He had a profound admiration for Cézanne, and was often charged with imitating him, and in some of his pictures there is a certain resemblance in construction, but two painters could scarce be less alike in the handling of color. Gauguin handled color for the pure joy of it.[23] Cézanne used color as a mason uses bricks.
Gauguin’s admiration for Cézanne was not reciprocated.
“Gauguin likes your work immensely, and imitates you,” a friend once said to Cézanne.
“Eh! he does not understand me,” was the angry response. “I never have and never will accept a lack of modelling or graduation; that is nonsense. Gauguin is not a painter; he produces simply Chinese figures.”
Gauguin was a dreamer; Cézanne, in his way, was quite an exact thinker, for instance, he explained his ideas of form and color as follows:
Everything in nature is modelled on the lines of the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder, and one must understand how to paint these simple figures, one can then paint anything. Design and color are not distinct; to precisely the extent that one paints, one draws; the more the color harmonizes, the clearer and purer the design. When the color is at its finest, the form also attains its perfection. Contrasts and harmonies of tones—that is the secret of drawing and modelling.[24]
In the suggestion of the lines of the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder, as the elements of all art, one recognizes the alphabet of cubism. But in reducing drawing to these elements Cézanne, without knowing it, simply repeated what Albert Durer printed in book form nearly four hundred years ago, and what the Chinese and Japanese had discovered centuries earlier.[25]
The fact that the work of four men so different, Cézanne, Henri Rousseau, VanGogh, Gauguin, began to be appreciated about the same time, shows how ripe the Paris art world was for the reaction from Impressionism—for a great movement in creative and decorative art.