Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning

by Willard Huntington Wright

Cézanne’s biography is of value to the art student, for it embodies in concrete form the factors which motivated his æsthetic apperceptions. By Cézanne’s biography is meant, not the distorted interpretations of the incidents of his life, now so well known, or the superficial conclusions deduced by his biographers from hearsay; but those actions and temperamental characteristics which are impartially set down at first hand by Émile Bernard. To this chronicler we are indebted for practically all the authentic personal anecdotes of the artist. He had always admired Cézanne, and in 1904 a personal friendship was established between them, which endured until the latter’s death. After Cézanne had overcome parental objections and had definitely decided on an artist’s career, he spent much of his time in Paris. Many influences entered into his early life. He had met Zola at school and had been intimate with him. Through him he had become acquainted with Manet, and while he appreciated Manet’s friendliness, he could never understand that artist’s great popularity. He preferred Courbet as a painter, and studied him sedulously. His great influence, however, came from Pissarro. For that persuasive Jew’s memory he always harboured a deep respect.

Cézanne’s youth, if one may call forty years a youth, was, as he himself 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 Cézanne 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. Cézanne, 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’Œuvre. Cézanne’s reply was simply that Zola had a “mediocre intelligence” and was a “detestable friend.” In their youth Cézanne 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.

Cézanne’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, Cézanne 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 Cézanne 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 æsthetic procedure, facilitated the experimentations of Cézanne. But he in turn recognised the restrictions of the Impressionists’ methods: indeed, he saw that their theories could apply only to a very circumscribed æsthetic 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 Cézanne’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 Cézanne 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. Cézanne 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. Cézanne, 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 Cézanne 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 Cézanne of the later years not only is the form poised in three dimensions, but the very light also is poised. We feel in Cézanne 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.