| BAIGNEUSES | CÉZANNE |
If this feat of Cézanne’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 Cézanne 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 Cézanne 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 Cézanne, 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. Cézanne, 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 æsthetic means. Cézanne 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 Cézanne 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 naïf. 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 æsthetics 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 æsthetics. Readily comprehensible painting is no further advanced than readily comprehensible therapeutics.
Émile Bernard was little different from the average critic. In attributing to Cézanne 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 Cézanne 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 Cézanne 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 Cézanne 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’étendue), whether it be a section of nature, or if you choose, of the spectacle that the Pater omnipotens æternus 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 esthétique. 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. Cézanne, 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. Cézanne 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 Cézanne, 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: Cézanne’s desire was to reproduce its solidity. Both achieved their ends. Cézanne’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 æsthetic 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 Cézanne 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. Cézanne’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 Cézanne’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. Cézanne 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.”
The individual solidity of Cézanne’s colour planes is due to the eternalism and absolutism of his light. But it was the other qualities which entered into his art which brought about the interdependence of the parts and evoked the sensation of unity we feel before them. One of these qualities was a perfect rapport of lines. Cézanne, better than any other painter up to his day, understood how one slanting line modifies its direction when coming in contact with another line moving from a different direction. When colour was first investigated realistically, artists saw that two pure complementary tints, when juxtaposed, tended to draw away from each other and to differentiate themselves. Therefore they set about to study the influence that one colour has upon another, assuming that lines were more static and absolute and consequently did not change at contact with other lines. Cézanne recognised the fallacy of this assumption, and wrote: “I see the planes criss-crossing and overlapping, and sometimes the lines seem to fall.” He realised that the laws governing the opposition of line are most important in the production of the emotion of movement. In all the old painters this emotion was engendered by just such devices, but with them the laws were only dimly suspected—instincts rather than applied science. In contemplating their work we seem torn by some physical impulse to follow one line, but cannot, because the lure of the other line is equally great.
To the man of sensitive and trained eyesight this physical emotion is incited also by nature, only nature is more complex than art and is without æsthetic finality. Thus in regarding the rapports of two lines in nature, one leaning to the right and one to the left, the highly sensitive person feels unrest and strife, and subconsciously produces order and calm by imagining a third line which harmonises the original two. Cézanne looked upon nature with perhaps the most delicate and perceptive eye a painter has ever possessed, and his vision became a theatre for the violent struggles of some one line against terrible odds, for the warring clashes of inharmonious colours. He saw in objective nature a chaos of disorganised movement, and he set himself the task of putting it in order. In studying the variations and qualifications of linear directions in his model, he discovered another method of accentuating the feeling of dynamism in his canvases. He stated lines, not in their static character, but in their average of fluctuation. We know that all straight lines are influenced by their surroundings, that they appear bent or curved when related to other lines. The extent to which a line is thus optically bent is its extreme of fluctuability. Cézanne determined this extreme in all of his lines, and by transcribing them midway between their actual and optical states, achieved at once their normality and their extreme abnormality. The character, direction and curve of all lines in a canvas change with every shifting of the point of visual contact. Since the unity of a picture is different from every focus, all the lines consequently assume a slightly different direction every time our eye shifts from one spot to another. Cézanne, by recording the mean of linear changeability, facilitated and hastened this vicissitude of mutation.