CÉZANNE

Cézanne was pre-eminently occupied with the problem of space and its corollaries, bulk, weight, density, and with the still more stupendous problem of getting on a flat surface the suggestion of a third dimension—thickness. To achieve even a suggestion proves him a genius. And he was a genius. His supreme technical qualities are volume, ponderability, and a personal color-scheme. What’s the use of asking whether he is a sound draftsman or not? He is a master of “edges,” a magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke to me of the defective eyesight of Cézanne; but disease boasts its discoveries as well as health. Possibly his “abnormal” vision gave him glimpses of a reality denied to other painters. He advised students to look for the contrasts and correspondences of tone. He practised what he preached. No painter was so little affected by personal moods, by those variations of temperament dear to the professional artist. Did Cézanne possess the temperament he was always talking about? If he did, his temperament was not precisely decorative or flamboyant.

An unwearying experimenter, he seldom “finished” a picture. His morose landscapes were usually painted from one scene near his home at Aix. I saw the spot. The pictures do not closely resemble it—that is, in the photographic sense—which simply means that Cézanne had the vision and I had not. A few themes with polyphonic variations filled his simple life; art was submerged by its apparatus. His was the centripetal, not the centrifugal, temperament. In the domain of his rigid, intense ignorance there was little space for climate, charm, hardly for sunshine. Recall the blazing blue sky and sun of Provence, the tropical riot of its vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and then search for this mellow richness and misty, golden air in the pictures of the master. You won’t find them in his dim, muffled surfaces, though a mystic light permeates his landscapes. It is the sallow-sublime in its apotheosis. He did not paint portraits of Provence as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L’Arlésienne. Cézanne sought for profounder meanings. The superficial, the facile, the staccato, the merely brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an “abstract” painter—as the self-contradictory atelier jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a legitimate “trompe-l’œil” on the optic nerve. His is not a pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, cruel delineation of a certain hill on old Mother Earth which exposes her bare torso, her bald, rocky pate and gravelled feet. The hallucination is inescapable.

As drab as the orchestration of Brahms, as austere in linear economy and as analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, the art of Cézanne never becomes truly lyric except in his still life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palette of smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion to him may be as beautiful as a naked woman. Taste is not one of his marked traits. The chiefest misconception of Cézanne is that of the theoretical fanatics who not only proclaim him chief of a school, which he is, but declare him to be the greatest painter since the Byzantines. This assertion I have read in cold type. There is a lot of inutile talk about “significant form” by propagandists—usually rotten bad painters. As if form had not always been “significant.” When the impressionists as a school, now outmoded as the Barbizons, began to issue their prospectuses, the emphasis was laid upon form; form having served its purpose must go—at least become subordinate to color and its decomposition. The suave line of Raphael had degenerated into the insipid arabesques of Lefebvre, Bouguereau, and Cabanel. No denying these truths, since become platitudes. Form is again in the ascendant, impressionism having in its turn become deliquescence. No one denies Cézanne’s preoccupation with form, nor Courbet’s, either. Consider the Ornan’s landscapes, with their sombre flux of forest, painted by the crassest realist among French artists, though he seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper, more petulant mode of envisaging the world; yet what better example of “significant form” and solid structural sense than Courbet’s? Nevertheless, Cézanne quite o’ercrows Courbet in his feeling for the massive—sometimes you can’t see the ribs of his landscapes because of the skeleton.

Cézanne’s was a twilight soul. And a humorless one. His early painting was quasi-structural, well-nigh modelling. Always the architectural sense. His rhythms are often elliptical. He has a predilection for the asymmetrical. Yet he is a man who lent to an art of two dimensions, the illusion of a third. His tactile values are raised to the nth degree. His color is personal. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, a half century ago, he wrote of Cézanne’s work as containing the prodromes of a new art. The handling of his material alone absorbed him, and not its lyric, dramatic, anecdotic, or rhetorical elements. He despised “literary” painting. His portraits are charged with character. But he sometimes profoundly ponders unimportant matters—loses himself in a desert of sandy theorizing.

The tang of the town is not in his portraits of places. His leaden, metallic landscapes seldom spontaneously arouse to activity the jaded retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. In his groups of bathing women there is no sex appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt, as heavy flanked as Percheron mares. They are as ugly as the females of Degas, and twice as truthful. With beauty, academic or operatic, he had no traffic. If you don’t care for his graceless nudes, you may console yourself with the axiom that there is no disputing tastes—with the tasteless. We have seen some of his still-life pieces so acid in tonal quality as to suggest that divine dissonance produced on the palate by a stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a pantomime score by Stravinsky. But what thrice subtle sonorities, what opulent color-chords may be found in his compositions. His fruits savor of the earth. Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he paints an onion it reveals a certain grace. Vollon dramatizes it, or embroiders its homely shape with luxuriant decorations. When Cézanne paints an onion you smell it. His apples are—seemingly—falling off the table. How despairing are the efforts of his imitators to get those slanting surfaces covered with fruit and vegetables that have just been brought in by the cook. You say, Miraculous! and make a gesture to prevent the ripe stuff from sliding to the floor. The “representation” abhorred of the Cubists in its most pregnant shapes is there.

Cézanne did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the ideas, manners and aspects of his generation. With the classic retort of Manet, he could have replied to those who taunted him with not “finishing” his pictures, “Sir, I am not a historical painter.” Nor need we be disconcerted in any estimate of him by the depressing snobbery of collectors who don’t know B from bull’s foot but go off at half-trigger in their enthusiasm when a hint is dropped as to the possibilities of a painter appreciating in a pecuniary sense. Cézanne is the painting idol of the present crowd, as were Manet and Monet a few decades ago. These æsthetic fluctuations should not distract us. Henner, Cabanel, Bourguereau too, were idolized once upon a time and served to make a millionaire’s holiday by hanging in his marble bathroom. It is the undeniable truth that Cézanne has, in the eyes of the younger generation, become a tower of strength which intrigues critical fancy. Cézanne is sincere to the core, yet even stark sincerity does not, of necessity, imply the putting forth of masterpieces. Before he attained his synthetic power he patiently studied Delacroix, Courbet, and the early Italians. At times he achieved the foundational structure of Courbet, though I don’t think he had either the brains or the painting temperament of his elder contemporary, whose portée was at times tremendous. Hostile critics declare that the canvases of St. Paul of Provence are sans composition, sans linear pattern, sans personal charm. However, “popularity is for dolls,” says Emerson.

I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon of 1901 a large picture by Maurice Denis, entitled Hommage à Cézanne, the idea of which was manifestly inspired by Manet’s Hommage à Fantin-Latour, or Fantin’s Batignolle School. The Maurice Denis canvas depicts a still-life by Cézanne on a chevalet, which is surrounded by the figures of certain painters—Bonnard, Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellério, and Vollard. Cézanne is posed standing and is apparently embarrassed, which was his natural condition. There was a special Cézanne Salle, as there was one devoted to Eugène Carrière, but Cézanne held the place of honor. With all his naïve vanity he was dazzled by the uproarious championship of “les jeunes,” and, to give him credit for a peasant astuteness, he was rather suspicious of the demonstration. But he stolidly accepted the frantic homage of the youngsters, all the while looking like a bourgeois Buddha. To-day a Cézanne of quality is costly. Why not? When juxtaposed with many modern painters his vital art makes other pictures seem linoleum or papier maché. The nervous, shrinking man I saw at Aix and later at Paris would have been astounded at the praise printed since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of the official Salon—as did his school-friend Zola for a seat in the Academy—none the less, he disliked notoriety. He loved hard work. He loved his solitude. With a fresh batch of canvases he trudged every morning to his pet landscape, the Motive, he called it, and it was there that he daily slaved with genuine technical heroism. When I first saw him he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary. Like John La Farge, he hated shaking hands. A rare impersonality.

Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognize a master. The limitations of Cézanne are patent. An investigator, experimenter, even fumbler, he did not deem it wise to stray from his chosen, if narrow, field. His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding Johann Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss. The very notion is monstrous. Yet, figuratively speaking, this order constitutes the case of Cézanne. He arrived on the pictorial scene after the classic, romantic, impressionistic, and symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made like Puvis de Chavannes, but one born with an unaffected crabbed simplicity. Paul Cézanne will be remembered as a painter who respected his material, also as a painter, pure, without preoccupation in schools or ideas. No man who wields a brush need ask for a more enduring epitaph.