Sexy Art for Women 5.
Female Erotica and Feminine Beauty.
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PAUL CÉZANNE THE dilettante, avid for accounts of an artist’s eccentricities, will find abundant and varied material of this nature in half a hundred books written by critics of almost every nationality on that astounding and grotesque colossus, Cézanne. Perhaps no great artist in the world’s history has been so wantonly libelled, maligned and ridiculed as he. Nor has there ever been a painter of such wide influence so grossly misunderstood. Cézanne has been endowed with most fantastic powers, dismissed with a coup d’esprit for attributes he never possessed, and canonised for qualities he would have repudiated. Like Michelangelo he has been both the admiration and the mystery of critics. And he is at once the idol and the incubus of present-day artists. His letters alone have formed the technical basis of one great modern art school. A fragmentary phrase of his mentioning geometrical figures was seized upon by a Spaniard and made the foundation for another school. His mention of Poussin drove a horde of Scandinavians, Austrians and Bohemians to a contemplation of that artist. Cézanne’s very130 limitations have been the inspiration for an army of hardy imitators who believe it is more vital to imitate modernity than to reconstruct the past. Indeed it may be said that all art since Impressionism is divided into two groups, one which endeavours to develop some quality or qualities in Cézanne, the other which attempts the anachronism of resuscitating the primitive art of a simple-minded antiquity. For even this latter group, Cézanne is in part responsible. Did he not say that we must become classicists again by way of nature? And did this not give reactionary and servile minds ample excuse to cling with even greater passion to a dead and rigid past? In his great sense of order his disciples saw only immobility; their minds, redundant with parallels, harked back to the Egyptians. Thus has he been emulated: but, among all these branches shot out from the mother trunk, it can be stated incontestably that only one has understood him, has penetrated beneath the surface of his canvases, has realised his true gift to the art of the future. And this one, strangely enough, is the furthest removed from imitation. Cézanne’s biography is of value to the art student, for it embodies in concrete form the factors which motivated his aesthetic apperceptions. By Cézanne’s biography is meant, not the distorted interpretations of the incidents of his life, now so well known, or the superficial conclusions deduced by his biographers from hearsay; but those actions and temperamental characteristics which are impartially set down at first hand by Émile Bernard. To 131this chronicler we are indebted for practically all the authentic personal anecdotes of the artist. He had always admired Cézanne, and in 1904 a personal friendship was established between them, which endured until the latter’s death. After Cézanne had overcome parental objections and had definitely decided on an artist’s career, he spent much of his time in Paris. Many influences entered into his early life. He had met Zola at school and had been intimate with him. Through him he had become acquainted with Manet, and while he appreciated Manet’s friendliness, he could never understand that artist’s great popularity. He preferred Courbet as a painter, and studied him sedulously. His great influence, however, came from Pissarro. For that persuasive Jew’s memory he always harboured a deep respect. Cézanne’s youth, if one may call forty years a youth, was, as he himself put it, filled mostly with “literature and laziness.” Not until his final renunciation of city life and his return to the south did his best work begin. At first he made friends timidly. He was a man who could not brook opposition, who was extremely sensitive to rebuffs; and those good people of provincial France were brusquely aggressive in all their beliefs and traditions. At every thought he expressed they sneered. He clashed violently and disastrously with the local celebrities who had the sanction of the established schools. In Paris he had been a frank and even garrulous companion; but at each contact with the narrow, self-centered and righteous community of Aix, he withdrew into himself. His natural spontaneity and good-fellowship turned inward, became restrained and pent-up. He grew sensitive and wary, and in later life this defensive attitude developed into abnormal irritability. To those132 who could understand, however, he unburdened himself on all subjects, and his opinions were always the result of profound thought. But he never entirely divulged his methods. If questions became too pertinent, he consciously led his interrogators astray. “They think I’ve got a trick,” he would cry, “and they want to steal it. But nobody will ever put his hooks on me (pas un ne me mettra le grappin dessus).” He had already suffered enough at the hands of self-seekers. He had been extravagantly ridiculed by his boyhood friends. He had been robbed and bullied by his hired architect; and having money he had been considered prey by the village widows. He permitted himself to be browbeaten because of his antipathy to any kind of friction. It is small wonder he became misanthropic. The popular opinion of Aix was that he was crazy, and his chroniclers, almost without exception, have echoed this belief. But, to the contrary, his was the highest type of the creative mind, always in search for something better, never satisfied with present results; the type of mind which gives no thought to the acquisition or retention of property. His joy lay in his creations of the moment, but his desires were far ahead. Some one who showed him one of his early treasured canvases was ridiculed for liking “such things.” Every day Cézanne watched his evolution: to him this progress was the essential thing. He left his unfinished works in the meadows, in studio corners, in the nursery. They have been found in the most out-of-the-way places. He had given large numbers of them to chance friends on the impulse of the moment. His son cut out the windows of his masterpieces for amusement, and his133 servant and his wife used his canvases for stove cleaners. He saw his work put to these uses tranquilly, knowing that later he would do better, that he would “realise” more fully. His mind was too exalted to be impatient with the pettinesses of life. His great aversion was politics, and unlike Delacroix, he was above nationality. During the Franco-Prussian War he hid with a relative that he might pursue his own ideal rather than sacrifice himself for the protection of his tormentors. What did he care for France when his whole admiration was for Italy and Holland? Painting, not the preservation of nationality, was his innermost concern. In evading conscription he called down upon him the public abuse which such actions evoke. But it passed him by: he was too absorbed in his work to heed, just as later he was too engrossed to follow his mother’s hearse to the funeral or to seek a market for his pictures. At every step he paused to study the rapports of line, of light, of shadow, of colour. At table, in conversation or at church, he never for a moment lost sight of his desire. One can find a parallel for this intellectually ascetic creature only in the old martyrs. He was the type that renounces all the benefits and usufructs of life in order to follow the face of a dream. With such self-confidence no adversity could daunt him, no logic draw from him a compromise, no flourish of enthusiasm distract him from his course. Zola says of him: “He is made in one piece, stiff and hard under the134 hand; nothing bends him; nothing can wrench from him a concession.” This quality of character was a thing which Zola, the slave of words, could not understand. Cézanne, through much contact with letters, saw the danger of literature to the painter. “Literature,” he wrote, “expresses itself through abstractions, while painting, by means of drawing and colour, makes concrete the artist’s sensations and perceptions.” Zola libelled him at great length in L’Œuvre. Cézanne’s reply was simply that Zola had a “mediocre intelligence” and was a “detestable friend.” In their youth Cézanne took the ascendency over Zola in Latin and French verse; even in his old age he could recite long passages from Virgil, Lucretius and Horace. He knew literature and was able to judge it. His criticisms of Zola are as penetrating as any that realist has called forth. His reputation for barbarism, vulgarity and ignorance has little foundation in fact. To be sure, he did not desert his work for social activities: he despised the polished and shallow wit of men like Whistler: and he bitterly attacked those painters who strove for salon popularity. It is therefore not incredible that the accusations against him were but the world’s retaliation for having been ignored by him. Cézanne’s work from the first contained the undeniable elements of greatness. In his first, almost black-and-white still-lives, executed under the influence of Courbet (it is not tenable that they were done under Manet, as is commonly believed: they are too solidly formed for that), there is exhibited a passionate admiration for volume and for full and rich chiaroscuro. We are conscious of the artist’s gropings for those135 fundamentals he was finally to discover in the seclusion of his rugged country of the south. Even his early figure pieces carry this sensual delight in objectivity to a greater height than did Delacroix by whom they were inspired. And they attest to a freedom from academic principles which was not surpassed by the Impressionists. These paintings are classic in the best sense; in them is an orderliness which Manet and the Impressionists never possessed. Yet, withal, they are only the results of the literary influences from Delacroix and of his admirations for other painters. They are not purely creative, but the qualities of creation are there. To those who can read the signs, they unmistakably indicate the beginnings of a full and masterly growth. His potentialities began to actualise with his comprehension of El Greco and the Venetians. From that period on his power for organisation steadily developed, and it was still advancing at the time of his death. But organisation touched only the compositional side of his work: it was the resultant element. His inspiration toward colour which emanated from Pissarro was what precipitated him irrevocably into painting. Colour, by presenting so many problems, claimed him entirely. To that Impressionist he owes much, not to that artist’s actual achievement, but to the136 incentive he furnished. During his intimacy with Pissarro, Cézanne completed his assimilation of all the traits in others which were relative to himself. His beliefs and intransigencies became crystallised. The road opened into fields where that new element of colour, which had taken on so vital a significance, led to an infinitude of emotional possibilities. Though Cézanne never completely became a defender of Pissarro’s theories, he always looked upon the Impressionists as innovators whose importance as such could not be overestimated. He realised that without them he himself would not have existed, and that they had sketched out a preface to all the great art which was to come. Without them there undoubtedly would have been great artists, but he knew that a painter with the means of a Renoir is greater than one who, though equally competent in organisation, is limited in the mechanics of method. Restricted means permit only of restricted expression. The Impressionists, having made an advance in aesthetic procedure, facilitated the experimentations of Cézanne. But he in turn recognised the restrictions of the Impressionists’ methods: indeed, he saw that their theories could apply only to a very circumscribed aesthetic field; and he was not content with them. He studied assiduously in the Louvre and absorbed the myriad impulses which had impelled the great masters of the past. The Louvre and Pissarro constituted his primer. From the one he got his impetus toward voluminous organisation; from the other, his impetus toward colour. From their fragmentary teachings he went on to greater achievements. There is little or no documentary history of Cézanne’s early years. Consequently his youthful admirations are not recorded in detail. But we know enough to gauge his early tastes. He travelled in Holland and Belgium, and though he never went to Italy, he greatly admired Tintoretto and Veronese. He had a high esteem for that master of style, Luca Signorelli, who, had he not gone into architecture, might have become one of the world’s great painters. In his studio Cézanne kept a water-colour by Delacroix hung face to the wall that it might not fade, and beside it a lithograph by Daumier whom137 he regarded highly. We may be sure he fully understood the limitations of these men aside from their ambitions. To him they were points of departure rather than goals to aspire to. Both of them he surpassed early in his career. Cézanne admired also the Dutch and Flemish masters. He had an old and dilapidated book of their reproductions full of bad lithographs done by inferior craftsmen. But he overlooked all their defects in his remembrance of the originals. Here, as elsewhere, he ignored those details which to another would have militated against enjoyment. His mind was too comprehensive and analytic to be led astray by the flaws on an otherwise perfect work: it penetrated to the essentials first and remained there. Thus it was in his work. The exact reproduction of nature in any of its manifestations never held him for a moment. He saw its eternal aspect aside from its accidental visages caused by fluctuating lights. In this he was diametrically opposed to the Impressionists who recorded only nature’s temporary phases. They captured and set down its atmosphere and were satisfied. Cézanne, regarding its atmosphere as an ephemerality, portrayed the lasting force of light. “One is the master of one’s model and above all of one’s means of expression,” he wrote. “Penetrate what is before you, and138 persevere in expressing yourself as logically as possible.” It is this penetration which separates Cézanne by an impassable gulf from those purely sensitive artists who are content with the merely physiological effects of an emotion. In the process of penetrating he became familiar with those undercurrents of causation from which has sprung the greatest art of all ages. In a Cézanne of the later years not only is the form poised in three dimensions, but the very light also is poised. We feel in Cézanne the same completion we experience before a Rubens that emotion of finality caused by the forms moving, swelling and grinding in an eternal order; and added to this completion of form, heightening its emotive power, is the same final organisation of illumination. The light suggests no particular time of day or night; it is not appropriated from morning or afternoon, sunlight or shadow. So delicate and perfectly balanced is this light that, with the22 raising or the lowering of the curtain in the room where the picture hangs, it will darken or brighten perfectly, logically, proportionately with the outer light. It lives because it is painted with the logic of nature. Whether the picture be hung in a bright sunlight or in half gloom, it is a creature of its environment. Its planes, like those of nature, advance and recede, swell and shrink. In short, they are dynamic.
If this feat of Cézanne’s seems to border on metaphysics, the reason is that there has been no precedent for it in history. It was, in fact, a purely technical accomplishment based wholly on the most stringently empirical research. The manner in which he arrived at this achievement may not be entirely insusceptible of explanation. It has been pointed out how the Impressionists broke up surfaces into minute sensitive parts, some of which reflected or absorbed more than others. That which gives us our sensation of colour is the atomic preponderance of one of these attributes. Thus if an atom or combination of atoms reflects highly it translates itself through the retina into our brains as a high force, namely, as a yellow. If an 139atom absorbs more than it reflects, it takes and retains the reflective force of light, and, in discharging this limited power, produces in us the sensation of blue. Now, that point on a round object where the light is strongest is the point nearest the light. As the planes of the object curve away from the light they diminish in brilliancy. The further the plane from the point nearest the illumination, the less light it has to reflect. Consequently it will appear bluish. The Impressionists were satisfied with recording this blue of shadow merely as the complement of the light which was yellow. But Cézanne studied each degradation of tone from yellow to blue. In this study he discovered that light always graduates from warm to cold in precisely the same way; and, that, provided the model is white, each step down the tonic scale is the same on no matter what object. But this discovery was little more than a premise. He was now necessitated to solve the problem of just how much the local colour of an object modifies the natural colours of the light and shadow which reveal that object.140 In all coloured objects the modifications are different, according to the laws of colour complementaries and admixtures. By keeping these laws always in mind, and by applying his discovery of the consistent gradations of the colours of light, he was able to paint in such a way that, no matter how much or how little outside light of a uniform quality fell on his canvas, the colours he had applied would, as they retreated from the most highly illuminated point on the picture, absorb a graduatingly smaller quantity of actual light, and would thus create emotional form in the same manner that nature creates visual form. Hence, the planes in a Cézanne canvas advance or recede en masse, retaining their relativity, as the eye excludes or receives a greater or a lesser quantity of light; and since the light never remains the same for any period of time, the planes bulge toward the spectator and retract from him with each minute variation of illumination. In all painting prior to Cézanne, the natural variations of light distorted the objects of a picture: that is to say, the colours of external light changed the character of the applied colours, making some advance and others retreat; and because these applied colours were not put on with the exact logic of natural gradations, the proportions between them could not be maintained. Thus in one light certain objects advanced more than others, and in another light certain objects receded more than others. Their relativity was lost. Hence, not only was the picture’s composition and balance altered, but the appearance of its objects belied the actual measurements. These variations were so small that the untrained eye might not have seen them, any more than an untrained ear may not detect the slight variations of pitch in music. But to the man whose eye is trained, even to the degree that a141 good musician’s ear is trained, pictures appear “off” in the same way that a poorly tuned piano sounds “off” to the sensitive musician. Cézanne, had he never achieved any intrinsically great art, would still be a colossal figure in painting because of this basic and momentous discovery. The Impressionists had been content with the mere discovery of light. Their theory was, not that one can enjoy the natural light of out-of-doors more than the abstract light in a canvas, but that, since every one of nature’s moods is the result of degrees of illumination, these moods can only be recorded by the depiction of natural light; and therefore out-of-door light is an aesthetic means. Cézanne recognised the limitations of this theory, but considered it an admirable opening for higher achievement. He thereupon stripped the Impressionists’ means of their ephemeral plasticity, and, by using the principles, and not the results, of nature’s method, gave them an eternal plasticity which no great art of the future can afford to ignore, and which in time, no doubt, will lead to the creation of an entirely new art. Although Cézanne had many times given out broad hints of his methods, his friends and critics were too busy trying to discover other less concise qualities in his work to appreciate the full significance of his occasional words. Herein lies the main reason why an untechnical onlooker142 and admirer can never sound the depths of art. He is too detached, for, not having followed its logical evolution from the simplest forms to the most complex, he is unable to understand the complicated mechanism on which it is built. Critics for the most part are writers whose admiration for art has been born in front of the completed works of the great masters. Unable to comprehend them fully, they turn to a contemplation of the simple and naïf. Their process of valuation is thus reversed. Great art is as a rule too compounded for their analytical powers, and they end by imagining that the primitives and the mosaicists represent the highest and most conscious type of the creative will. What to them is incomprehensible appears of little value; and here we find the explanation for the popular theory that the test of great art is its simplicity, its humanitas, its obviousness. Persons who would not pretend to grasp without study the principles of modern science, still demand that art be sufficiently lucid to be comprehended at once by the untutored mind. A physician may tell them of143 profundities in medical experimentation, and they will accept his views as those of an expert in a science of which they are ignorant. But when an artist tells them of recondite principles in aesthetics they accuse him of an endeavour to befuddle them. The isolation of bacilli and the application of serums and anti-toxins are mysteries which call for respect. The equally scientific and obscure principles of colour and form are absurd imaginings. And yet without a scientific basis art is merely an artifice the New Thought in aesthetics. Readily comprehensible painting is no further advanced than readily comprehensible therapeutics. Émile Bernard was little different from the average critic. In attributing to Cézanne his own limitations, he restricted what he might otherwise have learned. But the literalness with which he recorded the artist’s sayings makes his book of paramount interest. We read for instance that Cézanne once remarked: “Here is something incontestable; I am most affirmative on this point: An optical sensation is produced in our visual organ by what we class as light, half tone or quarter tone, each plane being represented by colour sensations. Therefore light as such does not exist for the painter.” By this he broadly hinted at an absolute relativity between the degrees of light forces a relativity which translates itself to us as colour gradations. Again Cézanne said: “One should not say model but modulate.... Drawing and colour are not distinct; as one paints one draws. The more the colours harmonise [namely: follow nature’s logical sequences], the more precise is the drawing.” Precision in drawing to Cézanne meant among other things the ability to produce volume. Again: “When colour is richest, form is at its plenitude. In the contrasts and rapports of tones lies the secret of drawing and of modelling.” In a letter he wrote: “Lines parallel to the horizon create vastness (donnent l’étendue), whether it be a section of nature, or if you choose, of the spectacle that the Pater omnipotens aeternus Deus spreads before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. And since nature for us human beings exists in depth rather than surfacely, the painter is necessitated to introduce 144into light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to make the air felt.” These observations are of paramount interest because they touch on the essential principles of his esthétique. They are at once an explanation and a measure of his significance. Like all great truths they appear simple after we know them, or rather after we have experienced them. Daumier might have stated with certitude the same principles in relation to tone, for he always practised them qualifiedly. Though his means were limited, he employed those means as fully as his materials permitted. Cézanne, because he possessed the greater element colour, constructed his canvases as nature presents its objects to the sight, as a unique whole. With all of the older painters drawing came first, chiaroscuro second and colour third three distinct steps, each one conceived separately. Daumier was the first painter to approach simultaneity in execution. Ignorant of colour, he conceived his drawing and chiaroscuro together. Cézanne went a step beyond, and conceived his drawing, form and colour as one and the same, in the exact manner that these qualities, united in each natural object, present themselves to the eye. His method was the same as the mechanism of human vision. Compared with Cézanne, Monet was only145 fragmentary. Not only in methods did they differ but in objective as well. The Impressionists’ aim was to reproduce nature’s externals: Cézanne’s desire was to reproduce its solidity. Both achieved their ends. Cézanne’s pictures are as impenetrable as sculpture. Every object seems hewn out of marble. Solidity alone, however, though a high and necessary virtue of painting, is a limited quality. Unless it is made mobile it gives off the impression of rigidity. It is to painting what the rough clay is to sculpture the dead material of art. In order for it to engender aesthetic empathy it must be organised, that is, it must be harmonised and poised in three dimensions in such a way that, should we translate our bodies into its spacial forms, we should experience its dynamism. This Cézanne did, and therein lay his claim to greatness. In his best canvases there seems no way of veering a plane, of imagining one plane changing places with another, unless every plane in the picture is shifted simultaneously. Cézanne’s solidity is organised like the volumes in44 Michelangelo’s best sculpture. Move an arm of any one of these statues, and every other part of the figure, down to the smallest muscle, must change position. Their plasticity, like Cézanne’s, is perfect. There is a complete ordonnance between every minute part, and between every group of parts. Nothing can be added or taken away without changing the entire structure in all its finest details. Cézanne once said to Ambroise Vollard, a picture merchant, who had called attention to a small uncovered spot on a canvas which the artist had pronounced finished: “You will understand that if I were to put something there haphazardly, I should have to start the whole picture over from that point.” The individual solidity of Cézanne’s colour planes is due to the eternalism and absolutism of his light. But it was146 the other qualities which entered into his art which brought about the interdependence of the parts and evoked the sensation of unity we feel before them. One of these qualities was a perfect rapport of lines. Cézanne, better than any other painter up to his day, understood how one slanting line modifies its direction when coming in contact with another line moving from a different direction. When colour was first investigated realistically, artists saw that two pure complementary tints, when juxtaposed, tended to draw away from each other and to differentiate themselves. Therefore they set about to study the influence that one colour has upon another, assuming that lines were more static and absolute and consequently did not change at contact with other lines. Cézanne recognised the fallacy of this assumption, and wrote: “I see the planes criss-crossing and overlapping, and sometimes the lines seem to fall.” He realised that the laws governing the opposition of line are most important in the production of the emotion of movement. In all the old painters this emotion was engendered by just such devices, but with them the laws were only dimly suspected instincts rather than applied science. In contemplating their work we seem torn by some physical impulse to follow one line, but cannot, because the lure of the other line is equally great. To the man of sensitive and trained eyesight this physical emotion is incited also by nature, only nature is more complex than art and is without aesthetic finality. Thus in regarding the147 rapports of two lines in nature, one leaning to the right and one to the left, the highly sensitive person feels unrest and strife, and subconsciously produces order and calm by imagining a third line which harmonises the original two. Cézanne looked upon nature with perhaps the most delicate and perceptive eye a painter has ever possessed, and his vision became a theatre for the violent struggles of some one line against terrible odds, for the warring clashes of inharmonious colours. He saw in objective nature a chaos of disorganised movement, and he set himself the task of putting it in order. In studying the variations and qualifications of linear directions in his model, he discovered another method of accentuating the feeling of dynamism in his canvases. He stated lines, not in their static character, but in their average of fluctuation. We know that all straight lines are influenced by148 their surroundings, that they appear bent or curved when related to other lines. The extent to which a line is thus optically bent is its extreme of fluctuability. Cézanne determined this extreme in all of his lines, and by transcribing them midway between their actual and optical states, achieved at once their normality and their extreme abnormality. The character, direction and curve of all lines in a canvas change with every shifting of the point of visual contact. Since the unity of a picture is different from every focus, all the lines consequently assume a slightly different direction every time our eye shifts from one spot to another. Cézanne, by recording the mean of linear changeability, facilitated and hastened this vicissitude of mutation. Another contribution he made to painting was his application of the stereoscopic function of the eye to all models by means of colour. From the earliest art to Cézanne, objects have been portrayed as if conceived in vacuo, with absolute and delimited contours. Such portrayals are directly opposed to our normal vision, for whenever we focus our sight on any natural object whatever, each eye records a different perspective representation of that object; there is a distinct binocular parallax. Certain parts are seen by one eye which are invisible to the other. But these two visual impressions are perceived simultaneously, combined in one image; that is to say: the optic axes converge at such an angle that both the right and left monocular impressions are superimposed. The single impression thus produced is one of perspective and relief. This is a rudimentary law of optics, but on it our accuracy of vision has always depended. In the lenticular stereoscope the eye-glasses are marginal portions of the same convex lens, which, when set edge to edge, deflect the rays from the picture so as to strike the eyes as if coming from an intermediate point. By this bending of the rays the two pictures become one impression, and present the appearance of solid forms as in nature. The problem of how to transcribe on a flat surface in a single picture the effect later produced by a stereoscope with two pictures, has confronted painters for hundreds of years. Leonardo da Vinci in his Trattato della Pittura recorded the fact that our vision encompasses to a slight degree everything that passes before it; that we see around all objects; and that this encircling sight gives us the sensation of rotundity. But neither he, nor149 any artist up to Cézanne, was able to make aesthetic use of the fact. The vision of all older painting (although by the use of line and composition it became plastic because used as a detail) was the vision of the man with one eye, for a one-eyed man sees nature as a flat plane: only by association of the relative size of objects is he capable of judging depth. Cézanne saw the impossibility of producing a double vision by geometric rules, and approached the problem from another direction. By understanding the functioning elements of colour in their relation to texture and space, he was able to paint forms in such a way that each colour he applied took its relative position in space and held each part of an object stationary at any required distance from the eye. As a result of his method we can judge the depth and sense the solidity of his pictures the same as we do in nature. Cézanne was ever attempting to solve the problem of the dynamics of vision. An analysis of his pictures often reveals a uniform leaning of lines a tendency of all the objects to precipitate themselves upon a certain spot, like the minute flotsam on a surface of water being sucked through a drain-hole. We find an explanation for this convergence in one of his letters. He says: “In studying nature closely, you will observe that it becomes concentric. I mean that on an orange, an apple, a ball or a head there is a culminating point; and this point, despite150 the strong effects of light and shadow which are colour sensations, is always the nearest to our eye. The edges of objects retreat toward a centre which is situated on our horizon.” It is small wonder that Cézanne, obsessed with the idea of form and depth, should have had little admiration for his contemporaries, Van Gogh and Gauguin, both of whom were workmen in the flat. He let pass no opportunity of expressing himself on these artists who of late years have become so popular. Van Gogh was to him only another Pointillist; and he called Gauguin’s work “des images Chinoises,” adding, “I will never accept his entire lack of modelling and gradation.” Does not this explain his aversion to the primitives in whom he saw but the rudiments of art? How could Cézanne, preoccupied with the most momentous problems of aesthetics, take an interest in enlarged book illuminations, when the most superficial corner of his slightest canvas had more organisation and incited a greater aesthetic emotion than all the mosaics in S. Vitale at Ravenna? Cézanne was never attracted by the facial expressions, the manual attitudes, or the graceful poses of his models. The characteristics of materiality meant nothing to him. He was perpetually searching for something more profound, and began his art where the average painter leaves off. Realistic attributes are interesting only as decoration; they are indicative of the simplicity of man’s mind; they are unable to conduce to an extended aesthetic experience. Van Gogh and Gauguin said well what they had to say, but it was so slight that it is of little interest to us today. We demand a greater stimulus than an art of two dimensions can give; our minds instinctively extend themselves into space. So it was151 with Cézanne. He left no device untried which would give his work a greater depth, a more veritable solidity. He experimented in colour from this standpoint, then in line, then in optics. With the results of this research he became possessed of all the necessary factors of colossal organisation. He knew that, were these factors rightly applied, they would produce a greater sensation of weight, of force and of movement than any artist before him had succeeded in attaining. Their application presented to Cézanne his most difficult problem. He must use his discoveries in these three fields in such a way that the very disposition of weights would produce that perfect balance of stress and repose, out of which emanates all aesthetic movement. The simplest manifestation of this balance is found in the opposition of line; but in order to complete this linear adjustment there must be an opposition of colours which, while they must function as volumes, must also accord with the character of the natural object portrayed. In short, there must be an opposition of countering weights, not perfectly balanced so as to create a dead equality, but rhythmically related so that the effect is one of swaying poise. Obviously this could not be accomplished on a flat surface, for the emotion of depth is a necessity to the recognition of equilibrium. Cézanne finally achieved this poise by a plastic distribution of volumes over and beside spacial vacancies. He mastered this basic principle of the hollow and the bump152 only after long and trying struggles and tedious experimentations. He translated it into terms of his own intellection: to the extent that there was order within him so was he able to put order into his pictures. This vision of his was intellectual rather than optical; and M. Bernard unnecessarily tells us that, so sure was Cézanne of his justification, he placed his colours on canvas with the same absolutism he used in expressing himself verbally. His art was his thought given concrete form through the medium of nature. His painting was the result of a mental process an intellectual conclusion after it had been weighed, added to, substracted from, modified by exterior considerations, and at last brought forth purged and clarified and as nearly complete as was his development at the time. For this reason Cézanne resented the presence of people while he worked. To attain his ends his mind had to be concentrated on its ultimate ambition. It could support no disturbing factors. Even though he had no trick which might be copied, he once said to a friend: “I have never permitted anyone to watch me while I work. I refuse to do anything before anyone.” Had he allowed spectators to stand over him he probably would have fatigued them, for his work progressed by single strokes interspersed by long periods of reflection and analysis. M. Bernard would hear him descend to the garden a score of times during the day’s work, sit a moment and rush back to the studio as if some153 solution had presented itself to him suddenly. At other times he would walk back and forth before his picture awaiting the answer to a problem before him. It is such deliberateness in great artiststhat has, curiously enough, acquired for them a reputation for esotericism. Their moments of deep contemplation and their sudden plunges into labour have been interpreted as periods of intellectual coma shot through occasionally by “divine flashes of inspiration” coming from an outside agent. The reverse is true, however. An artist retains his sentiency at all times. He necessarily works consciously, with the same intellectual labours as a scientist. A painter can no more produce a great picture unwittingly than an inventor can construct an intricate machine unwittingly. They are both labourers in the most plebeian sense. Cézanne’s hatred for facile and thoughtless workmen who continually entertain amateurs, was monumental. To him they were pupils who, by learning a few rules, were able to paint conventional pieces after the manner of thousands who had preceded him. They represented the academicians with whom every country is overrun the suave and satisfied craftsmen who epitomise mediocrity, whose appeal is to minds steeped in pedantry and conservatism. In France they come out of the government-run Beaux-Arts school to which the incompetents of both America and England 154flock. Cézanne harboured a particular enmity for that school; anyone who had passed through it aroused his scorn. “With a little temperament anyone can be an academic painter,” he said. “One can make pictures without being a harmonist or a colourist. It is enough to have an art sense and even this art sense is without doubt the horror of the bourgeois. Thus the institutes, the pensions and the honours are only made for cretins, farceurs and drolls.” In writing of Cézanne one is led to make a comparison between him and his great compatriot, Renoir, for it is almost unbelievable that one century could have produced two such radically different geniuses. Renoir, first of all, was not an innovator: he was the consummation of Impressionistic means. In Cézanne, to the contrary, we see a man dissatisfied with the greatest results of others, ever tortured by the search for something more final, more potent. “Let us not be satisfied with the formulas of our wonderful antecedents,” he said many times, and he might have added, “and of our wonderful contemporaries.” Renoir was the apex of an art era, while Cézanne was the first segment of a greater and vaster cycle. Renoir, by mastering his means at an early date, acquired a technical facility to which Cézanne, ever on the hunt for deeper conceptions, never attained. Renoir’s genius was for linear rhythm. In the acquisition of this there entered, in varying degree, form, colour and light; but the line itself was his preoccupation. Cézanne’s genius was for plastic volume out of which the rhythmic line resulted. That is: the one constructed his creations out of colour and made colour appear like form; while in the other’s creations, which are the result of colour, the colour is felt to be form. In Renoir is recognised the solidity and depth of form, while in Cézanne the colour is a functional element whose dynamism gives birth to form which is felt subjectively. Renoir synthesises nature’s forms, by grouping them in such a way that the lines move and are harmonious. Cézanne looks for the synthesis in each subject he sits before, and instead of grouping his forms arbitrarily, he penetrates155 to their inherent synthesis. This is why almost every one of his pictures is built on a different synthetic form. His penetration gave him at each essay a different vision of the organisms of a particular subject, a vision which varied as the subject varied. In Renoir movement is attained by relating the lines: Cézanne has produced harmony by accentuating their differences. In the former the lines lead smoothly and fluently into others, until they all culminate in a line which carries the movement to a finality; while in the latter we feel little of that suavity of sequence: the lines are formed by the spaces between his volumes rather than by linear continuation. Cézanne, if less pleasing, is the more powerful; and with all his lack of suavity he is the more complex and less monotonous. The extraordinary imprévu of his formal developments and his unique manner of stating parallels recall the symphonic works of Beethoven. The ensembles of both are made up of an infinitude of smaller forms, and both display a colossal power of absoluteness in setting forth each smallest form. Renoir’s work is more on the lines of Haydn. After Michelangelo there was no longer any new inspiration for sculpture. After Cézanne there was no longer any excuse for it. He has made us see that painting can present a more solid vision than that of any stone image. Against modern statues we can only bump our heads: in the contemplation of modern painting we can exhaust our intelligences. Cézanne is as much a reproach to sculptors as Renoir is to those 156who continue to use Impressionist methods. He is the great prophet of future art, as well as the consummator of the realistic vision of his time. Both men deformed nature’s objects Renoir slightly to meet the demands of consistency in his preconceived compositions; Cézanne to a greater extent in order to make form voluminous. Some of his deformations resulted from extraneous line forces which, when coming in contact with an object’s contour, made it lean to the right or left, or in some other way take on an abnormal appearance as of convexity or concavity. M. Bernard thinks these irregularities in Cézanne the result of defective eyesight. But such an explanation is untenable. There is abundant evidence to show that, to the contrary, they are the result of a highly sensitised sight a sight which simultaneously calls up the complementary of the thing viewed, whether it be a line, a colour or a tone. This double vision is only a dependency of the plastic mind which, instead of approaching a problem from the nearest side, throws itself automatically to the opposite side, and, by thus obtaining a double approach, arrives at a fuller comprehension. While slanting his line and distorting his volumes Cézanne was unconsciously moulding the parts to echo the organisation of the whole. In turning his pictures into block-manifestations, he strove for a result which would conduce to a profounder aesthetic pleasure than did the linear movements of Renoir. After we have157 enjoyed Renoir’s rhythms we can lay them aside for the time as we can a very beautiful but simple melody. The force of Cézanne strikes us like that of a vast bulk or a mountain. Contemplating his work is like coming suddenly face to face with an ordered elemental force. At first we are conscious only of a shock, but when our wonder has abated, we find ourselves studying the smaller forms which go into the picture’s making. In the 1902 Baigneuses of Renoir each separate figure is a beautiful and complete form which fits into and becomes part of the general rhythm. In Cézanne the importance of parts is entirely submerged in the effect of the whole. Here is the main difference between these two great men: we enjoy each part of Renoir and are conducted by line to a completion; in Cézanne we are struck simultaneously by each interrelated part. Viewing a canvas of the latter is like going out into the blazing sunlight from the cool sombreness of a house. At first we are aware only of the force of the light, but as we gradually become accustomed to the glare, we begin to perceive separately objects which before had been only a part of the general impression. The fact that Cézanne invariably spoke of the “motif” should have given his friends a clue to his conception of composition. Before him composition had been to a great extent the formation of a simple melody of line in three dimensions, constructed by the forms of objects. It corresponded to the purely melodious in music, the opening of the theme, its sequence of phrasing and the finale. Cézanne chose a motif, and in each movement of his picture it is to be found, varied, elaborated, reversed and developed. Each part of his canvas is a beginning, yet each158 part, though distinct as a form, is perfectly united both with the opening motif and with every variation of it.
In this little-understood side of Cézanne’s genius lies an infinitude of possibilities. Without an ability to organise, all his knowledge is worthless to the painter. He himself could apply it, and his understanding of the exact adaptability of a form to a hollow permitted him to express his knowledge with a force his followers lack. His sensitiveness to spaces and the characters of his forms recall at times the works of Mokkei who used protuberances and hollows (namely: accidents of portraiture and landscape) to enrich and diversify form. Nature to Cézanne was not simple, and he never depicted it thus. Even in his bathing pieces, whose disproportions are deplored by many, the composition is minutely conceived, not on a simple harmonic figure, but on complicated oppositional planes. Not only are the surface forms perfectly adapted to a given space, but the directions taken by these forms are as solidly indicated and the vacancies made by them are as solidly filled in, as in a Rubens. Indeed these canvases, as block-manifestations, are nearly as perfect as the pictures of El Greco who was the greatest master of this kind of composition. Cézanne should be numbered among the experimenters in art. With him, as with the Impressionists, the desire was to learn rather than to utilise discoveries. The painters from Courbet to Cézanne were the first to usher in an authentically realistic art mode, and they were also the first who sensed the possibilities of inanimate reality for aesthetic organisation. Others before159 them had regarded nature strictly en amateur, using only the human body for abstract purposes. Even Michelangelo said that aside from it there was nothing worth while. These modern innovators refuted his assertion by proving the contrary, namely: by introducing order into chaotic nature. Their simple arrangements, however, would not have satisfied Michelangelo who, like all men who come at a florescence when the lessons have been learned and it remains only to apply them, demanded an arbitrary organisation which should be not only ordered but composed. Cézanne did little composing in the melodic sense of the word. He stopped at the gate of great composition which, after pointing the future way, he left for his successors to enter. His synthetic interest was limited to the eternal fugue qualities of nature. He undoubtedly saw the futility of creating polyphonic composition from lemons and napkins, but he had not found a menstruum in which the qualities of his materials would disappear. The old masters had done all that was possible with the recognisable human body; Cézanne’s desires for the purification of painting kept him from attempting to improve on their medium. Among a great scope of oil subjects one cannot say through which of them Cézanne has exerted the strongest influence. His landscapes have made as many disciples as his portraits, and his figure pieces and still-lives are universally copied. But his greatest work, his water-colours, has almost no following. In these he found his most facile and fluent expression. His method of working in oil had always been the posing of small, slightly oblong touches of colour which gave, his canvases the appearance of perfect mosaics. In his water-colour pictures these touches are placed side by side with little or160 no thought of their ultimate objective importance, and they become larger planes of unmixed tints juxtaposed in such a way that voluminous form results. His work in this most difficult medium has an abstract significance, for in it even the objective colouring of natural objects is unnoticeable. The colours stand by themselves; and while the aspect of Cézanne’s pictures in this medium is flat and almost transparent, the subjective emotion we feel before them is greater than in his oil work. In these pictures there was no going back to retouch. They had to be visualised as a whole before they could be commenced. Each brush stroke had to be a definite and irretrievable step toward the completion of the ensemble. As we study them a slow shifting of the planes is felt: an emotional reconstruction takes place, and at length the volumes begin their turning, advancing and retreating as in his oil paintings, only here the purely aesthetic quality is unadulterated by objective reality. In these water-colours, more than in any of his other work, has he posed the question of aesthetic beauty itself. When we contemplate them, we are more than ever convinced that Cézanne was the first painter, that is, the first man to express himself entirely in the medium of his art, colour. Unfortunately these pictures are difficult of access. Only occasionally are they exposed in a group. Bernheim-Jeune has a magnificent collection of them, and it is to be161 hoped they will soon find their way into public museums. Eventually, when a true comprehension of this great man comes, they will supplant his other efforts. His desires for a pure art are here expressed most intensely. Cézanne, however, is not always able to “realise,” as he put it. Even in these water-colours he did not attain his desire. He started too late in life to acquire complete mastery over his enormous means. “One must be a workman in one’s art, must know one’s method of realisation,” he said. “One must be a painter by the very qualities of painting, by making use of the rough materials of art.” He failed to gain that great facility by which supreme realisation is achieved, because the span of life accorded him was too short. He was old when his best work was begun, and like Joseph Conrad, he had passed his youth before the great ambition fired him. “Realising” to him meant the handling of his stupendous means as easily as the academicians handled their puny ones. This he could never do, and his age haunted him to the end. Many have taken him literally when he said he desired to expose in Bouguereau’s Salon, but though he earnestly wished it, he desired to be received there as Bouguereau was: as one who had mastered his expression. “The exterior appearance is nothing,” he explained. “The obstacle is that I don’t realise sufficiently.” In other words, he did not have great enough fluency to permit only the highest qualities of his art to be felt. In his gigantic efforts to “realise,” his pictures changed colour and form many times before they were finished. His respect and admiration for inferior men like Bouguereau and Couture was due to their enviable facility in handling their means. He 162knew that the fundamental and unalterable laws of organisation had been found and perfected by the old masters, and that, so long as we were human, we must build on their discoveries. “Only to realise like the Venetians!” he cried. And later: “We must again become classicists by way of nature, that is to say, by sensation.... I am old, and it is possible I shall die without having attained this great end.” A year before his death he said: “Yes, I am too old; I have not realised, and I shall never realise now. I shall remain the primitive of the way I have discovered.” The prediction proved true, but his destiny was none the less a glorious one. Deprived of the phrenetic impulse which took him in all weathers over country roads to the “motif” from six o’clock in the morning until dark, he would never have achieved what he did. The fact of this great modern genius going to work in a hired carriage, too weak to walk, should be a lesson to those painters who are always awaiting the combination of propitious circumstances which will provide them with a perfect studio, a perfect model and a perfect desire. Cézanne, however, knew his high place in art history. Once when Balzac’s Le Chef-d’Œuvre Inconnu was brought up in conversation and the name of its hero, Frenhofer, was mentioned, he arose with tears in his eyes and indicated himself with a single gesture. So sure was he of what he wanted to do that when he failed he discarded his canvases. Many of them are only half covered. He could never pad merely to fill out an arbitrary frame. With Cézanne’s death came his apotheosis. As he had predicted, thousands rushed in and cleverly imitated his surfaces, his colour gamuts, 163his distortions of line. His white wooden tables and ruddy apples and twisted fruit-dishes have lately become the etiquette of sophistication. But all this is not authentic eulogy. Derain, his most ardent imitator, is as ignorant of him as Nadelmann is of the Greeks or Archipenko is of Michelangelo. And the majority of those who have written books concerning him merely echo the unintelligent commotion that goes on about his name. Cézanne’s significance lies in his gifts to the painters of the future, to those in whom the creative instinct is a sacred and exalted thing, to those serious and solitary men whose insatiability makes of them explorers in new fields. To such artists Cézanne will always be the primitive of the way that they themselves will take, for there can be no genuine art of the future without his directing and guiding hand. His postulates are too solidly founded on human organisms ever to be ignored. He may be modified and developed: he can never be set aside until the primal emotions of life are changed. Only today is he beginning to be understood, and even now his claim to true greatness is questioned. But Cézanne, judged either as a theorist or as an achiever, is the preeminent figure in modern art. Renoir alone approaches his stature. Purely as a painter he is the greatest the world has produced. In the visual arts he is surpassed only by El Greco, Michelangelo and Rubens. Continued on the next page at the bottom. |
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