Paul Cézanne

“ Let us be equally just to Zola; let us notice, too, how amusingly he sets off Cézanne. Both were greatly gifted men: neither was the man of intelligence and talent, the brilliant man with the discursive intellect, who carries his gift about with him, takes it out when and where he pleases, and applies it where and how he likes. Zola, when he was not using his gift, posed as an artist, a saint, or simply "a great man"; but he never contrived to be anything but a bourgeois—a "sale bourgeois," according to Cézanne. Cézanne was all gift: seen as anything but a painter he looked like a fool. ”

“ That with the maturity of Cézanne a new movement came to birth will hardly be disputed by anyone who has managed to survive the "nineties"; that this movement is the beginning of a new slope is a possibility worth discussing, but about which no decided opinion can yet be held. In so far as one man can be said to inspire a whole age, Cézanne inspires the contemporary movement: he stands a little apart, however, because he is too big to take a place in any scheme of historical development ”

“ 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. ”

“ During the last ten years Jazz had dominated music and coloured literature: on painting, as I have said, its effect has been negligible. What, for want of a better name, I must call the Cézanne movement was too profound a stream to be modified by so shallow a current. All the great contemporary painters are extremely serious; they make no faces at their predecessors, or at anyone else. They are not gavroche. Surprise is the last emotion they wish to arouse. And, assuredly, they have neither gone to the hotel-loungers for inspiration nor shown the slightest desire to amuse them. ”

“ Their simple, honest vision and frank statement are peculiarly sympathetic to the generation that swears by Cézanne. Here are men of good faith who feel things directly, and say not a word more than they feel. With a little ingenuity and disingenuousness one might make a douanier of them. They are scrupulous, sincere, and born painters. But they are not orderly. They are not organizers of form and colour. ”

“ Post-Impressionism is nothing but the reassertion of the first commandment of art—Thou shalt create form. By this assertion it shakes hands across the ages with the Byzantine primitives and with every vital movement that has struggled into existence since the arts began.
Post-Impressionism is not a matter of technique. Certainly Cézanne invented a technique, admirably suited to his purpose, which has been adopted and elaborated, more or less, by the majority of his followers. The important thing about a picture, however, is not how it is painted, but whether it provokes aesthetic emotion. ”

“ Cézanne was a very great artist and a very bad painter. One may go further and say that had he not been such a bad painter he might never have shown himself to be a great artist. His whole being was clumsy and blundering, and his attempts to emulate the brilliant Manet in his light effects were constantly balked by this very clumsiness. ”

“ It is because his task must have been so abominably exacting—the task of catching the artist outside his work—that we easily forgive him a few lapses from good sense when he is not talking about his hero. It is annoying, nevertheless, to hear quite so much of the stupid and insensitive people who attacked and insulted Cézanne. ”

“ But, constantly rebuffed by critics and even scorned by Zola, who failed to see any promise in his forceful early works, Cézanne withdrew to live in Provence during the 1880’s and perfected his individual style. His methods paved the way for the abstract painting of our own day. In his old age a number of young artists and critics sought him out and he enjoyed a small degree of recognition within his lifetime. His work, together with that of Manet, Monet, Degas, Lautrec, van Gogh, and Gauguin, has become the most popular painting today. ”

“ Stubborn, with an instinctive hatred of academic poses, of the atmosphere of the studio, of the hired model, of "literary," or of mere digital cleverness, Cézanne has dropped out of his scheme harmony, melody, beauty—classic, romantic, symbolic, what you will!—and doggedly represented the ugliness of things. But there is a brutal strength, a tang of the soil that is bitter, and also strangely invigorating, after the false, perfumed boudoir art of so many of his contemporaries. ”

“ That movement is still young. But I think it would be safe to say that already it has produced as much good art as its predecessor. Cézanne, of course, created far greater things than any Impressionist painter; and Gaugin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Rousseau, Picasso, de Vlaminck, Derain, Herbin, Marchand, Marquet, Bonnard, Duncan Grant, Maillol, Lewis, Kandinsky, Brancuzi, von Anrep, Roger Fry, Friesz, Goncharova, L'Hôte, are Rolands for the Olivers of any other artistic period. [23] They are not all great artists, but they all are artists. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What but pure form, and that which, lying behind pure form, gives it its significance. It was for this Cézanne felt the emotion he spent his life in expressing. And the second characteristic of the new movement is a passionate interest, inherited from Cézanne, in things regarded as ends in themselves. In saying this I am saying no more than that the painters of the movement are consciously determined to be artists. Peculiarity lies in the consciousness—the consciousness with which they set themselves to eliminate all that lies between themselves and the pure forms of things. ”

“ The rest of Cézanne's life is a continuous effort to capture and express the significance of form.
I have tried to say in another place that there are more roads than one by which a man may come at reality. Some artists seem to have come at it by sheer force of imagination, unaided by anything without them; they have needed no material ladder to help them out of matter. They have spoken with reality as mind to mind, and have passed on the message in forms which owe nothing but bare existence to the physical universe. ”

“ There Ibsen was never so completely at home as Cézanne; he lacked the imagination by which alone one arrives and remains in the world of reality. His vision was more uncertain and so his faith was weaker. He was a less ferociously sincere artist. When vision began to fail he took refuge in a catalogue of facts or in unconvincing symbolism: Cézanne tossed his picture into a bush. Perhaps that is why a new generation, hungry for great contemporary art, turns more hopefully to painting than to literature. ”

“ At this moment there are not above half a dozen good painters alive who do not derive, to some extent, from Cézanne, and belong, in some sense, to the Post-Impressionist movement; but tomorrow a great painter may arise who will create significant form by means superficially opposed to those of Cézanne. Superficially, I say, because, essentially, all good art is of the same movement: there are only two kinds of art, good and bad. ”

“ Genius of the very highest order never, probably, succeeds in completely realizing its conceptions, because its conceptions are unrealizable. When Cézanne envied M. Bouguereau his power of realization he was perfectly sincere and perfectly sensible. A Bouguereau can realize completely the little nasty things that are in his mind: if a Cézanne, a Shakespeare, or an Æschylus could realize as completely all that was in his the human race would think more of itself than it does. ”

“ Certainly, they all owe something to Cézanne: but what other important characteristic have they in common which they do not share with the best of the last hundred years? It was ever thus: the best, who are all alike in some ways, in others are, from the first, the most sharply differentiated simply because they are the most personal. Also, as they mature they become more and more peculiar because they tend to rely less and less on anything but themselves and the grand tradition. ”

“ Cézanne is a type of the perfect artist; he is the perfect antithesis of the professional picture-maker, or poem-maker, or music-maker. He created forms because only by so doing could he accomplish the end of his existence—the expression of his sense of the significance of form. When we are talking about aesthetics, very properly we brush all this aside, and consider only the object and its emotional effect on us ”

“ Let anyone who doubts this mention quickly the name of some artist who owes nothing to his predecessors.
Often, however, owing either to some change in circumstances or to his innate peculiarity, a man of uncommon force and imagination will find himself with something to say for which the traditional instrument is, or at first seems to be, inadequate. What shall he do? Why, what Giotto did, what Masaccio did, what Ronsard and the poets of the Pléiade did, what Wordsworth did, and what Cézanne has done. ”

“ Because, in addition to this magic power of creation, Matisse has been blest with extraordinary sensibility both of reaction and touch, he is a great artist; because he trusts to it entirely he is not what for a moment apparently he wished to be—a chef d'école.
Picasso, on the other hand, who never tried to be anything of the sort, is the paramount influence in modern painting—subject, of course, to the supreme influence of Cézanne. All the world over are students and young painters to whom his mere name is thrilling ”

“ In this age it is possible to take refuge under the magic word "Cézanne"; we can say that Cézanne has imposed his forms on Georgian painters and public, just as Wagner imposed his on Edwardian musicians and concert-goers. This explanation seems to me inadequate; and in any case it will not account for the predominance of formal fashions in ages undominated by any masterful genius. The spirit of an artistic age is, I suspect, a composition that defies complete analysis; the work of one great mind is generally one part of it, the monuments of some particular past age are often another. ”

“ Bonnard and Vuillard, unlike Aristide Maillol, though being sensitive and intelligent artists who make the most of whatever serves their turn they have taken what they wanted from the atmosphere in which they work, are hardly to be counted of Cézanne's descendants. Rather are they children of the great impressionists who, unlike the majority of their surviving brothers and sisters, instead of swallowing the impressionist doctrine whole, just as official painters do the academic, have modified it charmingly to suit their peculiar temperaments. ”

“ For instance, it must have been at the end of 1912, or the beginning of 1913, that I first heard of Modigliani, Utrillo, Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, Luc-Albert Moreau and Kisling, though doubtless all were known earlier to wide-awake men on the spot. None of them can fairly be described as doctrinaire: by that time an artist with a pronounced taste for abstractions betook himself to Cubism almost as a matter of course. All owe much to Cézanne—Utrillo least; Modigliani and Marie Laurencin owe a good deal to Picasso's blue period; while Luc-Albert Moreau owes something to Segonzac. ”

“ It is consistent that Cézanne, like all pioneers, was without prescribed means, that he had to spend his life inventing for himself those terms and methods which would best express his feelings about nature. It is natural that he admired the precision of Bouguereau, it is also quite natural that he should have worshipped in turn, Delacroix, Courbet, and without doubt, the mastery of Ingres, and it is in [31] dicative too that he felt the frank force of Manet. ”

“ And I only wish M. Vollard had perceived it when he was writing about Zola. Zola failed to appreciate Cézanne, of course. Zola was an ordinary middle-class man: he was vain, vulgar, petty; he longed for the consideration of people like himself, and was therefore ostentatious; he had a passion for money and notoriety; he wanted to be thought not only clever but good ”

“ So it is that with Cézanne the world is conscious of a new power that will never be effectually shaken off, since the principles that are involved in the intention of Cézanne are of too vital importance to be treated with lightness of judgment. Such valuable ideas as Cézanne contributes must be accepted almost as dogma, albeit valuable dogma. Influence is a conscious and necessary factor in the development of all serious minded artists, as we have seen in the instances of all important ones. ”