| POMMES SUR UNE TABLE | CÉZANNE |
In this little-understood side of Cézanne’s genius lies an infinitude of possibilities. Without an ability to organise, all his knowledge is worthless to the painter. He himself could apply it, and his understanding of the exact adaptability of a form to a hollow permitted him to express his knowledge with a force his followers lack. His sensitiveness to spaces and the characters of his forms recall at times the works of Mokkei who used protuberances and hollows (namely: accidents of portraiture and landscape) to enrich and diversify form. Nature to Cézanne was not simple, and he never depicted it thus. Even in his bathing pieces, whose disproportions are deplored by many, the composition is minutely conceived, not on a simple harmonic figure, but on complicated oppositional planes. Not only are the surface forms perfectly adapted to a given space, but the directions taken by these forms are as solidly indicated and the vacancies made by them are as solidly filled in, as in a Rubens. Indeed these canvases, as block-manifestations, are nearly as perfect as the pictures of El Greco who was the greatest master of this kind of composition.
Cézanne should be numbered among the experimenters in art. With him, as with the Impressionists, the desire was to learn rather than to utilise discoveries. The painters from Courbet to Cézanne were the first to usher in an authentically realistic art mode, and they were also the first who sensed the possibilities of inanimate reality for æsthetic organisation. Others before them had regarded nature strictly en amateur, using only the human body for abstract purposes. Even Michelangelo said that aside from it there was nothing worth while. These modern innovators refuted his assertion by proving the contrary, namely: by introducing order into chaotic nature. Their simple arrangements, however, would not have satisfied Michelangelo who, like all men who come at a florescence when the lessons have been learned and it remains only to apply them, demanded an arbitrary organisation which should be not only ordered but composed. Cézanne did little composing in the melodic sense of the word. He stopped at the gate of great composition which, after pointing the future way, he left for his successors to enter. His synthetic interest was limited to the eternal fugue qualities of nature. He undoubtedly saw the futility of creating polyphonic composition from lemons and napkins, but he had not found a menstruum in which the qualities of his materials would disappear. The old masters had done all that was possible with the recognisable human body; Cézanne’s desires for the purification of painting kept him from attempting to improve on their medium.
Among a great scope of oil subjects one cannot say through which of them Cézanne has exerted the strongest influence. His landscapes have made as many disciples as his portraits, and his figure pieces and still-lives are universally copied. But his greatest work, his water-colours, has almost no following. In these he found his most facile and fluent expression. His method of working in oil had always been the posing of small, slightly oblong touches of colour which gave, his canvases the appearance of perfect mosaics. In his water-colour pictures these touches are placed side by side with little or no thought of their ultimate objective importance, and they become larger planes of unmixed tints juxtaposed in such a way that voluminous form results. His work in this most difficult medium has an abstract significance, for in it even the objective colouring of natural objects is unnoticeable. The colours stand by themselves; and while the aspect of Cézanne’s pictures in this medium is flat and almost transparent, the subjective emotion we feel before them is greater than in his oil work. In these pictures there was no going back to retouch. They had to be visualised as a whole before they could be commenced. Each brush stroke had to be a definite and irretrievable step toward the completion of the ensemble. As we study them a slow shifting of the planes is felt: an emotional reconstruction takes place, and at length the volumes begin their turning, advancing and retreating as in his oil paintings, only here the purely æsthetic quality is unadulterated by objective reality. In these water-colours, more than in any of his other work, has he posed the question of æsthetic beauty itself. When we contemplate them, we are more than ever convinced that Cézanne was the first painter, that is, the first man to express himself entirely in the medium of his art, colour. Unfortunately these pictures are difficult of access. Only occasionally are they exposed in a group. Bernheim-Jeune has a magnificent collection of them, and it is to be hoped they will soon find their way into public museums. Eventually, when a true comprehension of this great man comes, they will supplant his other efforts. His desires for a pure art are here expressed most intensely.
Cézanne, however, is not always able to “realise,” as he put it. Even in these water-colours he did not attain his desire. He started too late in life to acquire complete mastery over his enormous means. “One must be a workman in one’s art, must know one’s method of realisation,” he said. “One must be a painter by the very qualities of painting, by making use of the rough materials of art.” He failed to gain that great facility by which supreme realisation is achieved, because the span of life accorded him was too short. He was old when his best work was begun, and like Joseph Conrad, he had passed his youth before the great ambition fired him. “Realising” to him meant the handling of his stupendous means as easily as the academicians handled their puny ones. This he could never do, and his age haunted him to the end. Many have taken him literally when he said he desired to expose in Bouguereau’s Salon, but though he earnestly wished it, he desired to be received there as Bouguereau was: as one who had mastered his expression. “The exterior appearance is nothing,” he explained. “The obstacle is that I don’t realise sufficiently.” In other words, he did not have great enough fluency to permit only the highest qualities of his art to be felt. In his gigantic efforts to “realise,” his pictures changed colour and form many times before they were finished. His respect and admiration for inferior men like Bouguereau and Couture was due to their enviable facility in handling their means. He knew that the fundamental and unalterable laws of organisation had been found and perfected by the old masters, and that, so long as we were human, we must build on their discoveries. “Only to realise like the Venetians!” he cried. And later: “We must again become classicists by way of nature, that is to say, by sensation.... I am old, and it is possible I shall die without having attained this great end.” A year before his death he said: “Yes, I am too old; I have not realised, and I shall never realise now. I shall remain the primitive of the way I have discovered.”
The prediction proved true, but his destiny was none the less a glorious one. Deprived of the phrenetic impulse which took him in all weathers over country roads to the “motif” from six o’clock in the morning until dark, he would never have achieved what he did. The fact of this great modern genius going to work in a hired carriage, too weak to walk, should be a lesson to those painters who are always awaiting the combination of propitious circumstances which will provide them with a perfect studio, a perfect model and a perfect desire. Cézanne, however, knew his high place in art history. Once when Balzac’s Le Chef-d’Œuvre Inconnu was brought up in conversation and the name of its hero, Frenhofer, was mentioned, he arose with tears in his eyes and indicated himself with a single gesture. So sure was he of what he wanted to do that when he failed he discarded his canvases. Many of them are only half covered. He could never pad merely to fill out an arbitrary frame.
With Cézanne’s death came his apotheosis. As he had predicted, thousands rushed in and cleverly imitated his surfaces, his colour gamuts, his distortions of line. His white wooden tables and ruddy apples and twisted fruit-dishes have lately become the etiquette of sophistication. But all this is not authentic eulogy. Derain, his most ardent imitator, is as ignorant of him as Nadelmann is of the Greeks or Archipenko is of Michelangelo. And the majority of those who have written books concerning him merely echo the unintelligent commotion that goes on about his name. Cézanne’s significance lies in his gifts to the painters of the future, to those in whom the creative instinct is a sacred and exalted thing, to those serious and solitary men whose insatiability makes of them explorers in new fields. To such artists Cézanne will always be the primitive of the way that they themselves will take, for there can be no genuine art of the future without his directing and guiding hand. His postulates are too solidly founded on human organisms ever to be ignored. He may be modified and developed: he can never be set aside until the primal emotions of life are changed. Only today is he beginning to be understood, and even now his claim to true greatness is questioned. But Cézanne, judged either as a theorist or as an achiever, is the preeminent figure in modern art. Renoir alone approaches his stature. Purely as a painter he is the greatest the world has produced. In the visual arts he is surpassed only by El Greco, Michelangelo and Rubens.