Another contribution he made to painting was his application of the stereoscopic function of the eye to all models by means of colour. From the earliest art to Cézanne, objects have been portrayed as if conceived in vacuo, with absolute and delimited contours. Such portrayals are directly opposed to our normal vision, for whenever we focus our sight on any natural object whatever, each eye records a different perspective representation of that object; there is a distinct binocular parallax. Certain parts are seen by one eye which are invisible to the other. But these two visual impressions are perceived simultaneously, combined in one image; that is to say: the optic axes converge at such an angle that both the right and left monocular impressions are superimposed. The single impression thus produced is one of perspective and relief. This is a rudimentary law of optics, but on it our accuracy of vision has always depended. In the lenticular stereoscope the eye-glasses are marginal portions of the same convex lens, which, when set edge to edge, deflect the rays from the picture so as to strike the eyes as if coming from an intermediate point. By this bending of the rays the two pictures become one impression, and present the appearance of solid forms as in nature. The problem of how to transcribe on a flat surface in a single picture the effect later produced by a stereoscope with two pictures, has confronted painters for hundreds of years. Leonardo da Vinci in his Trattato della Pittura recorded the fact that our vision encompasses to a slight degree everything that passes before it; that we see around all objects; and that this encircling sight gives us the sensation of rotundity. But neither he, nor any artist up to Cézanne, was able to make æsthetic use of the fact. The vision of all older painting (although by the use of line and composition it became plastic because used as a detail) was the vision of the man with one eye, for a one-eyed man sees nature as a flat plane: only by association of the relative size of objects is he capable of judging depth. Cézanne saw the impossibility of producing a double vision by geometric rules, and approached the problem from another direction. By understanding the functioning elements of colour in their relation to texture and space, he was able to paint forms in such a way that each colour he applied took its relative position in space and held each part of an object stationary at any required distance from the eye. As a result of his method we can judge the depth and sense the solidity of his pictures the same as we do in nature.
Cézanne was ever attempting to solve the problem of the dynamics of vision. An analysis of his pictures often reveals a uniform leaning of lines—a tendency of all the objects to precipitate themselves upon a certain spot, like the minute flotsam on a surface of water being sucked through a drain-hole. We find an explanation for this convergence in one of his letters. He says: “In studying nature closely, you will observe that it becomes concentric. I mean that on an orange, an apple, a ball or a head there is a culminating point; and this point, despite the strong effects of light and shadow which are colour sensations, is always the nearest to our eye. The edges of objects retreat toward a centre which is situated on our horizon.” It is small wonder that Cézanne, obsessed with the idea of form and depth, should have had little admiration for his contemporaries, Van Gogh and Gauguin, both of whom were workmen in the flat. He let pass no opportunity of expressing himself on these artists who of late years have become so popular. Van Gogh was to him only another Pointillist; and he called Gauguin’s work “des images Chinoises,” adding, “I will never accept his entire lack of modelling and gradation.” Does not this explain his aversion to the primitives in whom he saw but the rudiments of art? How could Cézanne, preoccupied with the most momentous problems of æsthetics, take an interest in enlarged book illuminations, when the most superficial corner of his slightest canvas had more organisation and incited a greater æsthetic emotion than all the mosaics in S. Vitale at Ravenna?
Cézanne was never attracted by the facial expressions, the manual attitudes, or the graceful poses of his models. The characteristics of materiality meant nothing to him. He was perpetually searching for something more profound, and began his art where the average painter leaves off. Realistic attributes are interesting only as decoration; they are indicative of the simplicity of man’s mind; they are unable to conduce to an extended æsthetic experience. Van Gogh and Gauguin said well what they had to say, but it was so slight that it is of little interest to us today. We demand a greater stimulus than an art of two dimensions can give; our minds instinctively extend themselves into space. So it was with Cézanne. He left no device untried which would give his work a greater depth, a more veritable solidity. He experimented in colour from this standpoint, then in line, then in optics. With the results of this research he became possessed of all the necessary factors of colossal organisation. He knew that, were these factors rightly applied, they would produce a greater sensation of weight, of force and of movement than any artist before him had succeeded in attaining.
Their application presented to Cézanne his most difficult problem. He must use his discoveries in these three fields in such a way that the very disposition of weights would produce that perfect balance of stress and repose, out of which emanates all æsthetic movement. The simplest manifestation of this balance is found in the opposition of line; but in order to complete this linear adjustment there must be an opposition of colours which, while they must function as volumes, must also accord with the character of the natural object portrayed. In short, there must be an opposition of countering weights, not perfectly balanced so as to create a dead equality, but rhythmically related so that the effect is one of swaying poise. Obviously this could not be accomplished on a flat surface, for the emotion of depth is a necessity to the recognition of equilibrium. Cézanne finally achieved this poise by a plastic distribution of volumes over and beside spacial vacancies. He mastered this basic principle of the hollow and the bump only after long and trying struggles and tedious experimentations. He translated it into terms of his own intellection: to the extent that there was order within him so was he able to put order into his pictures. This vision of his was intellectual rather than optical; and M. Bernard unnecessarily tells us that, so sure was Cézanne of his justification, he placed his colours on canvas with the same absolutism he used in expressing himself verbally. His art was his thought given concrete form through the medium of nature. His painting was the result of a mental process—an intellectual conclusion after it had been weighed, added to, substracted from, modified by exterior considerations, and at last brought forth purged and clarified and as nearly complete as was his development at the time.
For this reason Cézanne resented the presence of people while he worked. To attain his ends his mind had to be concentrated on its ultimate ambition. It could support no disturbing factors. Even though he had no trick which might be copied, he once said to a friend: “I have never permitted anyone to watch me while I work. I refuse to do anything before anyone.” Had he allowed spectators to stand over him he probably would have fatigued them, for his work progressed by single strokes interspersed by long periods of reflection and analysis. M. Bernard would hear him descend to the garden a score of times during the day’s work, sit a moment and rush back to the studio as if some solution had presented itself to him suddenly. At other times he would walk back and forth before his picture awaiting the answer to a problem before him. It is such deliberateness in great artists that has, curiously enough, acquired for them a reputation for esotericism. Their moments of deep contemplation and their sudden plunges into labour have been interpreted as periods of intellectual coma shot through occasionally by “divine flashes of inspiration” coming from an outside agent. The reverse is true, however. An artist retains his sentiency at all times. He necessarily works consciously, with the same intellectual labours as a scientist. A painter can no more produce a great picture unwittingly than an inventor can construct an intricate machine unwittingly. They are both labourers in the most plebeian sense.
Cézanne’s hatred for facile and thoughtless workmen who continually entertain amateurs, was monumental. To him they were pupils who, by learning a few rules, were able to paint conventional pieces after the manner of thousands who had preceded him. They represented the academicians with whom every country is overrun—the suave and satisfied craftsmen who epitomise mediocrity, whose appeal is to minds steeped in pedantry and conservatism. In France they come out of the government-run Beaux-Arts school to which the incompetents of both America and England flock. Cézanne harboured a particular enmity for that school; anyone who had passed through it aroused his scorn. “With a little temperament anyone can be an academic painter,” he said. “One can make pictures without being a harmonist or a colourist. It is enough to have an art sense—and even this art sense is without doubt the horror of the bourgeois. Thus the institutes, the pensions and the honours are only made for cretins, farceurs and drolls.”
In writing of Cézanne one is led to make a comparison between him and his great compatriot, Renoir, for it is almost unbelievable that one century could have produced two such radically different geniuses. Renoir, first of all, was not an innovator: he was the consummation of Impressionistic means. In Cézanne, to the contrary, we see a man dissatisfied with the greatest results of others, ever tortured by the search for something more final, more potent. “Let us not be satisfied with the formulas of our wonderful antecedents,” he said many times, and he might have added, “and of our wonderful contemporaries.” Renoir was the apex of an art era, while Cézanne was the first segment of a greater and vaster cycle. Renoir, by mastering his means at an early date, acquired a technical facility to which Cézanne, ever on the hunt for deeper conceptions, never attained. Renoir’s genius was for linear rhythm. In the acquisition of this there entered, in varying degree, form, colour and light; but the line itself was his preoccupation. Cézanne’s genius was for plastic volume out of which the rhythmic line resulted. That is: the one constructed his creations out of colour and made colour appear like form; while in the other’s creations, which are the result of colour, the colour is felt to be form. In Renoir is recognised the solidity and depth of form, while in Cézanne the colour is a functional element whose dynamism gives birth to form which is felt subjectively. Renoir synthesises nature’s forms, by grouping them in such a way that the lines move and are harmonious. Cézanne looks for the synthesis in each subject he sits before, and instead of grouping his forms arbitrarily, he penetrates to their inherent synthesis. This is why almost every one of his pictures is built on a different synthetic form. His penetration gave him at each essay a different vision of the organisms of a particular subject, a vision which varied as the subject varied. In Renoir movement is attained by relating the lines: Cézanne has produced harmony by accentuating their differences. In the former the lines lead smoothly and fluently into others, until they all culminate in a line which carries the movement to a finality; while in the latter we feel little of that suavity of sequence: the lines are formed by the spaces between his volumes rather than by linear continuation. Cézanne, if less pleasing, is the more powerful; and with all his lack of suavity he is the more complex and less monotonous. The extraordinary imprévu of his formal developments and his unique manner of stating parallels recall the symphonic works of Beethoven. The ensembles of both are made up of an infinitude of smaller forms, and both display a colossal power of absoluteness in setting forth each smallest form. Renoir’s work is more on the lines of Haydn.
After Michelangelo there was no longer any new inspiration for sculpture. After Cézanne there was no longer any excuse for it. He has made us see that painting can present a more solid vision than that of any stone image. Against modern statues we can only bump our heads: in the contemplation of modern painting we can exhaust our intelligences. Cézanne is as much a reproach to sculptors as Renoir is to those who continue to use Impressionist methods. He is the great prophet of future art, as well as the consummator of the realistic vision of his time. Both men deformed nature’s objects—Renoir slightly to meet the demands of consistency in his preconceived compositions; Cézanne to a greater extent in order to make form voluminous. Some of his deformations resulted from extraneous line forces which, when coming in contact with an object’s contour, made it lean to the right or left, or in some other way take on an abnormal appearance as of convexity or concavity.
M. Bernard thinks these irregularities in Cézanne the result of defective eyesight. But such an explanation is untenable. There is abundant evidence to show that, to the contrary, they are the result of a highly sensitised sight—a sight which simultaneously calls up the complementary of the thing viewed, whether it be a line, a colour or a tone. This double vision is only a dependency of the plastic mind which, instead of approaching a problem from the nearest side, throws itself automatically to the opposite side, and, by thus obtaining a double approach, arrives at a fuller comprehension. While slanting his line and distorting his volumes Cézanne was unconsciously moulding the parts to echo the organisation of the whole. In turning his pictures into block-manifestations, he strove for a result which would conduce to a profounder æsthetic pleasure than did the linear movements of Renoir. After we have enjoyed Renoir’s rhythms we can lay them aside for the time as we can a very beautiful but simple melody. The force of Cézanne strikes us like that of a vast bulk or a mountain. Contemplating his work is like coming suddenly face to face with an ordered elemental force. At first we are conscious only of a shock, but when our wonder has abated, we find ourselves studying the smaller forms which go into the picture’s making. In the 1902 Baigneuses of Renoir each separate figure is a beautiful and complete form which fits into and becomes part of the general rhythm. In Cézanne the importance of parts is entirely submerged in the effect of the whole. Here is the main difference between these two great men: we enjoy each part of Renoir and are conducted by line to a completion; in Cézanne we are struck simultaneously by each interrelated part. Viewing a canvas of the latter is like going out into the blazing sunlight from the cool sombreness of a house. At first we are aware only of the force of the light, but as we gradually become accustomed to the glare, we begin to perceive separately objects which before had been only a part of the general impression. The fact that Cézanne invariably spoke of the “motif” should have given his friends a clue to his conception of composition. Before him composition had been to a great extent the formation of a simple melody of line in three dimensions, constructed by the forms of objects. It corresponded to the purely melodious in music, the opening of the theme, its sequence of phrasing and the finale. Cézanne chose a motif, and in each movement of his picture it is to be found, varied, elaborated, reversed and developed. Each part of his canvas is a beginning, yet each part, though distinct as a form, is perfectly united both with the opening motif and with every variation of it.