Part 10

Although Cezanne 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 naif. 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 aesthetics 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 aesthetics. Readily comprehensible painting is no further advanced than readily comprehensible therapeutics.

Emile Bernard was little different from the average critic. In attributing to Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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'etendue_), whether it be a section of nature, or if you choose, of the spectacle that the _Pater omnipotens aeternus 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 _esthetique_. 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. Cezanne, 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. Cezanne 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 Cezanne, 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: Cezanne's desire was to reproduce its solidity. Both achieved their ends. Cezanne'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 aesthetic 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 Cezanne 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. Cezanne'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 Cezanne'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. Cezanne 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 Cezanne'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. Cezanne, 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. Cezanne 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 aesthetic 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. Cezanne 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. Cezanne 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. Cezanne, by recording the mean of linear changeability, facilitated and hastened this vicissitude of mutation.

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 Cezanne, 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 Cezanne, was able to make aesthetic 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. Cezanne 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.

Cezanne 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 Cezanne, 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 Cezanne, preoccupied with the most momentous problems of aesthetics, take an interest in enlarged book illuminations, when the most superficial corner of his slightest canvas had more organisation and incited a greater aesthetic emotion than all the mosaics in S. Vitale at Ravenna?

Cezanne 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 aesthetic 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 Cezanne. 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 Cezanne 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 aesthetic 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. Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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.

Cezanne'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. Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne, 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne, 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. Cezanne'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 Cezanne 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. Cezanne 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_: Cezanne 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. Cezanne, if less pleasing, is the more powerful; and with all his lack of suavity he is the more complex and less monotonous. The extraordinary _imprevu_ 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 Cezanne 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. Cezanne 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; Cezanne 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.