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 those
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 Cezanne 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 his 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
the 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. Cezanne, 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'OEuvre. Cezanne's
reply was simply that Zola had a "mediocre intelligence" and was a
"detestable friend." In their youth Cezanne 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.
Cezanne'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 those 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 the
incentive he furnished. During his intimacy with Pissarro, Cezanne
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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne. 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 Cezanne'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 Cezanne kept a
water-colour by Delacroix--hung face to the wall that it might not fade,
and beside it a lithograph by Daumier whom 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. Cezanne
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. Cezanne, 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, and persevere in expressing yourself as logically as
possible." It is this penetration which separates Cezanne 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 Cezanne of the later years not only is the form poised in three
dimensions, but the very light also is poised. We feel in Cezanne 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 the 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.
[Illustration: BAIGNEUSES by CEZANNE]
If this feat of Cezanne'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 atom 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 Cezanne 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. 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne, 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 a good
musician's ear is trained, pictures appear "off" in the same way that a
poorly tuned piano sounds "off" to the sensitive musician. Cezanne, 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. Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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
onlooker 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 naif. 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 of 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.
Emile Bernard was little different from the average critic. In
attributing to Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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'etendue_), 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 into
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 _esthetique_. 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. Cezanne, 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. Cezanne 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 Cezanne, Monet was only fragmentary. Not only in
methods did they differ but in objective as well. The Impressionists'
aim was to reproduce nature's externals: Cezanne's desire was to
reproduce its solidity. Both achieved their ends. Cezanne'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 Cezanne
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. Cezanne's solidity is organised like the volumes in
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 Cezanne'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. Cezanne 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."