Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning Part 4

The years from 1865 to 1876 const.i.tute a period of Renoir's life rich in its promise of splendid things. His keen admirations and high enthusiasms made of him throughout this time a disciple. But his achievements, small as they were, were more sumptuous and effectual than either Manet's or Monet's. Their true significance, though, lay in their a.s.surance of what was to come after he had completed that unlearning process through which all great men must pa.s.s. Only by sitting at a master's feet can one acquire the knowledge that informs one which influences should be utilised and which cast aside. One cannot learn from experience the total lessons of many men, each one of whom has given a lifetime to the study of a different side of a subject. If these men are to be surpa.s.sed their life work must be used as a starting point. Renoir began thus. He had fallen under the sway of Courbet, Manet, Delacroix and Monet; but after eleven years he had exhausted his creative interest in both their theories and their attainments. These men had expressed all that was in them. For Renoir to cling to them was to stand still. If he was to go down in history as a constructive genius and not merely as an able imitator, it was time for him to strike out alone.

He did not hesitate. The portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, done in 1876, marks his transformation. In it he achieved the scintillation of light which is not linked with colour or painting, but which seems to arise, by some mysterious alchemy, from the surface of the canvas. In this picture, and also in the Moulin de la Galette, finished in the same year, he consummated the fondest ambition of the Impressionists, namely: to make the spectator feel a picture, not as a depiction of nature's light, but as a medium from which emanates the very force of light itself. But Renoir did not stop here: to this achievement he added form and rhythm-two attributes which the Impressionists, preoccupied with objectivity, were too busy to attempt. And in addition he displayed a technique so perfect in its adaptability to any expression, that its mannerisms were completely submerged in the picture's total effect.

These were the qualities which Renoir was to develop to so superlative a degree. He had begun to express form in 1870 in his Portrait de Dame.

Two years later in his Delacroix adaptation he had branched out into colour. And in his very first canvases there was rhythmic balance of lines. In 1876 all these tendencies coalesced. In consequence Renoir blossomed forth free from aggressive influences, knowing his own limitations and possibilities. This cannot be said even of those excellent works, La Loge, La Danseuse and La Fillette Attentive, done the two preceding years. It is only by contemplating such pictures as the portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, La Chevelure and La Source that we can perceive the path along which his development was to take place. For these canvases, though far more significant than the works of p.i.s.sarro and Monet, are almost negligible beside his later work. He was a man never satisfied with results, no matter how exalted. His every new achievement was only a higher elevation from which his horizon ever receded.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LE DeJEUNER DES CANOTIERS by RENOIR]

One of Renoir's important advances in method is his liberation from the circ.u.mscribed use of black. Although in some of his work of 1876 there are still traces of that tone used organically, they are so slight that they may be disregarded. Black was the very keynote of the paintings of his day. It was looked upon as a necessity in the creation of volumes.

Courbet did little without it, and Manet brightened it only with occasional flashes of colour. Today we know that it is not a technical necessity, that pure colours, in fact, when properly used, can produce the most solid forms. But whereas we have been able to profit by the teachings of Cezanne and the Synchromists, Renoir had to learn this fact by bitter experiments in a new element. In La Balancoire, done in the same year as the Moulin de la Galette and now hanging with that picture in the Luxembourg, black is entirely absent. This little canvas was probably an experiment actuated by Monet, for never afterward did he on principle lay black aside. While he realised its unimportance as a fundamental for constructing volume, he nevertheless felt its need as a complement to colour-the need of the static and the dead to accentuate the plastic and alive.

It is during this period that critics are p.r.o.ne to see Gainsborough in Renoir. But their reasons for such a comparison are superficial, and go no further than the fact that both painters dealt with feminine themes in a similarly intimate manner. No genuinely artistic likeness can be found between Mrs. Siddons, for instance, and the Ingenue. The one is merely a spirited portrait without composition or tactility: the other is an exquisite bit of form and colour, which we feel would be as solid to the touch as it appears to the eye. If we are to compare Renoir to English painters at all, let us designate Hogarth and Romney, although any such comparative method of criticism is apt to lead at once to misunderstanding. However, even these two men are distinctly inadequate as measures for Renoir. In the graphic arts Englishmen exhibit no feeling for rhythm. Indeed, it may correctly be said they possess no graphic arts. Rhythm is a factor which has made itself felt only in their poetry, and here it can hardly be called more than a division of interval, or tempo. Rossetti in his paintings is seemingly more conscious of its power than any other Englishman, and occasionally attempted to produce it by the primitive device of curved lines. But, after all, Rossetti was Italian. On the whole Renoir and the English artists are two fundamentally dissimilar to be estimated relatively. The finest qualities of Renoir's art grew out of his instinct for fluent movement, for intense undulations, for hot gorgeous colour, for freedom from all traditional prescriptions.

The evolution of these instincts was by no means a mechanical one. After he had amalgamated the leading qualities of his art, his interest would often reveal itself more strongly in one direction than another. Thus many of his canvases show a retrogression toward emphasis of light; others toward form; still others toward linear rhythm. Yet no matter which one of these qualities predominated, the others also remained intact. More importance, however, attached to his preoccupation with the treatment of light. His experiments and consequent development in this field are of initial significance in judging his later work. In 1878 he had evidently foreseen the cul-de-sac into which the natural distribution of light would lead. The very volatility and translucency of illumination and its matter-dispelling qualities, const.i.tuted the greatest drawback to its use in the creation of form. In other words its sheer beauty nullified the deeper aims of painting. In two decorative Panneaux of reclining nudes, done in the same year, Renoir makes his first attempt to escape from the naturalism of light. The use of light is here restricted to a colour force which serves only to bring form into relief. From that time on, although he had many struggles with its power over him, he had conquered its insidious influence. It became his servant, whereas before it had been his master. In his earlier canvases, wherein sunlight had played a leading part, he had placed the sun patches, gleaming and vibrant, wherever they naturally fell. After 1878 he began placing them arbitrarily on points where formal projection was needed.

The subtle manner in which he constructed and posed these patches precluded any discovery of his reasons for altering their natural location. But Renoir was not fully satisfied, and soon abandoned this phase of _pleinairisme_. Later the spots of sunlight appeared on cheeks, shoulders, knees, or any other salients which called for powerful relief, thereby losing their flat and detached appearance. This moulding of them into intense aggregations had much to do with Renoir's fullness of form. His long experience had given him a complete knowledge of their naturalistic effect. He knew it was impossible to make them remain on the same plane with the surrounding shadow, and he understood the reasons for this phenomenon. It was not therefore remarkable that, in his later method of applying them, he was sure of his results. As soon as he realised that sunlight dispersed matter by obscuring some points and accentuating others, he knew that by an intelligent employment of this factor of luminosity he could at will accentuate certain parts of his canvas and obscure others. This knowledge led him naturally to create his own light, irrespective of how it actually existed. This was an important step toward its complete abrogation, and brought arbitrary means in painting just so much nearer. He had already distorted volumes for purposes of organisation in the same manner that he now distorted light. Indeed every great painter has taken this liberty with form; but each one has to learn the device anew in its relation to his own separate vision.

There are few shadows, as such, in Renoir. We find darks and lights in scintillating succession, but we may search in vain, even in his canvases of 1878 or 1879, for those shadowed outlines which are the result of light. If light there is, it is only the light which springs from our own eyes-light which seems to come from the direction of the beholder, like the reflection of a light in water. Move as you will before his pictures, it follows you, for it is the illumination of that part of the picture nearest the eyes of the painter. Where a form is full, there Renoir contrives to have a light fall. This artifice may strike us today as childish, since we have outgrown our concern with light; but let us remember that from the beginning the depiction of lights and shadows had been a fixed practice, and that their tones had formed the only basis for chiaroscuro. With the Impressionists light became the _atout_ of painting. Renoir made of it a vital form-creating element. Herein we have its evolution: first, a convention; next, an obsession; last, a utility. So were the aesthetic possibilities of light exhausted, just as the aesthetic possibilities of the human form were exhausted by Michelangelo.

In this last step of liberating light from convention, Renoir approached nearer to nature than any antecedent painter. After all, a human being in the sunlight appears to us as a solid moving ma.s.s. Only those who look upon nature as a flat pattern of shades and lights are misled by sun patches. So, in Renoir's adapting the source of light for the purpose of producing solidity of form, we are cognisant of the palpability of his figures whether they are in light or shadow, or both.

Thus he created the actual impression of volume we all get before a moving form. This arbitrary disposition of light and shadow also gave fullness and intensity to his form, and accentuated the poise, so subtle and unexpected, we feel in even his slightest works. But while this was the secret of his attainment of volume, the compositional use to which he put this volume requires another explanation-one which has its roots in the very depths of the man's genius. There had never been such form in the French school as that which Renoir gave it in 1880. The Tete de Jeune Fille and Les Enfants en Rose et Bleu, done about this time, must have been the despair of even the sculptors of his day. And these were but the beginning. Many phases of his art were yet to be emphasised and developed before the Renoir we know today was to be perfected.

It was in 1884 that he began to "_apprendre le dessin_." For four years he continued this self-training in the precision of draughtsmans.h.i.+p. As a boy he had begun his painting in a manner more competent than the most advanced style of the average artist, as is evidenced by the able use of colour as design in his early porcelains. And although he was driven to this work by necessity, the incident was a salutary one. It turned his thoughts toward those abstract organisations of colour which always afterward haunted him. Later he learned all the tricks of the day in the school of the realists, and succeeded in surpa.s.sing his masters. Next he studied the Impressionists and went beyond them also. Then he co-ordinated his knowledge and established his individual greatness.

This period of his development gave France much of its finest painting, and his Baigneuse done at this time is an undoubted masterpiece. His reversion to the rudiments of drawing was the result of a burning desire to develop rhythm and form. His technical difficulties had been conquered at an early date: he needed only dexterity in drawing to achieve his end. Not only did Renoir attain to his objective, but, by comprehending the principle of the placements and displacements of volumes, he learned the advantages of line accentuation in obtaining movement.

We now come to those pictures which show Renoir's intimate relation to Rubens through Boucher and Watteau: to his alfres...o...b..thing figures.

Some one has pointed out that his Baigneuses of 1885, one year after he had devoted himself to drawing, was inspired by Girardon's lead-reliefs in the gardens at Versailles. The commentary is undoubtedly true; but even so, of what significance is it? Aside from the superficial fact that in the works of both appear bathing women in more or less abandoned poses, Renoir had nothing in common with the school of Largilliere, Pater, Fragonard, Le Moyne, Santerre and Girardon. In all such observations one senses the restriction of the critic's viewpoint to ill.u.s.tration. An artist may find inspiration in any visual form, but this form is of no more aesthetic importance to him than a photograph. In Pica.s.so's paintings of violin fragments we are scarcely permitted to deduce an inspiration from Stradivarius. Grotesque as this a.n.a.logy may seem, it is applicable to the contention that Renoir stemmed from Girardon. For there is nothing whatever in Renoir's bathing girls to suggest a psychological parallel between them and the leaden frieze at Versailles. If Renoir saw in that frieze an attractive pose, it was with an eye to its adaptability to composition. In Girardon there is only a pretty and sensual chaos. In Renoir we have a masterly organisation wherein the actual positions of the young women are not even remarked.

Compare, for instance, Girardon's version of the figure of the girl throwing water on her playmates, with the corresponding figure in Renoir's drawing. The body of the former is without doubt a more faithful replica of its model; in Renoir it has become impossibly elongated and voluminous. Its head is too small; its back too long; its hips are too large-and yet withal it is an exquisite bit of rich form which has as concrete a tangibility as that of a real body. One cannot judge it by its contour; one must bury oneself in its very weight.

Had Renoir advanced no further than his masterly Baigneuse of 1884, he would nevertheless have gone down in history as a great artist. But compared with the same subject done in 1888, it appears stiff. We feel in it the rigidity of a master whose great qualities are without a directing intelligence. In the later canvas, Renoir is less preoccupied with details. As a result there is a greater plenitude of bulging form, a purer rhythm. And there is also an added movement caused by the linear harmony of the background, by the hair over the shoulder, and above all by the turning of the head so that its weight is s.h.i.+fted over a hollow.

An apparently simple thing-this turning of a head. Yet Michelangelo's genius, as well as that of all great artists, is dependent on the knowledge of when a head should be turned or a limb advanced. This knowledge is what transforms action into movement, tempo into rhythm, the static into the plastic, the dead into the living. It is the final penetration into composition; on it all aesthetic form is built. Renoir acquired it in his period of so-called dry drawing. Its dawn came in La Natte and Mere et Enfant. It was still developing in the Baigneuse; and in La Baigneuse Brune and Nu a l'etoffe Vert et Jaune, both done after 1900, this knowledge was becoming sure of itself. Between 1884 and 1892, however, Renoir's new strength was not wholly mastered. There was conscious effort in its employment. This is seen in La Fillette a la Gerbe and Les Filles de Catulle Mendes and in that otherwise miraculous canvas, Au Piano. In Le Croquet, 1892, he begins to exhibit, in his use of new means, the same prodigious adroitness he displayed in his earlier and slighter works. And in Les Deux Surs the effects of labour entirely vanish, and he once more paints with magistral unconcern.

From that time forward Renoir's complete genius was but a matter of evolution. And here let it be remembered that his transcendent competency was the result of academic training, for of late we have heard many objections to this kind of discipline. We have been invited to behold the water-colour and crayon works of the untutored, a.s.sured that they were as fine as Matisse's drawings. And we have been asked to accept, as a corollary, the statement that all painters are better off without the pernicious influence of schools. We have had modern paintings pointed out to us as examples of what inspiration and freedom from convention can do. We have heard the constantly reiterated a.s.sertion that academies cramp genius, restrict vision and force all expression into stipulated moulds. To concede to these extravagant a.s.sertions would be to ignore the history of great painting, for during all the significant epochs of art the school was at its zenith. Without it there could be no genuine achievement. No amount of mere inspiration has ever enabled an artist to paint an eminent canvas. No amount of uncontrolled emotionalism has ever permitted one to make an aesthetically moving work of art. No untrained man, no matter how high his natural gifts, has yet been able to record adequately his feelings. All the records of past accomplishment go to show that no person who has not been profoundly educated in the purely objective (not utilitarian) forms, and in the abstract qualities of painting, such as anatomy and technique, has succeeded in conceiving an artistic organisation.

The school has never obscured or dwarfed genius, nor is it probable it ever will. To the contrary it a.s.sists the truly great man in his self-fulfilment and weeds out the mediocre man. It turns the student's thoughts to methods rather than to inspiration. It directs the attention of incompetent and merely talented persons, incapable of rising above its teachings, into side issues. Thus it relegates their work to the _soupentes_ of the world: whereas, if they had been permitted to labour at random, they would only have choked the market of genuinely aesthetic production. The school teaches discipline, precision, and the control of wayward impulses, without all of which the greatest artist could only incompletely express himself. These are the things which Renoir felt he lacked; and in the midst of his career he halted long enough to acquire them. It may be argued that his was intelligent training, while that of the schools is unintelligent. But all discipline is beneficial to the artist. Only slavish minds, hopeless from the first, succ.u.mb to it. The fact that a man capitulates to academic training attests to an incompetency so great that, under no circ.u.mstances, however favorable, could it have arisen to a point capable of producing great art. Giotto, El Greco and Rubens pa.s.sed through rigid training and rose above it. And the apprentices.h.i.+p demanded of the old Egyptian, Chinese and Greek artists was longer and more tedious than any of our school courses today.

Renoir's scholastic training was his salvation. With the advent of the twentieth century he struck his pace. All his qualities converged toward the construction of rhythm. In 1900 he painted a large and ambitious canvas of an attired maid combing a nude's hair, La Toilette de la Baigneuse, which is more extended and conclusive than any of his previous works. The forms lean in opposition and complete each other. In them is a perfect poise which subjectively evokes an emotion of movement. Even the lights and darks are separated so as to give the strongest effect. The very hat and tree trunk are integral parts of the whole, and there is not a line in the picture which does not develop logically to a harmonic completion. The luscious plenitude of form is equalled only by the finality of the rhythm.

Another picture of the same period is the Baigneuses in the Vollard collection, a duplicate of his Baigneuses of fifteen years before. Now all the hardness is gone from the contours. The differentiation of texture between the flesh and water and foliage is absent. The lines are less angular and true, and both the distant nudes' att.i.tudes are changed. The first canvas recalled Ingres; but the second brings up Cezanne, for it is pure composition with every nugatory quality eliminated. It demonstrates the possibility of creating abstract unity in three dimensions with the objective reality at hand. The picture contains movement in the vital sense, and possesses a tactility as great as a Giorgione done with modern means. In fact, comparison of these two Baigneuses will straightway divulge the advantages that lie in modern methods. The first is extremely able, and has the unfinished foundation of a great composition. The second, because of what Renoir had learned of freedom, is as intense as a Rubens in that painter's own manner; and in addition it has an emotional element to which the Antwerp master never attained.

Two years later this obsession to create form as an impregnable block, no matter in how many integers it might be divided, made him turn his attention to Daumier; and in Le Jardin d'Essoyes and his heads of Coco he surpa.s.ses even this master of organisation. Having a.s.similated this new influence Renoir added it to his own store of knowledge, and four years later painted his greatest picture, Le Pet.i.t Peintre. After this there was little more to be done in Renoir's style unless he extended his vision to greater surfaces. This he has not done. But he has added other masterpieces to the ones already mentioned. His Ode aux Fleurs (d'apres Anacreon), the two decorative Panneaux of the tambourine player and the dancer, Coco et les Deux Servantes, La Rose dans les Cheveux and La Femme au Miroir are all worthy of a place beside the greatest pictures of all time. In these last paintings nature's form is transcribed in a purely arbitrary manner. Many of the parts are exaggerated to create greater projection or more perfect proportion in relation to the whole. Texture has developed into a unified surface, and simple linear balance has become poise in depth. The colouring has grown so subtle that it is impossible in many places to tell just what it is, for in it is a whole spectrum that makes it living.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BAIGNEUSES, 1885 by RENOIR]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BAIGNEUSES, 1902 BY RENOIR]

Renoir was a man who fundamentally was not revolutionary, an artist who was shown the way by others, a genius who culminated a great and febrile epoch. His beginnings were imitative of the painters of his day. He climbed the ladder from dark to light, from the stiff to the mobile. His first works under Courbet and Manet were no better than those of Hankwan. Later his pictures began to flow rhythmically in simple lines as in the Head of a Chinese Lady by Ririomin. Then they began to extend into depth, and as early as 1881 they surpa.s.sed t.i.tian. From then on they approached steadily to the completeness of a modernised Rubens.

That Renoir never reached that master's greatness is due, not to his lack of acute and complete vision, but to his restriction of it to small works. A composer who writes a symphony in which each minute part is an intimate factor of the whole, is greater than he who writes only an overture whose entirety is no greater than one of the symphony's movements. Renoir, in so far as he went, was as great as the greatest.

One cannot think of a Renoir canvas merely as a painting. It is a new and visually complete cosmos. In looking at his work the intelligence enters a world in which every form has interest, every line completion, every s.p.a.ce a plasticity: in short, a world in which everything is visibly interrelated. A host of influences have been read into Renoir, and indeed there were many in his development. But they were only the steps by which he mounted to high achievement. So unimportant are the works of most of these other men when compared with Renoir's personal accomplishments, that one may visualise this artist as a raindrop on a window, which, as it flows downward, consumes and embodies all those in its path. Courbet, Monet, Delacroix and Manet, had they no other claim on posterity than as instructors of Renoir, would not have lived in vain. The Chinese, the Greeks, the Renaissance, even that full Indian sculpture in the Chaitya of Karli of the eleventh century B.C.-are all within him. That they are temperamental affinities rather than direct influences none can deny; but, strange as it may seem, he has traits which directly recall each one of them. They all have the ineradicable germ of genius in them; and that germ, being changeless and eternal, lies at the root of all aesthetic creation. For this reason a great man belongs to all time. He embraces all the results of the struggles which have gone before. In the possession of Renoir we have no apologies to make to antiquity, any more than in having produced Cezanne must we abase ourselves before the artists who are yet to come.

VI

PAUL CeZANNE

The dilettante, avid for accounts of an artist's eccentricities, will find abundant and varied material of this nature in half a hundred books written by critics of almost every nationality on that astounding and grotesque colossus, Cezanne. Perhaps no great artist in the world's history has been so wantonly libelled, maligned and ridiculed as he. Nor has there ever been a painter of such wide influence so grossly misunderstood. Cezanne has been endowed with most fantastic powers, dismissed with a _coup d'esprit_ for attributes he never possessed, and canonised for qualities he would have repudiated. Like Michelangelo he has been both the admiration and the mystery of critics. And he is at once the idol and the incubus of present-day artists. His letters alone have formed the technical basis of one great modern art school. A fragmentary phrase of his mentioning geometrical figures was seized upon by a Spaniard and made the foundation for another school. His mention of Poussin drove a horde of Scandinavians, Austrians and Bohemians to a contemplation of that artist. Cezanne's very limitations have been the inspiration for an army of hardy imitators who believe it is more vital to imitate modernity than to reconstruct the past. Indeed it may be said that all art since Impressionism is divided into two groups, one which endeavours to develop some quality or qualities in Cezanne, the other which attempts the anachronism of resuscitating the primitive art of a simple-minded antiquity. For even this latter group, Cezanne is in part responsible. Did he not say that we must become cla.s.sicists again by way of nature? And did this not give reactionary and servile minds ample excuse to cling with even greater pa.s.sion to a dead and rigid past? In his great sense of order his disciples saw only immobility; their minds, redundant with parallels, harked back to the Egyptians.

Thus has he been emulated: but, among all these branches shot out from the mother trunk, it can be stated incontestably that only one has understood him, has penetrated beneath the surface of his canvases, has realised his true gift to the art of the future. And this one, strangely enough, is the furthest removed from imitation.

Cezanne's biography is of value to the art student, for it embodies in concrete form the factors which motivated his aesthetic apperceptions. By Cezanne'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 emile Bernard. To this chronicler we are indebted for practically all the authentic personal anecdotes of the artist. He had always admired Cezanne, and in 1904 a personal friends.h.i.+p was established between them, which endured until the latter's death. After Cezanne 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 p.i.s.sarro. For that persuasive Jew's memory he always harboured a deep respect.

Cezanne'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-fellows.h.i.+p turned inward, became restrained and pent-up. He grew sensitive and wary, and in later life this defensive att.i.tude 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 n.o.body 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 Cezanne 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 pa.s.sed him by: he was too absorbed in his work to heed, just as later he was too engrossed to follow his mother's hea.r.s.e 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. Cezanne, 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'uvre. Cezanne's reply was simply that Zola had a "mediocre intelligence" and was a "detestable friend." In their youth Cezanne took the ascendency over Zola in Latin and French verse; even in his old age he could recite long pa.s.sages 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.

Cezanne'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 pa.s.sionate 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 surpa.s.sed by the Impressionists. These paintings are cla.s.sic 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 p.i.s.sarro 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 p.i.s.sarro, Cezanne completed his a.s.similation 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 Cezanne never completely became a defender of p.i.s.sarro'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 aesthetic procedure, facilitated the experimentations of Cezanne. But he in turn recognised the restrictions of the Impressionists' methods: indeed, he saw that their theories could apply only to a very circ.u.mscribed aesthetic field; and he was not content with them. He studied a.s.siduously in the Louvre and absorbed the myriad impulses which had impelled the great masters of the past. The Louvre and p.i.s.sarro const.i.tuted 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 doc.u.mentary history of Cezanne'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 Cezanne 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 surpa.s.sed early in his career. Cezanne 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 a.n.a.lytic 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. Cezanne, 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 Cezanne by an impa.s.sable 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 Cezanne of the later years not only is the form poised in three dimensions, but the very light also is poised. We feel in Cezanne 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BAIGNEUSES by CeZANNE]

If this feat of Cezanne'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 Cezanne 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 quant.i.ty of actual light, and would thus create emotional form in the same manner that nature creates visual form. Hence, the planes in a Cezanne canvas advance or recede _en ma.s.se_, retaining their relativity, as the eye excludes or receives a greater or a lesser quant.i.ty 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 Cezanne, 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. Cezanne, 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 aesthetic means. Cezanne 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 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 naf. Their process of valuation is thus reversed. Great art is as a rule too compounded for their a.n.a.lytical 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 cla.s.s 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 cert.i.tude 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'