"Independent of the Independents" is a magnificent motto with which to assault any intrenched organisation.
PAUL CÉZANNE
If riotous energy is, as I have said, the chief note of many of these hot, hasty, and often clever pictures, it must be sadly stated that of genuine originality there are few traces. To the very masters they pretend to revile they owe everything. In vain one looks for a tradition older than Courbet; a few have attempted to stammer in the suave speech of Corot and the men of Fontainebleau; but 1863, the year of the Salon des Refusés, is really the year of their artistic ancestor's birth. The classicism of Lebrun, David, Ingres, Prudhon; the romanticism of Géricault, Delacroix, Decamps; the tender poetry of those true Waldmenschen, Millet, Dupré, Diaz, Daubigny, or of that wild heir of Giorgione and Tiepolo, the marvellous colour virtuoso who "painted music," Monticelli—all these men might never have been born except for their possible impact upon the so-called "Batignolles" school. Alas! such ingratitude must rankle. To see the major portion of this band of young painters, with talent in plenty, occupying itself in a frantic burlesque of second-hand Cézannes, with here and there a shallow Monet, a faded Renoir, an affected Degas, or an impertinent Gauguin, must be mortifying to the older men.
And now we reach the holy precincts. If ardent youths sneered at the lyric ecstasy of Renoir, at the severe restraint of Chavannes, at the poetic mystery of Carrière, their lips were hushed as they tiptoed into the Salle Cézanne. Sacred ground, indeed, we trod as we gazed and wondered before these crude, violent, sincere, ugly, and bizarre canvases. Here was the very hub of the Independents' universe. Here the results of a hard-labouring painter, without taste, without the faculty of selection, without vision, culture—one is tempted to add, intellect—who with dogged persistency has painted in the face of mockery, painted portraits, landscapes, flowers, houses, figures, painted everything, painted himself. And what paint! 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.
Think of Bouguereau and you have his antithesis in Cézanne—Cézanne whose stark figures of bathers, male and female, evoke a shuddering sense of the bestial. Not that there is offence intended in his badly huddled nudes; he only delineates in simple, naked fashion the horrors of some undressed humans. His landscapes are primitive though suffused by perceptible atmosphere; while the rough architecture, shambling figures, harsh colouring do not quite destroy the impression of general vitality. You could not say with Walt Whitman that his stunted trees were "uttering joyous leaves of dark green." They utter, if anything, raucous oaths, as seemingly do the self-portraits—exceedingly well modelled, however. Cézanne's still-life attracts by its whole-souled absorption; these fruits and vegetables really savour of the earth. Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; if he had ever painted an onion it would have revealed a certain grace. When Paul Cézanne paints an onion you smell it. Nevertheless, he has captured the affections of the rebels and is their god. And next season it may be some one else.
It may interest readers of Zola's L'Oeuvre to learn about one of the characters, who perforce sat for his portrait in that clever novel (a direct imitation of Goncourt's Manette Salomon). Paul Cézanne bitterly resented the liberty taken by his old school friend Zola. They both hailed from Aix, in Provence. Zola went up to Paris; Cézanne remained in his birthplace but finally persuaded his father to let him study art at the capital. His father was both rich and wise, for he settled a small allowance on Paul, who, poor chap, as he said, would never earn a franc from his paintings. This prediction was nearly verified. Cézanne was almost laughed off the artistic map of Paris. Manet they could stand, even Claude Monet; but Cézanne—communard and anarchist he must be (so said the wise ones in official circles), for he was such a villainous painter! Cézanne died, but not before his apotheosis by the new crowd of the Autumn Salon. We are told by admirers of Zola how much he did for his neglected and struggling fellow-townsman; how the novelist opened his arms to Cézanne. Cézanne says quite the contrary. In the first place he had more money than Zola when they started, and Zola, after he had become a celebrity, was a great man and very haughty.
"A mediocre intelligence and a detestable friend" is the way the prototype of Claude Lantier puts the case. "A bad book and a completely false one," he added, when speaking to the painter Emile Bernard on the disagreeable theme. Naturally Zola did not pose his old friend for the entire figure of the crazy impressionist, his hero, Claude. It was a study composed of Cézanne, Bazille, and one other, a poor, wretched lad who had been employed to clean Manet's studio, entertained artistic ambitions, but hanged himself. The conversations Cézanne had with Zola, his extreme theories of light, are all in the novel—by the way, one of Zola's most finished efforts. Cézanne, an honest, hard-working man, bourgeois in habits if not by temperament, was grievously wounded by the treachery of Zola; and he did not fail to denounce this treachery to Bernard.
Paul Cézanne was born January 19, 1839. His father was a rich bourgeois, and while he was disappointed when his son refused to prosecute further his law studies, he, being a sensible parent and justly estimating Paul's steadiness of character, allowed him to go to Paris in 1862, giving him an income of a hundred and fifty francs a month, which was shortly after doubled. With sixty dollars a month an art student of twenty-three could, in those days, live comfortably, study at leisure, and see the world. Cézanne from the start was in earnest. Instinctively he realised that for him was not the rapid ascent of the rocky path that leads to Parnassus. He mistrusted his own talent, though not his powers of application. At first he frequented the Académie Suisse, where he encountered as fellow-workers Pissarro and Guillaumin. He soon transferred his easel to the Beaux-Arts and became an admirer of Delacroix and Courbet. It seems strange in the presence of a Cézanne picture to realise that he, too, suffered his little term of lyric madness and wrestled with huge mythologic themes—giant men carrying off monstrous women. Connoisseurs at the sale of Zola's art treasures were astonished by the sight of a canvas signed Cézanne, the subject of which was L'Enlèvement, a romantic subject, not lacking in the spirit of Delacroix. The Courbet influence persisted, despite the development of the younger painter in other schools. Cézanne can claim Courbet and the Dutchmen as artistic ancestors.
When Cézanne arrived in Paris the first comrade to greet him was Zola. The pair became inseparable; they fought for naturalism, and it was to Cézanne that Zola dedicated his Salons which are now to be found in a volume of essays on art and literature bearing the soothing title of Mes Haines. Zola, pitching overboard many friends, wrote his famous eulogy of Manet in the Evenement, and the row he raised was so fierce that he was forced to resign as art critic from that journal. The fight then began in earnest. The story is a thrice-told one. It may be read in Théodore Duret's study of Manet and, as regards Cézanne, in the same critic's volume on Impressionism. Cézanne exhibited in 1874 with Manet and the rest at the impressionists' salon, held at the studio of Nadar the photographer. He had earlier submitted at once to Manet's magic method of painting, but in 1873, at Auvers-sur-Oise, he began painting in the plein air style and with certain modifications adhered to that manner until the time of his death. The amazing part of it all is that he produced for more than thirty years and seldom sold a canvas, seldom exhibited. His solitary appearance at an official salon was in 1882, and he would not have succeeded then if it had not been for his friend Guillaumin, a member of the selecting jury, who claimed his rights and passed in, amid execrations, both mock and real, a portrait by Cézanne.
Called a communard in 1874, Cézanne was saluted with the title of anarchist in 1904, when his vogue had begun; these titles being a species of official nomenclature for all rebels. Thiers, once President of the French Republic, made a bon mot when he exclaimed: "A Romantic—that is to say, Communist!" During his entire career this mild, reserved gentleman from Aix came under the ban of the critics and the authorities, for he had shouldered his musket in 1871, as did Manet, as did Bazille,—who, like Henri Regnault, was killed in a skirmish.