THE CASE OF PAUL CEZANNE
The case of painter Paul Cezanne. Is he a stupendous nobody or a
surpassing genius? The critical doctors disagree, an excellent omen
for the reputation of the man from Provence. We do not discuss a
corpse, and though Cezanne died in 1906 he is still a living issue
among artists and writers. Every exhibition calls forth comment:
fair, unfair, ignorant, and seldom just. Yet the Cezanne question,
is it so difficult to resolve? Like Brahms, the Frenchman is often
misrepresented; Brahms, known now as a Romantic writing within the
walls of accepted forms, neither a pedant nor a revolutionist;
Cezanne, not a revolutionist, not an innovator, vastly interested in
certain problems, has been made "chef d'ecole" and fathered with a
lot of theories which would send him into one of his famous rages if
he could hear them. Either a revolutionist or a plagiarist! cried
Paul Gauguin--whose work was heartily detested by Cezanne; but truth
is ever mediocre, whether it resides at the bottom of a well or
swings on the cusps of the new moon. What is the truth about
Cezanne? The question bobs up every season. His so-called followers
raise a clamour over the banality of "representation" in art, and
their master is the one man in the history of art who squandered on
canvas startling evocations of actuality, whose nose was closest to
the soil. Huysmans was called an "eye" by Remy de Gourmont. Paul
Cezanne is also an eye.
In 1901 I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon a picture by Maurice Denis
entitled Hommage a Cezanne, the idea of which was manifestly
inspired by Manet's Hommage a Fantin-Latour. The canvas depicted a
still life by Cezanne on a chevalet and surrounded by Bonnard,
Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellerio, and Vollard.
Himself (as they say in Irish) is shown standing and apparently
unhappy, embarrassed. Then came the brusque apotheosis of 1904 at
the Autumn Salon, the most revelatory of his unique gift thus far
made. Puvis de Chavannes had a special Salle, so had Eugene
Carriere; Cezanne held the place of honour. The critical press was
hostile or half-hearted. Poor Cezanne, with his naive vanity, seemed
dazzled by the uproarious championship of "les jeunes," and, to give
him credit for a peasant-like astuteness, he was rather suspicious
and always on his guard. He stolidly accepted the frantic homage of
the youngsters, looking all the while like a bourgeois Buddha. In
The Sun of 1901, 1904, and 1906 (the latter the year of his death)
appeared my articles on Cezanne, among the first, if not the first,
that were printed in this country. Since then he has been hoisted to
the stars by his admirers, and with him have mounted his prices. Why
not? When juxtaposed with most painters his pictures make the others
look like linoleum or papier-mache.
He did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the manners, ideas,
and aspects of his generation. In 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 a bull's foot, but who go off at
half-trigger when a hint is dropped about the possibilities of a
painter appreciating in a pecuniary sense. Cezanne is the painting
idol of the hour, as were Manet and Monet a decade ago. These
fluctuations must not distract us, because Cabanel, Bouguereau and
Henner, too, were idolised once upon a time, and served to make a
millionaire's holiday by hanging in his marble bathroom. It is the
undeniable truth that Cezanne has become a tower of strength in the
eyes of the younger generation of artists which intrigues critical
fancy. Sincerity is strength; Cezanne is sincere to the core; but
even stark sincerity does not necessarily imply the putting forth of
masterpieces. Before he attained his original, synthetic power he
patiently studied Delacroix, Courbet, and several others. He
achieved at times the foundational structure of Courbet, but his
pictures, so say his enemies, are sans composition, sans linear
pattern, sans personal charm. But "Popularity is for dolls," cried
Emerson.
Cezanne's was a twilight soul. And a humourless one. His early
modelling in paint was quasi-structural. Always the architectural
sense, though his rhythms are elliptical at times and he betrays a
predilection for the asymmetrical. Nevertheless, a man who has given
to an art in two dimensions the illusion of a third; tactile values
are here raised to the _n_th degree. His colour is personal and
rhythmic. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, nearly a half-century ago,
he spoke of Cezanne's work as containing the prodromes of a new art.
He was absorbed in the handling of his material, not in the lyric,
dramatic, anecdotic, or rhetorical elements. His portraits are vital
and charged with character. And he often thinks profoundly on
unimportant matters.
When you are young your foreground is huddled: it is the desire for
more space that begets revolutionists; not unlike a big man elbowing
his way in a crowd. Laudable then are all these sporadic outbursts;
and while a creative talent may remain provincial, even parochial,
as was the case with Cezanne, a critic must be cosmopolitan or
nothing. An artist may stay rooted in his own bailiwick his life
long, yet paint like an angel; but a provincial critic is a
contradiction in terms. He reminds one of a razor so dull that it
can't cut butter. Let us therefore be hospitable to new ideas; even
Cabanel has his good points.
The tang of the town is not in Cezanne's portraits of places. His
leaden landscapes do not arouse to spontaneous activity a jaded
retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. As for the groups of
bathing women, how they must wound the sensibility of George Moore,
Professor of Energy at the University of Erotica. There is no sex
appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt. It is related of the
Empress Eugenie that in front of Courbet's Les Baigneuses (Salon,
1853) she asked: "Est-ce aussi une percheronne?" Of the
heavy-flanked Percheron breed of horse are the ladies on the
canvases of Cezanne. The remark of the Empress appealed to the
truculent vanity of Courbet. It might not have pleased Cezanne. With
beauty, academic or operatic, he had no traffic. If you don't care
for his graceless nudes you may console yourself that there is no
disputing tastes--with the tasteless. They are uglier than the
females of Degas, and twice as truthful.
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
slightly stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a
score by Stravinski. But what thrice-subtle sonorities, what colour
chords are in his best work. I once wrote in the Promenades of an
Impressionist that his fruits and vegetables savour of the earth.
Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he painted
an onion it revealed a certain grace. Vollon would have dramatised
it. When Cezanne painted one you smelt it. A feeble witticism, to be
sure, but it registered the reaction on the sounding-board of my
sensibility.
The supreme technical qualities in Cezanne are volume,
ponderability, and an entrancing colour scheme. What's the use of
asking whether he is a "sound" draughtsman? He is a master of edges
and a magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke of his defective
eyesight; but disease boasts its discoveries, as well as health. The
abnormal vision of Cezanne gave him glimpses of a "reality" denied
to other painters. He advised Emile Bernard to look for the
contrasts and correspondences of tones. He practised what he
preached. No painter was so little affected by personal moods, by
those variations of temperament dear to the artist. Had Cezanne the
"temperament" that he was always talking about? If so it was not
decorative in the accepted sense. An unwearying experimenter, he
seldom "finished" a picture. His morose landscapes were usually
painted from one scene near his home at Aix. I visited the spot. The
pictures do not resemble it; which simply means that Cezanne had the
vision and I had not. A few themes with polyphonic variations
filled his simple life. Art submerged by the apparatus. And he had
the centripetal, not the centrifugal temperament.
In his rigid, intense ignorance there was no room for climate,
personal charm, not even for sunshine. Think of the blazing blue sky
and sun of Provence; the romantic, semitropical riot of its
vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and search for this
mellow richness and misty golden air in the pictures of our master.
You won't find them, though a mystic light permeates the entire
series. The sallow-sublime. He did not paint portraits of Provence,
as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L'Arlesienne. He sought
for profounder meanings. The superficial, the facile, the staccato,
and the brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an "abstract"
painter--as the jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a
legitimate trompe-l'[oe]il on the optic nerve. His is not a
pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, patient
delineation by a geologist of art of a certain hill on old Mother
Earth, shamelessly exposing her bare torso, bald rocky pate, and
gravelled feet. The illusion is not to be escaped. As drab as the
orchestration of Brahms, and as austere in linear economy; and as
analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, Cezanne never becomes truly lyrical
except in his still-life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palette of
smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion for him
is as beautiful as a naked woman. And he possesses a positive
genius for the tasteless.
The chiefest misconception of Cezanne is that of the theoretical
fanatics who not only proclaim him their chief of school, which may
be true, but also declare him to be the greatest painter that ever
wielded a brush since the Byzantines. The nervous, shrinking man I
saw at Paris would have been astounded at some of the things printed
since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of the official
Salon (as did Zola for a seat in the Academy) he disliked notoriety.
He loved work; above all, solitude. He took with him a fresh batch
of canvases every morning and trudged to his pet landscapes, the
Motive he called it, and it was there that he slaved away with
technical heroism, though he didn't kill himself with his labours as
some of his fervent disciples have asserted. He died of unromantic
diabetes. 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, A rare impersonality, I should say.
There is a lot of inutile talk about "significant form" by
propagandists of the New AEsthetic. As if form had not always been
significant. No one can deny Cezanne's preoccupation with form; nor
Courbet's either. Consider the Ornans landscapes, with their sombre
flux of forest, by the crassest realist among French painters (he
seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper and more petulant modern
mode of envisaging the world); there is "significant form," and a
solid structural sense. But Cezanne quite o'ercrows Courbet in his
feeling for the massive. Sometimes you can't see the ribs because of
the skeleton.
Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognise
a master. The limitations of Paul Cezanne are patent to all. He is a
profound investigator, and if he did not deem it wise to stray far
from the territory he called his own then we should not complain,
for therein he was monarch of all he surveyed. His non-conformism
defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding
Johann Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss! The idea seems
monstrous. Yet this, figuratively speaking, constitutes the case of
Cezanne. He arrived after the classic, romantic, impressionistic,
symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made, like Puvis, but one
born to a crabbed simplicity. His veiled, cool harmonies sometimes
recall the throb of a deep-bass organ-pipe. Oppositional splendour
is there, and the stained radiance of a Bachian chorale. The music
flows as if from a secret spring.
What poet asked: "When we drive out from the cloud of steam
majestical white horses, are we greater than the first men, who led
black ones by the mane?" Why can't we be truly catholic in our
taste? The heaven of art contains many mansions, and the rainbow
more colours than one. Paul Cezanne will be remembered as a painter
who respected his material, and as a painter, pure and complex. No
man who wields a brush need wish a more enduring epitaph.