Art: The Sister's Friend

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Wonderful things happen (sometimes) when a painting gets stolen. Last year the City Art Museum of St. Louis lent its $150,000 Cézanne. The Artist's Sister, to the museum at Aix-en-Provence in southern France, only to have it purloined in a comic-opera art theft. Last week St. Louis' Cézanne was back and on display, and worth $75,000 more than before.

The painting (along with seven other stolen Cézannes from elsewhere) turned up last-April, apparently after some undercover ransoming by insurance companies, in an abandoned car in Marseille. Though it had escaped serious damage when the thieves pulled it from its frame, the painting needed a new canvas backing. Kansas City Art Conservator James Roth set to work, found an unusually thick layer of glue beneath the torn fabric. He softened the rock-hard glue with wet packs, picked away with tweezers, gradually revealing the white-kerchiefed head of a woman, its strongly modeled face accented by deep red shadows.

The newly discovered work, actually an unfinished sketch in oil, is not included among the catalogued paintings of Cézanne, though it is similar to both The Artist's Sister (1867-69) and the Portrait of Marie Cézanne (1865-67). now in a German collection. Nevertheless. City Art Museum Director Charles Nagel believes that the discovery is a portrait of an unidentified peasant woman rather than a third view of sister.

For the time being. St. Louisans may view Nagel's bonanza at the City Art Museum, where, because Cézanne painted it upside down in relation to the other portrait, it is being displayed in a flipover frame. Ironically, the long-hidden Cézanne will eventually disappear again: to preserve the more valuable work, a new canvas liner will have to be glued back in place. But doing so will be painful. To many art lovers the unfinished portrait of the peasant woman has more warmth of life than the later, bolder Artist's Sister.