbuster show that took Philadelphia by storm.
   This time around, “Cézanne and Beyond” is like a collection of ghost stories, cobbled together with Cézanne at the center as 18 artists attempt to both reconcile and embrace the impact of the master Impressionist’s work on their own.
   Perhaps the most blatant representation of the effect Cézanne had on his peers can be found in Fernand Léger’s “Woman in Blue” (1912), a wildly abstracted version of the famous “Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair” (1877). Léger, previously entrenched in Impressionism, was deeply affected by a 1907 Cézanne retrospective, and began to develop his own unique offshoot of Cubism as a result. In “Woman in Blue,” he works in sharp angles, tubes and multileveled points of views, but telltale evidence of Cézanne’s influence remains; his woman is given a small head in proportion to her body, her hands are demurely clasped before her in the same manner as Madame Cézanne’s, and the colors of red and blue appear in a final, undeniable tribute to the original master. Léger at least admits his joint inspiration/curse, once remarking that “the power of Cézanne was such that, to find myself, I had to go to the limits of abstraction.”
   In this case, the reference is obvious even in its abstraction, and, hanging in the same room as the original Cézanne, — plus Henri Matisse’s “Women in Blue” (1937) and Picasso’s “The Dream” (1932) — the connection is undeniable.
   Not all of the themes are quite as blatantly stated throughout the rest of the exhibition, however, as it encompasses a wide variety of schools and artists, hanging next to a sizeable number of Cézanne’s works.
 At times, the scale is staggering, and the sheer number of artists showcased can make it difficult to switch eras and genres quickly enough to comprehend the vital references. Pieces by Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns sometimes seem to be a stretch, but, as curator Joseph Rishel, who also organized the 1996 Cézanne show, noted, the show is purposefully curated with a lighter tone in mind. He compared his organization of the exhibit to a “dating service, utilizing matching skills in order to ricochet themes off of one another in an exchange of ideas.”
   The show reflects this mindset, introducing a twinge of irony and even humor in the sometimes oddly paired works. But this is not a historically driven, serious-minded retrospective of an artist’s work; rather, “Cézanne and Beyond” moves in a decidedly nonlinear fashion that promotes the appreciation of at-times bizarre themes and humorous juxtapositions.
   However, as the curator intended audiences to become lost in the subject matter rather than to be belabored with chronology or history, the exhibit largely lacks the traditional placards of biographical information and origin, and sometimes it is possible to distractedly disconnect from the actual artwork in an attempt to form some kind of art history timeline in your head. As refreshing as it is to lose oneself in themes, the human brain occasionally craves some sense of order.
   Also noticeably lacking is any kind of detailed biography about the man himself, which means that the common observer might not know how frequently Cézanne’s work was rejected by critics during the majory of his life (one critic noted that pregnant women should not view Cézanne’s portrait of Chocquet, fearing it would be detrimental to the unborn child’s birth). Also missing is any reference of Cézanne’s deference to Pissarro, whom he regarded highly, and from whom Cézanne inherited his style of short brushstrokes and lighter colors.
   At the same time, Philadelphia “did” Cézanne in a grand-scale, blockbuster fashion not too long ago, so perhaps the curators are banking on the fact that most people have soaked in enough historical details about the man to last for another decade or so, guided by the great “heartbeat” of the ’96 show, “The Large Bathers,” one of the PMA’s most treasured pieces.
   And maybe the curators are right. Philadelphia has seen Cézanne once, and it’s time to look at him through a completely different lens. With that in mind, “Cézanne and Beyond” does take things a step to the right or left of the traditional view, which is refreshing. This is an exhibit to spark conversations about the art world in general, and to introduce a decidedly cross-generational bent.
   Certainly, the works on display — both of Cézanne’s and of the other artists — are more than fascinating enough in their own right. But even more interesting is the study of the relationships between and among these artists. Though generally unrecognized during his lifetime, Cézanne has become a decidedly corporeal ghost to many artists throughout the years, haunting artists from Picasso to Matisse to Brice Marden with a tenacity that is both humorous and compelling.

Lindsay Warner can be reached at calendar@thebulletin.us