seeing cezanne

Seeing CezanneAuthor(s): Richard ShiffSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Summer, 1978), pp. 769-808Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342954Accessed: 22/10/2008 14:34

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Seeing Cezanne

Richard Shiff

After a period of relative obscurity, around 1890 Cezanne's art began to receive critical attention from an ever expanding group of commentators-the artist's old impressionist companions, his new symbolist admirers, and a diverse body of critics and journalists. This mass of

early Cezanne criticism is by no means univocal and includes statements on the artist and his art which are in radical opposition to one another. Yet there seems to be a surprising degree of conformity in the early descriptions of the appearance of Cezanne's paintings. In other words, numerous commentators saw the same group of stylistic characteristics as significant, but their interpretations of the meaning or intention be- hind these definable stylistic elements diverged widely. In general, nearly all the early commentary can be categorized as describing Cezanne's art as if it were the product of either impressionist or symbolist concerns. I propose to demonstrate that, contrary to the prevailing twentieth-century interpretation,1 the impressionist view of Cezanne's art more nearly corresponds to his own intentions as he revealed them

through both his stylistic choices and his theoretical pronouncements

A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled me to complete preparatory work for this essay during the summer of 1975.

1. Most modern art historical accounts have grouped Cezanne among the so-called

postimpressionists, a category originally employed by Roger Fry to refer to all French artists whose styles developed in reaction to or as a refinement of impressionism. The major postimpressionists other than Cezanne-Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh-have been closely identified with symbolist concerns; and Cezanne himself is generally described by twentieth-century historians as exhibiting many aspects of the symbolist aesthetic, especially the concern for discovering an ideally expressive "form" or "structure."

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770 Richard Shiff

and that, therefore, his significance for his own time should be re- evaluated. But I would also argue that neither the symbolist nor the

impressionist view of Cezanne's art need be accepted as the one right view today. Extending that thesis, I would call into question any art historical argument which purports to demonstrate that one and only one view of an artist or work of art can be correctly applied. For different viewers, different interpretations may be "correct" or most meaningful, even if at variance with the artist's intended effect.

When the historian chooses to study a particular work of art, he does so either because its contemporary audience considered the work

significant or because he himself considers it significant. Often both

justifications for study and evaluation coincide, as they do in the case of Cezanne's works-his paintings were admired in his lifetime and they are admired now. Recent evaluations of Cezanne's art, however, are not identical to those rendered by his contemporaries. Not only do we seem to have settled upon a more monolithic approach to the appraisal of the artist's motivation and expressive intentions, but we have even given meanings to some observed visual qualities (such as "flatness") which the artist's contemporaries never perceived. If the historian wishes to consider the significance of the artist's oeuvre in relation to its own cultural milieu, he must be careful to evaluate all aspects of that art as it was seen or experienced within its own environment. For this reason I have taken

special care to define categories such as "impressionist" and "symbolist" by means of concepts considered valid in France in the late nineteenth

century and to employ abstract or descriptive words such as "true," "sincere," "primitive," "bright," or "awkward" as they were then em-

ployed. I have also sought to distinguish among types of "im-

pressionists," for example, Academic or Salon impressionists as opposed to the more familiar independent impressionists. Furthermore, in dis-

cussing matters of style, I have analyzed paintings in terms of stylistic elements actually recognized as significant at the time of the production of the paintings and have attempted to make only those stylistic compari- sons which would have been meaningful then. Hence, Cezanne may be

compared to Bouguereau, even though no direct relationship is postu- lated, while it does not serve the purposes of this study to compare Cezanne to Picasso, even though Picasso admired his work.

To say that Cezanne's contemporaries interpreted his art in oppos-

Richard Shiff is an associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A related article, "The End of Impression- ism: A Study of Theories of Artistic Expression," will appear later this year.

Seeing Cezanne

Critical Inquiry Summer 1978

ing manners is to say that various stylistic elements were set into different contexts or taken to communicate different meanings. How did this

happen? Obviously, the divergent aims and expectations which impressionist

and symbolist observers brought to bear on Cezanne's art may account for much of the confusion. The impressionist artist's primary concern was to suggest or make reference to (although not, in a strict sense, to

depict) a spontaneous impression produced in contact with nature. This

"impression," which represented "truth," was identified with the direct interaction of the sense organs (or, alternatively, the perceiving consciousness) and the external environment. Both antiestablishment

figures, like Monet and Pissarro, and successful Salon artists, like Detaille and Bastien-Lepage, were associated with the impressionist or naturalist movement. On the whole a somewhat younger group, the symbolists, often opposed impressionism; they considered it a materialistic movement devoted to external appearances and thereby lacking intense emotion and universal meaning. The symbolists sought their "truth" through the synthetic "idea," the conceptual abstraction resulting from an emotional and intellectual response to external reality. They were "symbolist" not in the sense of using fixed, conventional symbols or allegorical subjects but in terms of using a process of discovering that ideational or

"symbolic" content which transcends the world of transient impressions. The painters Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Maurice Denis and the critics Felix Feneon and Albert Aurier were regarded as symbolists.

While different groups of viewers may have sought different values in Cezanne's art, the artist's manner of painting and personality both contributed to the ambiguity of his work. Until the last decade of his life he seldom exhibited, and even then his paintings seemed unfinished. He was generally regarded as an "incomplete" artist and often as a "primitive," one whose art was in some way simple or rudimentary, devoid of the refinements and complexities of his materialistic, industri- alized (and, some commentators added, atheistic) society.2 He was seen

2. For Cezanne as "incomplete," see, e.g., Thadee Natanson, "Paul Cezanne," Revue blanche 9 (1 December 1895): 497; and Gustave Geffroy, "Paul Cezanne" (16 November 1895), in La Vie artistique (Paris, 1900), p. 218. For Cezanne as "primitive," see, e.g., Georges Lecomte, L'Art impressionniste (Paris, 1892), pp. 30-31; and Maurice Denis, "Cezanne"

(September 1907), in Theories, 1890-1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, 2d ed. (Paris, 1912), p. 246. The late nineteenth-century notion of the "primitive" artist was very broad. Included in the category of primitives were artists of the ancient Orient, artists of the earlier stages of the development of various Western styles (such as the Archaic Greeks and the pre-Raphaelite Italians), provincial or uneducated European artists, and those of contemporary non-European societies. With regard to the negative evaluation of modern Western European society, see, e.g., Victor de Laprade, Le Sentiment de la nature chez les modernes, 2d ed. (Paris, 1870), pp. 483-88; and Albert Aurier, "Essai sur une nouvelle methode de critique" (1892), "Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin" (9

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as an isolated man who lived apart from other painters and found human relationship and communication difficult.

Yet for some symbolists it was this alienation and mystery which made Cezanne's art so attractive. As early as 1891, Feneon found it

appropriate to refer to "the Cezanne tradition," a designation which indicates the influence of the legendary account of the artist pro- mulgated by Gauguin and his associates.3 Gauguin had painted landscapes with the reclusive artist during the summer of 1881, was impressed by his odd style, both personal and pictorial, and in a letter to Emile Schuffenecker of 14 January 1885 described Cezanne as embody- ing the mysticism of the Orient.4 Such a characterization held special meaning for those like Gauguin who had come more and more to search for an ultimate truth in the experience of the mystical, the transcenden- tal, the intensely real. For the symbolist painter or writer, primitives lived in harmony with the real world; they had an intuitive, mythic under-

standing of their environment. Most modern Europeans, in contrast, viewed the world through false and short-sighted analytic reason and thus saw only immediate causes and effects, not eternal universal princi- ples. They were Christians who could not see the truth of Buddhism; they were socially indoctrinated Parisians who could not see the purer structure of human society in provincial Brittany; they were refined

painters of nature who could not see the expressive power of a flat area of color surrounded by broad outline. For Gauguin and the symbolists, Cezanne, living in isolation in his seemingly unsophisticated native Pro- vence, qualified as an enlightened contemporary, an inspiring force, a

primitive artist. Maurice Denis, one of the artists listed by Feneon as an adherent of

the "Cezanne tradition," later made several associations which came to have much more significance for younger generations than did Gau-

guin's reference to Cezanne's "Oriental" qualities. Denis, a more skillful theorist than painter, is today best known for having written in 1890 that the most expressive aspect of a work of art is not its subject but its abstract formal design.5 Like many nineteenth-century students of art

theory, Denis believed that artistic communication depends on a primary emotional response to elemental sensual stimuli-lines, colors, perhaps simple shapes. Such an immediate emotional response precedes any

February 1891), and "Les Isoles: Vincent van Gogh" (January 1890), in Oeuvres posthumes (Paris, 1893), pp. 202, 216, 262-63.

3. Felix Feneon, "Paul Gauguin" (23 May 1891), in Oeuvres plus que compltes, ed. Joan Halperin, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1970), 1:192.

4. Lettres de Gauguin d safemme et d ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue (Paris, 1946), p. 45. Felix Feneon, Andre Mellerio, and Emile Bernard also associated Cezanne's style with

mysticism. 5. Denis, "Definition du neo-traditionnisme" (August 1890), in Theories, pp. 1-13.


recognition of an identifiable natural form. The elements of vision be- come as important as the images finally built out of them. The implica- tion of this general theory-in some of its forms called "empathy" theory, in others, the theory of "expression"-is that the modern artist must turn away from overly illusionistic systems of depiction, systems developed to create the image of an object-filled natural world but which lack any emphasis on the abstract structure or the expressive elements of that world. In the past, according to Denis, the ancient Greeks had

produced an art which was founded in nature and yet translated natural

appearances by means of expressive visual elements. Nicolas Poussin, as a modem follower of the Greek classical tradition, also produced an

expressive art. His compositions seemed to lend themselves to an abstract formal reading. His landscapes and figures were not only nature but

geometry. As far as Denis was concerned, then, Poussin was a successful artist and could be used as the standard to whom others could be com-

pared.6 Denis compared Gauguin to Poussin, calling the former "a kind of

Poussin without classical culture" who studied primitive forms instead of those of classical antiquity.7 Like Poussin, Gauguin had an expressive "style" and, as a symbolist, the style was based on "the correspondence between [abstract] forms and emotions." Moreover, it followed for Denis that, as a symbolist, Gauguin's masters were the (European) primitives, the Japanese, and, above all, Cezanne.8 Thus, it was logical for Denis, having drawn Poussin and Gauguin together, to add Cezanne to complete the formulation. As Poussin sought true artistic expression through classical antiquity, and Gauguin through the primitive, Cezanne, Denis asserted, sought it through nature-Cezanne is "the Poussin of impressionism" and "the Poussin of the still life and landscape." Like Poussin and Gauguin, like the classical and the primitive, Cezanne achieved "the just equilibrium between [the sensation of] nature and

[emotionally expressive] style."9 But if Cezanne was a reincarnation of Poussin, he was not complete;

he lacked the Academic master's refinement. Denis recognized that Cezanne's monumental "Large Bathers" (fig. 1) was "gauchement Poussinesque"-it was awkward.10 In his theoretical writings Denis seems to have given his notion of distortion or awkwardness, the "gaucherie," nearly as much significance as his notion of "style." Cezanne, who had "style, that is, [formal] order through synthesis," also had "gaucherie," a

6. Denis, "De la gaucherie des primitifs" (July 1904), in Theories, p. 171. 7. Denis, "L'Influence de Paul Gauguin" (October 1903), in Thories, p. 166. 8. Denis, "Les Arts a Rome ou la methode classique" (1898), in Theories, pp. 50, 61, here

and elsewhere, my translation. 9. Denis, "Cezanne," and "De Gauguin, de Whistler, et de l'exces des theories"

(November 1905), in Theories, pp. 252, 197; cf. also p. 239. 10. Denis, "De Gauguin et de van Gogh au classicism" (May 1909), in Theories, p. 255.

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FIG. 1.-Paul Cezanne, Large Bathers (c. 1902-06). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph by A. J. Wyatt, staff photographer.

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result, according to Denis, of his originality and sincerity. Because the artist struggled so directly with the expression of his sensation of nature, because he refused to follow conventional formulations or a preconceived notion of the picturesque, his art was awkward like that of a

primitive.11 This awkwardness, Denis argued, was characteristic of those modem artists who had direct contact with nature, but, he added, we should not admire it for its own sake; it was simply a by-product of a modern sincere art and difficult to avoid.12

Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis, and their associates-among them Vincent van Gogh, Emile Bernard, and Joris Karl Huysmans-have left an image of Cezanne as a founding spirit of symbolism, a primitive, and

perhaps even a classicist, albeit an awkward one. Where is the evidence of this gaucherie? What specifically were these early viewers seeing in Cezanne's art? Van Gogh, in a moment of simplicity, spoke of "how

clumsy [Cezanne's] touch in certain studies is," then attributed the awkwardness to working outdoors "when the mistral was blowing."13 Huys- mans, like Denis, mentioned the distorted linear contours of the artist's bathers.14 Both these elements-the "touch" or brushstroke ('facture") and the linear outlining-are clearly visible to us today in the Tannahill "Bathers," a characteristic work which probably dates from the early 1880s (fig. 2). The "awkwardness" of this small study is revealed when the painting is compared to a refined large-scale work produced about the same time, Bouguereau's "Bathers" of 1884 (fig. 3). The two paintings are, of course, quite different in kind-one is a small study, possibly unfinished and not intended for exhibition, the other a major work by an artist who exhibited regularly. The more finished work, however, represents a norm, for Bouguereau was frequently classified by his con-

temporaries as an Academic naturalist, a master of the painter's craft and of imitating natural effects. He was, in addition, regarded as an artist whose subject matter (like Cezanne's) often appeared opaque and devoid of poetic content.15 If Cezanne's art seemed crude or distorted, it seemed so in comparison with the art of Bouguereau, an accepted standard of naturalistic refinement.16

11. Denis, "Cezanne," pp. 239, 243, 246. 12. Denis, "La Reaction nationaliste" (15 May 1905), and "Cezanne" in Theories, pp.

191, 247. 13. Van Gogh to Bernard, June 1888, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, ed.

V. W. van Gogh, 3 vols. (New York, 1958), 3:499. 14. Joris Karl Huysmans, Certains (1889), in Oeuvres completes, 18 vols. (Paris, 1929),

10:39; Denis, "Cezanne," p. 248. 15. See, e.g., F. Grindelle, "Une Visite au salon," La Critique philosophique (24 June

1882), p. 330. 16. The art of Bastien-Lepage (who died in 1884) was also regarded as a standard for

naturalistic painting. His style, however, was considered decidedly "impressionist," and this, for many viewers, implied a more subjective naturalism than that found in Bouguereau. Meissonier, too, represented for the late nineteenth-century viewer an objec-

775

776 Richard Shiff

FIG. 2.-Paul Cezanne, Bathers (c. 1883). Photo courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts, bequest of Robert H. Tannahill.

Thefacture, or brushwork, of Cezanne's "Bathers" is characterized by clearly visible individual parallel strokes. These strokes may at times suggest the notation of planar elements of a volumetric form or even individual leaves of a tree, but most often the strokes appear as an abstraction, a loosely structured pattern that gives definition to the pictorial surface by means of color. The strokes seem hastily applied and give the image a sketchy, unfinished quality. The color pattern seems abrupt; no transitional tones mediate the shifts from light green to dark green, from green to ochre, or from yellow-green to pale blue. In contrast, Bouguereau's brushstrokes and colors are a study in subtlety. The visibil- ity of the individual stroke is to a great extent suppressed, and a traditional system of chiaroscuro modeling is employed-that is, the passage

tive naturalism. A small minority of critics argued that the radical impressionism of the late works of Manet and Monet represented a standard for objective vision, but most considered their art highly personalized and subjective.

Seeing Cezanne

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FIG. 3.-William Adolphe Bouguereau, The Bathers (1884). Courtesy of the Art In- stitute of Chicago.


from light to dark or from one color to another is gradual; transitional tones eliminate any abrupt shifts in value or hue. Cezanne's "Bathers" also presents the multiple sketchy contour lines which Denis and others found so problematic.17 The figures seem crudely drawn and anatomy is not well defined. The seated figure to the left is awkwardly pro- portioned; its neck is long and thick, its head is small, and its legs are tapered to a crippling degree. The background foliage seems, in places, to impinge upon the physical integrity of the foreground figures as it overlaps their contours. Bouguereau's bathers may be vapid, but they have a convincing pictorial character as illusionistic volumetric forms. We should not wonder then that Cezanne's art, in comparison, was seen as awkward, full of gaucherie.

The artists and critics who observed this awkward art, those few who in the 1880s and 1890s wrote at length about Cezanne, nevertheless

praised him. In fact, during this period it was common for that which was crude, awkward, or distorted to be accepted as somehow more sin-

cerely expressive than that which was refined. We know that Denis linked Cezanne's gaucherie to his originality and sincerity. Earlier, in 1895, Gustave Geffroy reviewed the artist's first one-man exhibition and

explained what he called "the awkwardness, the lack of perspective and balance, and the unfinished aspect" as signs of a "scrupulous observer, like a primitive, deeply concerned with truth."18 A still earlier statement

provided general support for Geffroy's critical position: in 1883 the

prominent poet Armand Sully-Prudhomme had written, in his major theoretical work "Expression in the Fine Arts," that "a certain awkwardness [gaucherie], the guarantee of sincerity, may be preferable to an

overly great facility of execution."19 The attitude which Sully-Prudhomme expressed was frequently

applied to specific works of art in Salon reviews. Thus, the figural style of Puvis de Chavannes (fig. 4) was repeatedly seen as crude and distorted

yet superior to the refinement of an artist like Bouguereau. Puvis was described in the 1880s as Cezanne was in the 1890s and later-as a source for symbolism, as a primitive, as sincere and unconventional, and as a master of expressive abstraction.20 Many critics extended their initial acceptance of unintentional awkwardness by choosing to interpret it as deliberate "distortion" ("deformation"). Thus, in 1895 and 1904 Roger Marx asserted that Puvis' distorted forms were intentionally expressive

17. Denis, "Cezanne," pp. 248-49. 18. Geffroy, "Paul Cezanne," pp. 219-20. Geffroy argued that others among

Cezanne's paintings were, on the contrary, "admirably balanced and finished"; the artist

appeared to be both "traditional" and "primitive." 19. Rene Francois Armand Sully-Prudhomme, "L'Expression dans les beaux-arts"

(1883), in Oeuvres de Sully-Prudhomme, Prose, 7 vols. (Paris, 1898), 5:22. 20. See, e.g., Georges Lafenestre, "Le Salon de 1887," Revue des deux mondes 81 (1

June 1887): 607-9.

FIG. 4.-Puvis de Chavannes, Pleasant Land (1882). Yale University Art Gallery.

I


and intellectually profound, not the product of ignorance but of mature calculation. For Marx, Cezanne, like Puvis, "deliberately exaggerates" the linear form of his figures for expressive purposes.21

Cezanne's paintings were also characterized as distorted or awkward because they appeared to lack illusionistic space; they seemed flat. Marx linked Cezanne to symbolism and primitivism not only because of his linear distortion but also because of his broad, flat application of uni- formly bright pigment.22 Similarly, Georges Lecomte, in an essay of 1899, emphasized Cezanne's lack of spatial illusion; Lecomte ap- preciated the harmonies produced by the "very simple, flat tones" but was disturbed by the artist's failure to distinguish the various levels of depth in a landscape.23 Had Lecomte been viewing the Tannahill "Bathers," he would have issued just this complaint, for the lower landscape area seems to consist of four horizontal bands of color-pale yellow-orange (or ochre), blue-green, yellow-orange, and green-which represent a stream (blue-green), its sandy banks (yellow-orange), and a meadow beyond (green), and the colors themselves vary little in intensity as they conventionally would if indicating spatial recession. In addition, the horizontal bands are of nearly equal width and of similarfacture, again offering no hint of relative spatial displacement. It is not surprising then that, like other observers of Cezanne's style, Denis described the artist's color as lacking value gradation and as giving a surface effect

comparable to that of the flat color in works by Gauguin and Bernard.24

Characteristically, Denis saw this deviation from the standards of conventional technique as related to classicism and, especially, primitivism. In one of his most evasive formulations he connected both the awkward rendering of objects and the lack of conventional spatial perspective to the mental processes of the primitive. "The Primitive," Denis wrote in 1904, "knows objects with his intellect as so many entities distinct from himself; he ranks them always in the same plane, the plane of his consciousness." In other words, Denis argued that the world of immediate conscious experience is a world of only one plane, a flat world; the true image of reality, what Denis and others called the "idea," is two-dimensional, flat. The primitive, according to Denis, does not concern himself with spatial illusion; he "prefers reality [the conceptual idea] to the appearance of reality [the perceptual effect]."25

Denis' argument may seem obscure, but the association of flatness

21. Roger Marx, "Les Salons de 1895," Gazette des beaux-arts 13 (May 1895): 359; "Le Salon d'Automne," Gazette des beaux-arts 32 (December 1904): 462-64.

22. Marx, "Le Salon d'Automne," pp. 462-64. Marx is somewhat inconsistent on the issue of whether or not Cezanne's color is modeled or nuanced.

23. Georges Lecomte, "Paul Cezanne," Revue d'art 1 (9 December 1899): 86. 24. Denis, "Cezanne," pp. 250-52. Like Marx, Denis is ambivalent on the question of

whether or not Cezanne creates volumetric form (see p. 249). 25. Denis, "De la gaucherie des primitifs," pp. 170, 171.

Summer 1978 781

with conceptualization is a familiar one. We think of the objective external world (whether a projection of our minds or an independent reality) as three-dimensional, volumetric. We think of that which is two- dimensional or flat as an abstraction, an immaterial conceptualization of a material substance. In the late nineteenth century Charles Blanc, a

respected theorist of the French art establishment and neither a symbolist nor an impressionist, spoke of flat, unmodeled color as "symbolic," the color of intellectualized convention, not of nature.26

There is another sense, not so accessible to us today, in which Cezanne's paintings were logically seen as flat: they were "atmospheric." Atmospheric flatness was a notion very seriously considered by Cezanne's contemporaries. To the extent that his paintings could be seen as vibrating fields of color suggesting an even, ubiquitous light, they could be seen as atmospheric; and to the extent that these paintings could be seen as lacking chiaroscuro modeling, they could be seen as flat.27 Among many naturalists of Cezanne's generation it was customary to produce a uniform vibrating light through the use of contrasting relatively intense hues and by suppressing value gradation, or chiaroscuro. Since a lack of chiaroscuro implied a lack of depth, the atmospheric vibrating field of color was, by its very nature, to be interpreted as flat-flatness, if produced through a uniformity of value but not necessarily of hue, was atmospheric.

An alternative manner of suggesting atmospheric flatness can be seen in the Tannahill "Bathers"; as in Cezanne's other mature works, the foreground and background elements are rendered with similar color intensity and facture.28 This technique produces a unification of the painted surface or a unity of apparent spatial plane, that is, flatness. This kind of unification was traditionally associated with the effect of atmo-

spheric light and was frequently noted as an aspect of impressionist painting.29 The early critics of Cezanne often described his visual effects as those of a brilliantly colored tapestry; they were alluding to the vibrat-

ing field of bright color and the unifying effect of atmospheric light as well as to a concomitant surface flatness. Lecomte, for example, wrote in 1899: "Often [Cezanne's] studies of nature are without depth. They give the impression of a sumptuous tapestry without spatial distance."30

Cezanne's simplified, seemingly unrefined drawing and com-

26. Charles Blanc, Voyage de la haute Egypte (Paris, 1876), p. 99. 27. I have traced the evolution of the association of bright even light, bright color, and

lack of chiaroscuro with the concept of atmosphere in nineteenth-century French painting in a doctoral dissertation which is to be published in a revised form. See my "Impressionist Criticism, Impressionist Color, and Cezanne" (Yale University, 1973), pts. 2 and 3.

28. Cf. the works of Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro in this respect. 29. For the traditional association, see Mme. Cave's comments on Veronese in her La

Couleur, 3d ed. (Paris, 1863), p. 118; for the connection with impressionism, see Charles

Ephrussi, "Exposition des artistes independants," Gazette des beaux-arts 21 (May 1880): 486. 30. Lecomte, "Paul Cezanne," p. 86.

Critical Inquiry

782 Richard Shiff

position-often described by his early admirers not only as "simple" but as "awkward"-was consistent with both notions of flatness: the symbolist's conceptual "flatness" of the idea and the naturalist's perceptual "flatness" of the atmosphere. Today we might not be inclined to charac- terize Cezanne's compositions as "simple," but to the late nineteenth- century viewer they appeared so in comparison with those of an Academic master like Poussin (see fig. 5). Cezanne's paintings did not seem subject to a traditional detailed analysis of the interrelationships of

representational elements. As I have noted, critics often evaded such

analysis; they chose to discuss the "tapestry" effect in Cezanne's art, describing the total field of vibrating color rather than its separate parts and their relationships to one another. How much could a critic find to

say about a very straightforward rhythmic grouping of bathers arranged as alternating half-length and full-length forms in front of a repetitious massing of foliage (fig. 2)? How much could he say about three skulls lined up on a tabletop (fig. 6) or about a stiff frontal portrait figure before an imprecisely defined background of drapery and wallpaper (fig. 7)? For certain critics little needed to be said. The simplicity (or the awkwardness) seemed primitive, elemental, primary; and if, as a symbolist, a critic valued the concept, the idea, he argued that if essential and true and sincerely realized, this idea must be simple and known directly in its elemental form. If, on the other hand, as an impressionist, a critic valued the percept, he argued that the atmospheric effect must be known immediately, as an impression, as a simple form free of the conventional refinements of Academic painting. Each critic, symbolist or

impressionist, would, in addition, link the simple or primitive to the naive and spontaneous, qualities nearly universally admired at the end of the nineteenth century. Hence, for great numbers of viewers having either a symbolist or impressionist orientation, Cezanne's reputation could not suffer from the association of his style with that of the simple and awkward primitive. Lecomte perceived the situation accurately when he suggested that "at two successive stages of art [naturalism and

symbolism] Cezanne had the bizarre fate of having been praised less for his qualities than for his faults"-his awkward distortion and flatness won him general acclaim.31

We need to know something more about the odd notion of atmospheric flatness. We have seen that for Denis, the symbolist, conceptual flatness was related to an elemental manner of thinking, the thinking of the primitive. Atmospheric flatness, on the other hand, was for naturalists and impressionists related to an elemental manner of seeing; it was closely associated with the impression, the transient primary sensation of nature which was, of course, the object of investigation of impressionist painting. In the late nineteenth century the painter's equivalent for the

31. Ibid. Lecomte had made essentially the same point in 1892. See his "Des tendences de la peinture moderne," L'Art moderne (Brussels), 28 February 1892, p. 67.

Seeing Cezanne

FIG. 5.-Nicolas Poussin, The Baptism of Christ (1641). Photograph by courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

FIG 6 PalCeanneThehree(. 10.. Phot .... Tni

FIC. 6.-Paul Cezanne, The Three Skulls (c. 1900). Photo courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts, bequest of Robert H. Tannahill.

1. i;i'??'?? ?i?

Summer 1978 785

. ; .M .. . . . .....

FIG. 7.-Paul Cezanne, Portrait of Madame Cezanne (c. 1890). Photo courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts, bequest of Robert H. Tannahill.

impression seemed most often to be a field of vibrating brilliant color with little or no specific differentiation of represented tangible objects. To define contours precisely would be to impose a conceptual ordering upon vision.32 The immediate impression, this vibrating field of color,

32. Cf. Cezanne to Bernard, 23 October 1905, Paul Cezanne, Correspondence, ed. John Rewald (Paris, 1937), p. 277. All further page citations to Cezannes letters, unless otherwise indicated, will be to this volume.

Critical Inquiry


was flat not only in the technical sense that it lacked chiaroscuro grada- tions but in the very physical sense that it was projected directly onto the

planar surface of the retina. The immediate visual sensation was re-

garded as essentially two-dimensional; only thoughtful interpretation, conceptually ordering the initial image, would produce the illusion of volume. For the symbolist, a vision of a flat, two-dimensional world may have been true because it was an image of an intellectual or inner spiri- tual reality; but for the impressionist, flatness gave a true picture of the world because it represented a recording of the individual's interaction with a totally external reality. It represented a vision that was primordial and unadulterated.

The adult, the child, the embryo-the more primitive the stage of life, the more primary and directly true is the experience of one's own inner life and of the external environment. So argued the positivist Emile Littre in 1860. Littre, a versatile scholar and compiler of dic- tionaries, was by his own description a "disciple" of Auguste Comte. But Littre was a positivist who stuck to the facts; Comte, who had invented a new religion of Humanity in the 1850s, had, according to his "disciple," retreated from verifiable fact and slipped back two stages from the positive (or scientific) to the theological manner of thinking.33 Littre's personality was less complex than Comte's and his thinking was better known to the public. His position with regard to the theory of knowledge was popular and more than likely was influential in creating an atmo-

sphere for a critical appreciation of impressionism. Littre identified the

simple, the elemental, the primitive with the impression; at some very early stage in life all that exists is in the form of impressions from which all knowledge will derive. Littre wrote:

Yes, there is something that is primordial; but it is neither the subject [mind] nor the object [matter], neither the self nor the non-self: it is the impression perceived [l'impression perfue]. A perceived impression does not in any sense constitute the idea of the subject or of the object, it is only the element of these ideas [which grow when the impression] is repeated a certain number of times.... We never know anything but our impressions.34

Thus Littre argued that all that is directly given as true is the world of our

impressions, the most primitive world of experience. 33. Comte and his followers conceived of the history of mankind as having three

stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive (scientific). For Littre's attitude toward Comte, see his introduction of 1864 to the new edition of Comte's Principes de

philosophie positive (Paris, 1868). 34. Emile Littre, "De quelques points de physiologie psychique" (March 1860), in La

Science au point de vue philosophique, 4th ed. (Paris, 1876), pp. 313-20. Littre, of course, was

referring to any sense impression, not just visual impressions. His position is similar to those of Condillac, Maine de Biran, and Dr. Cabanis, as well as that of Comte.

Summer 1978 787

The positivist's theory implies that the impression is not to be

carelessly identified solely with "objective" reality, seemingly a well- understood external world of material substances. The impression is neither subject nor object. It exists in the life of the individual prior to the realization of the subject/object distinction; and once that distinction is made, the impression is characterized as the interaction of a subject and an object. Thus, an art of the impression should, according to

nineteenth-century positivist theory, express both the perceived object and the perceiving subject. The nineteenth-century critics of im-

pressionist art, however, often emphasized one factor at the expense of the other. Alfred de Lostalot, for example, wrote a favorable review of an 1883 exhibition of Monet's work in which he stressed fidelity to the

perceived object. He argued that Monet reproduced exactly what he saw, and if his colors seemed unusual, they were not chosen according to

personal taste but were the result of an unusually accurate and refined vision.35 Zola, on the other hand, emphasized the perceiving sub-

ject. In 1866 he stated a very general critical principle: "A work, for me, is a man; I wish to find in this work a temperament, a particular and

unique accent." And Zola's most famous pronouncement, made the same year, defined the expression of the perceived object as dependent upon the individual character of the perceiving subject: "A work of art is a bit of nature seen through a temperament."36 Zola's formulation, similar to those of earlier French Romantic theorists, might have appealed to the French positivist in its recognition of both subjective and objective factors in the psychology of the creation of a work of art.

In the twentieth century we have come to think of impressionism as an art of an exterior reality, while we consider symbolism a far more

subjective mode. We seem to have accepted a part of the symbolist view of impressionism for the whole. The symbolists themselves condemned the more popular form of impressionism, that of Detaille and Bastien-

Lepage, but also generally expressed admiration for the radical im-

pressionism of Monet. The former brand of naturalism seemed to represent a mindless recording of an accepted material reality, while the latter, to its credit, embodied a strong subjective factor.37 Impressionist subjectivity, however, did not lead to great art; it was undisciplined, overly personal, and expressed no universal truths. "The essential goal of our art," the symbolist Gustave Kahn wrote in 1886, "is to objectify the

subjective (the exteriorization of the Idea) instead of subjectifying the

35. Alfred de Lostalot, "Exposition des oeuvres de M. Claude Monet," Gazette des beaux-arts 27 (April 1883): 344.

36. Emile Zola, "M. H. Taine, Artiste" (1866), and "Proudhon et Courbet" (1866), in Mes haines, mon salon, Edouard Manet (Paris, 1907), pp. 225, 25.

37. Albert Aurier, for example, praised Monet but did not place him on the level of the "Idea" painters; see his "Claude Monet" (March 1892), in Oeuvres posthumes, p. 225.

Critical Inquiry


objective (nature seen through a temperament)."38 The subjective side of

impressionism, the role of the temperament recognized by the symbolists, was of great significance for Cezanne.

To understand this significance we must refer once again to the connection so often made between Cezanne and Poussin. As I have

already said, in 1905 Denis called Cezanne the "Poussin of the still life and landscape." But Denis was not the first publicly to associate the modern master with the classical one. Earlier in the same year Charles Camoin, a painter who had first met Cezanne during military service in Aix in 1901, had answered aMercure de France questionnaire on modern art by stressing Cezanne's seminal importance, his role as the "Primitive of outdoor painting," his apparent classicism, and his concern for "bring- ing Poussin back to life through nature [vivifier Poussin sur nature]."39 Camoin illuminated this cryptic phrase to some extent as he quoted excerpts from letters which Cezanne had written him during the preced- ing three and a half years. The word "vivifier" appeared in a sentence taken from a letter of 1903; Cezanne had written: "Go to the Louvre, but after having seen the Masters who rest there, it is necessary to hasten to

go out and revive in oneself, through contact with nature, the instincts, the sensations of art which reside within us." Camoin also quoted other passages which advised making studies after the baroque masters, as if after nature, and which argued that the method of another artist should not alter one's own sensation.40 In other words, Cezanne had told Ca- moin to study the masters for solutions to technical problems but, above all, to retain his individuality through a personal contact with nature. If Poussin's style or subject matter was to be revived, it was to be revived in a new form in accordance with the expression of the personal sensation of the artist. Cezanne repeatedly gave the same advice to his younger admirers: "go out and study nature"; "let us seek to express ourselves

according to our personal temperament"; "you will find through nature the techniques employed by the four or five masters of Venice" (Cezanne's emphasis).41 Cezanne was not very discriminatory in his choice of "old

38. Gustave Kahn, "Reponse des symbolistes," L'Evenement, 28 September 1886, quoted in Sven Loevgren, The Genesis of Modernism (Bloomington, Ind., 1971), pp. 83-84.

39. See Camoin's statement quoted by Charles Morice in "Enquete sur les tendences actuelles des arts plastiques," Mercure de France 56 (1 August 1905): 353-54. Theodore Reff

("Cezanne and Poussin,"Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 [1960]: 150-74) studied the Cezanne-Poussin relationship in detail but mentioned neither the Camoin statement nor several other earlier published accounts specifically linking Cezanne to Pous- sin. Reff noted his omission of the Camoin document in a later article ("Cezanne et Poussin,"Art de France 3 [1963]: 302) but did not alter his original argument. He concludes, in the first article, that Cezanne admired Poussin, as he admired the other old masters, for his general technical procedure (p. 161).

40. Morice, p. 354. The quotations are actually from Cezanne's letters to Camoin, 13 September 1903, 3 February 1902, and 22 February 1903, pp. 255, 246, 253.

41. Cezanne to Bernard, 23 December 1904 and (not precisely dated) 1905, pp. 269, 275. I have translated "moyens" as "techniques"; for the justification, see below in text.

Summer 1978 789

masters": sometimes he referred in general to "the Venetians," sometimes more specifically to Veronese or Tintoretto, sometimes also to Rubens; and, we may assume on the evidence of Camoin's statement, occasionally he referred to Poussin. Nearly any "old master" might do. But Cezanne was far more insistent about his ultimate reliance upon nature. His was essentially an impressionist solution to the problem of

relating an expressive style to immediate, personal sensation. Sig- nificantly, when his pupil Camoin was asked whether the modern artist should follow nature (like an impressionist) or follow his inner abstract

thought (like a symbolist), he replied: "I look for all in the study of nature."42

The word "sensation," which Cezanne used in discussing art and nature, is a difficult one in both French and English. It refers either to the perception of something external or to an internal emotional feeling. For Cezanne the two were nearly inseparable. Thus, one receives sensations before nature, but sensations "reside within us."43 Cezanne compli- cated the matter by writing that he had a "strong" sensation of nature, and elsewhere he described the "temperament" or personality of the artist as a "force" and as a "power in the presence of nature."44 In what sense can sensation be "strong," and how do sensation and temperament relate to the nature which Cezanne argued must be studied so intensely?

To answer these questions and define what amounts to Cezanne's

"theory" of art, we must examine his two most complete operational definitions of the artist. In a letter to Louis Aurenche of 1904, he wrote: "If the strong sensation of nature-and surely I have it-is the necessary base of any conception of art ... the knowledge of the means of expressing our emotion is no less essential and is not acquired except through a

long period of study."45 A year later, Cezanne wrote to Roger Marx: "With the temperament of a painter and an ideal of art, that is to say, a

conception of nature, sufficient means of expression would have been necessary [for me] to be intelligible to the general public and occupy a

proper rank in the history of art."46 The following general formulation

42. See Morice, pp. 349, 354. 43. Ibid., p. 354. 44. Cezanne to Louis Aurenche, 25 January 1904, to Charles Camoin, 22 February

1903, and to Emile Bernard, 23 October 1905, pp. 257, 254, 276. 45. Cezanne to Aurenche, 25 January 1904, p. 257. 46. Cezanne to Marx, 23 January 1905, pp. 273-74. Previous discussions of Cezanne's

"theory" have concentrated on his letters to Bernard, especially those of 15 April 1904 and 25 July 1904. These letters expound upon technical problems, not a general aesthetic. In them Cezanne adopted a somewhat condescending tone, telling Bernard much that he (and any beginning student of art) probably already knew; his description of one-point perspective, for example, is commonplace (letter of 15 April 1904). Cezanne's technical formulations do not differ appreciably from those of such standard theorists as Thenot, Regnier, and Blanc and would have been accepted (in the abstract) by impressionists, symbolists, and traditional Academics alike. The artists' definition of "sensation," although also not unusual, is a far more useful guide to his basic attitude.

Critical Inquiry


emerges from these remarks: from the temperament of the artist and his sensation of nature comes an artistic conception or ideal; the artist then

employs some means of expression to communicate his personal artistic statement. The temperament, what Cezanne once called the "initial force," is intimately linked to the sensation of nature. In other words, our temperament, our primary subjective force, our emotion, influences our impression of nature; each individual, if true to his own direct im-

pressions, if "naive" and "sincere," perceives nature in a unique way.47 We are coming closer to Cezanne's meaning, but we still have not

defined his terms. It is easy to interpret "means of expression"; in the nineteenth century this always referred to technique: color, chiaroscuro, drawing, perspective, and so forth.48 "Temperament," too, is readily identifiable; it is the individual personality about which Zola and many others so often spoke.49 But to define "conception of nature" and "ideal of art," especially in Cezanne's context, seems more difficult. The artist

probably derived his notions of the "means of expression," the "temperament," the "ideal of art," and the "conception of nature" from the individualistic aesthetics of Stendhal and Baudelaire, both of whose works he had read and perhaps also discussed with Zola.50 For a general definition of these terms by one of Cezanne's contemporaries we can turn to the theoretical writings of the poet Sully-Prudhomme. I referred above to his belief that awkwardness is often preferable to refinement. His own arguments nonetheless are unusually clear and instructive and, although there is no evidence that Cezanne knew his work either directly or indirectly, Sully-Prudhomme's statements provide us with an easy access to Ce- zanne's convoluted terminology.

First, Sully-Prudhomme tells us how a sensation of nature can be

"strong." He defined the "impression" as a positivist would, as the immediate interaction between a being and the outside world; but the result of this interaction, the perceived sensation, varies for each individual according to his own "nervous power" or, as we might say today, according to his psychological state.51 The sensation is thus

personalized-some might have a strong sensation, others a weak. Like Cezanne, Sully-Prudhomme related temperament to sensation. He wrote that the same image formed on the retinas of two artists would not be seen as the same because the two men have different temperaments;

47. On naivete and sincerity, see pt. 1 of my diss. 48. See, e.g., Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin, 3d ed. (Paris, 1876), pp.

496-503. 49. Some theorists, however, associated "temperament" primarily with general types

of personality rather than with individual personalities. Zola and Taine differed in this

respect. 50. See StendharsHistoire de la peinture en Italie (Paris, 1817); and Baudelaire's "Salon

de 1846," inCuriosites esthetiques (Paris, 1946), pp. 77-197, and "L'Oeuvre et la vie d'Eugene Delacroix," in L'Art romantique (Paris, 1885), pp. 1-44.

51. Sully-Prudhomme, 5:408.

Summer 1978 791

in other words, sensation and temperament go hand in hand and both are personal, subjective.52 Art, then, involves an objective vision-the

impression or retinal image-but perceived in a subjective or expressive manner. This resultant subjective vision, when externalized or made objective again, corresponds, according to Sully-Prudhomme, to the "ideal" of the artist; and this "ideal" is formed by the temperament. This

personal vision or ideal can be communicated when the artist finds the

appropriate technique or "means of expression."53 In sum, for both Cezanne and Sully-Prudhomme, the artist needs the following: an artistic sense (Cezanne's "strong sensation of nature"), a temperament, an ideal (Cezanne's "conception of nature" or "ideal of art"), and a means of

expression.54 In the course of his analysis, Sully-Prudhomme drew a very sig-

nificant conclusion; art, he argued, is expressive simply in that it expresses "the temperament of the artist, his [personal] ideal."55 This belief in the validity of an individualistic art was shared by Zola, for whom it was quintessential. Zola was the closest friend of Cezanne's youth and early maturity, and the two apparently debated and shared many ideas; like Zola, Cezanne repeatedly stressed his concern for the expression of the individual temperament.56 It should be evident that in its most distilled form, Cezanne's "theory" of art corresponds to Zola's basic notion: art is nature seen through a temperament. Zola's extreme concern for individuality was the source of his dispute with Hippolyte Taine, the prominent philosopher, historian, and art theorist. Taine, whose views were in many ways close to those of Zola, had argued that the artist should express a general social ideal derived from the "moral climate" or "temperament" of his society at a given moment. Zola, on the other hand, argued that art need not express a general ideal but a personal one.57 Zola and Cezanne both concluded that with regard to artistic statements the expression of the individual, of his own temperament, sufficed.

52. Ibid., pp. 227-28. 53. Ibid., pp. 14-15, 33. Sully-Prudhomme's analysis of the "idear' is similar but not

identical to Hippolyte Taine's; see Taine,Philosophie de l'art (1865-69), 2 vols. (Paris, 1893), 2:258.

54. Sully-Prudhomme, 5:12-15, 33. 55. Ibid., 29. 56. In addition to the evidence of Cezanne's letters we may cite Edmond Duranty's

fictional character Marsabiel who appeared in an article published in 1867. The character was modeled after Cezanne and was noted for his frequent use of the word "temperament"; see Marcel Crouzet, Un Meconnu du realisme: Duranty (Paris, 1964), pp. 245-47. Also Mary Cassatt, after meeting Cezanne in 1894, reported that the artist insisted that everyone should have his own personal vision of nature; see A. D. Breeskin, The Graphic Work of Mary Cassatt (New York, 1948), p. 33.

57. Taine, 2:322-24. Taine's ideal artist is so characteristic of his society that in expressing himself, he expresses the general ideal. Cf. Zola, "M. H. Taine, Artiste," pp. 224-25.

Critical Inquiry


Cezanne's concern for the direct impression of nature and for the individual sensation and its eventual expression in painting must, of course, have also been related to his long involvement with the major independent impressionist artists-Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro. He exhibited with them in their first independent show held in 1874. Jules Castagnary, who reviewed the exhibition and who was among the first to apply the descriptive term "impressionist" to this art, criticized Cezanne's painting as overly subjective; in fact, although he generally admired the

impressionists' work, Castagnary described all of it as subjective: "[These artists] are 'impressionists' in the sense that they render not the land-

scape [itself], but the sensation produced by the landscape.... In this manner they leave [the world of] reality and enter into pure idealism."58

Castagnary meant that the sensation of the landscape which the im-

pressionist painting conveyed was a personal one, reflecting, as Zola would say, the temperament of an individual; it was a personal sensation rather than an image corresponding to the generally accepted "objective" concept of a landscape. Castagnary went on to say that the concern for such an individualized view of reality was not at all revolutionary; only the technical procedure, the chosen means of expression, was new and problematic. The critic was right; Cezanne's career provided the

testimony; Cezanne spent his life searching for the "means of expression."59

If impressionism was subjective and highly individualized, and if Cezanne's "theory" was an impressionist one, where does this leave us with regard to an analysis of his style? We have already seen that

although his "flatness" could be considered conceptual, it could also be considered atmospheric, the product of impressionist concerns. What about his gaucherie, his awkwardness, his distortion? There is an obvious answer and the symbolist theorists Aurier and Denis knew it: the

temperament causes distortion. In 1890 Aurier wrote that Zola's art of "nature seen through a temperament" resulted in "this distortion vary- ing according to personalities." One year later he said more on the

subject: "The aim [of impressionism] is still the imitation of material

reality, no longer perhaps with its own form, its own color, but with its perceived form, with its perceived color; it is the translation of the in- stantaneous sensation, with all the distortions of a rapid subjective synthesis." Following the implications of Zola's theory, Aurier argued that this impressionism or "realism" revealed "the essential nature of its maker because it shows us the deformations which the object under-

58. Jules Castagnary, "L'Exposition du boulevard des Capucines: Les Im-

pressionnistes" (29 April 1874), in Helene Adhemar, L'Exposition de 1874 chez Nadar (re- trospective documentaire) (Paris, 1974), n.p.

59. See Cezanne to Aurenche, 25 January 1904, to Bernard, 23 October 1905, and to his son, 8 September 1906 and 13 October 1906, pp. 257, 277, 288, 297.

Summer 1978 793

went" in the process of perception. Significantly, Aurier distinguished impressionist distortion from symbolist distortion: "The artist will always have the right to exaggerate [the pictorial elements], to attenuate them, to distort them, not only according to his individual vision, according to the molds of his personal subjectivity (as happens even in realist [i.e., Academic naturalist] art), but to exaggerate them, to distort them, ac-

cording to the requirements of the Idea to be expressed."60 In other words, Aurier distinguished distortion rooted in the expression of the individual temperament from that which made possible the expression of a universally significant "idea." Might not Cezanne's distortion and gaucherie be seen in terms of the former category even more clearly than in terms of the latter?

When Denis referred to this issue of impressionist distortion, he, like Aurier, implied that there was a related secondary factor-the immediacy or spontaneity of the vision. Like many of the earlier critics of impressionism, Denis suggested that the radical naturalist painters did not reflect upon their own style; they lacked method. The impressionists' "absence of method," he wrote in 1898, "was supposed to be an external sign of the personal sincerity, of the temperament."61 In other words, the impressionist tried to work so fast in order to capture his immediate impression and sensation that he lacked "method" or an orderly, clear style. The impressionists and their supporters did indeed value spontaneity and defended a sketchlike finish as a sign of an immediate, naive, and hence "true," vision.62

Can some of Cezanne's distortion be explained in terms of an im-

mediacy of vision? The critic Gustave Geffroy seemed to think so. Gef-

froy, a good friend of Monet, met Cezanne through him in late 1894, and in 1895 Cezanne painted Geffroy's portrait. Geffroy wrote of Cezanne's deep concern for the study of nature but was somewhat disturbed by distortion or gaucherie in his "unfinished" works.63 In an

essay of 1901 Geffroy gave the problem an impressionist interpretation, arguing that it is of no consequence whether a work by Cezanne is "finished," whether it appears totally refined and orderly. "Who will say at what precise moment a canvas is finished?" he asked; "art does not

proceed without a certain incompleteness, because the life which it re-

60. Aurier, "Les Isoles: Vincent van Gogh," p. 260; and "Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin," pp. 208, 211 (cf. "Les Peintres symbolistes," in Oeuvres posthumes, pp. 297-98), and p. 215.

61. Denis, "Les Arts a Rome ou la methode classique," p. 50. Denis, of course, dis- sociated Cezanne from the "faults" of impressionism (see p. 51 and untitled article of

April-May 1901, in Theories, p. 56). 62. See pt. 1 of my diss. 63. Geffroy, "Histoire de l'impressionnisme" (1894), in La Vie artistique (Paris, 1894),

pp. 253-55, 257, and "Paul Cezanne," p. 219. On Cezanne's chameleonic attitude toward Geffroy, see Rewald, Cezanne, Geffroy et Gasquet (Paris, 1960), pp. 11-26.

Critical Inquiry


produces is in perpetual transformation."64 In Cezanne's case, it would be best for us to interpret "life" as the world of sensation, a world of both external and internal immediacy.

We can make our general discussion of impressionist distortion more concrete by considering some specific works of art. There are at least two and perhaps three ways in which to view this distortion. First, we can consider distortion as due to the temperament, due to the indi-

viduality and essential subjectivity of vision. Just as Zola argued that Manet had a very personal view of the world-he said Manet saw "blond" and "by masses"-we might argue as impressionists that any oddities in Cezanne's style are the direct result of an individual vision which has not been subjected to a general, conventional conception of

reality.65 If, for example, we traveled to view Mont Sainte-Victoire and, on the basis of our own observations, decided that Cezanne's painting of the subject (fig. 8) is distorted, we could resolve the problem by appeal- ing to the notion of temperament-Cezanne perhaps actually perceived the subject as what seems to us to be an unusually bluish landscape broken up into unusually disjointed areas of brilliant color.

Second, we can consider distortion as due to the immediacy of the

impressionist vision. Distortions which seem to be of this type-or perhaps seem to have been created specifically to suggest this type of

interpretation for the viewer-are extremely common in the sketch- oriented naturalistic painting of the late nineteenth century.66 An early impressionist example is found in Bazille's 1866 portrait of Edouard Blau (fig. 9). The lack of correspondence between the left side of the chair frame and the right could be taken as a sign of impressionist spontaneity. The artist's immediate vision may be inaccurate, awkward, or distorted in conventional terms, but he has remained faithful to his first direct impression. Such an argument could be applied to nearly any painting by Cezanne, regardless of the fact that the work may seem the

product of a long period of labor; for each successive application of

paint is itself, for the impressionist, the reflection of spontaneous sensation.67 Thus, the sketchy record of apparent shifts in contour which we

may see in Cezanne's portrait of his wife (fig. 7) reflects, for the impressionist, a continual immediacy rather than duration.68 We see another such "spontaneous" process of delineation and coloring of form

64. Geffroy, "Salon de 1901," in La Vie artistique (Paris, 1903), p. 376. Had Geffroy been reading Henri Bergson?

65. See Emile Zola, "Edouard Manet" (1 January 1867), in Mon salon, Manet, ecrits sur I'art, ed. Antoinette Ehrard (Paris, 1970), p. 101.

66. Examples of such distortion abound in the work of Manet and Degas and are

frequently seen in Renoir's art also. 67. On this issue, see Cezanne to Bernard, 23 October 1905, and to his son, 8 Septem-

ber 1906, pp. 277, 288. 68. But we could apply the Bergsonian concept of "duration," a continual flow of

consciousness rather than a succession of fixed moments.

Summer 1978 795

FIG. 8.-Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1904). Photo courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts, bequest of Robert H. Tannahill.

recorded in the artist's "Three Skulls" (fig. 6); in addition, the

apparent warping or incomprehensible geometric structure of the ta-

bletop can be considered a "spontaneous" distortion analogous to that in the Bazille portrait.

My discussion of the second cause of distortion has partially sub- sumed the third. Distortion may arise, for an impressionist, as the result of a search for the seemingly unattainable means of expression. Geffroy was, in effect, referring to this type of distortion when he asked how one

Critical Inquiry

FIG. 9.-Frederic Bazille, Edouard Blau (1866). Photograph by courtesy of the National

Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Summer 1978 797

could determine when a painting was "finished." How does one determine whether an image, the recording of sensation, corresponds with an objective external norm, when life itself, the life of sensation, is an

ongoing process? There can be no doubt that Cezanne considered his own work unfinished. Aside from his repeated references to his paintings as "studies"69 and his reluctance to exhibit, he frequently referred to his lack of realization, his unending search for the means of expression. In 1904, for example, he wrote to Louis Aurenche:

You speak to me in your letter of my realization in art. I think I am reaching it more and more each day, although with some dif- ficulty.... the knowledge of the means of expressing our emotion is not acquired except through a long period of study.70

Shortly before his death in 1906, he wrote to his son:

Finally, I will tell you that I am becoming, as a painter, more lucid before nature, but for me, the realization of my sensations is always very difficult. I am not able to arrive at the intensity which unfolds before my senses; I do not have that magnificent richness of color which animates nature.71

So we have seen that just as Cezanne's flatness might be interpreted in terms of atmospheric effect rather than conceptual abstraction, his distortion or awkwardness might have its origin in the impressionist's "sensation" rather than the symbolist's "idea." To a great extent we can

interpret Cezanne's style as either symbolist or impressionist. Which should we choose? Since both interpretations seem to work, we need choose only if we are concerned with how Cezanne himself would have chosen. It is obvious whose side he was on. It is well documented that he did not think highly of the major symbolist artists, nor of symbolist theorizing. 72

Significantly, Cezanne's major theoretical statement (which I have

analyzed in detail) appeared in a letter to Roger Marx (23 January 1905) in specific response to that critic's remarks about his works in the Salon d'Automne of 1904. In his review, Marx had described Cezanne as a founder of impressionism but also, along with Odilon Redon and others whom Marx regarded as symbolists, as part of the current avant-garde.

69. On Cezanne's "studies," see, e.g., his letters to Octave Maus, 27 November 1889 and Egisto Fabbri, 31 May 1899, pp. 214, 237. (The Tannahill "Bathers" was once owned by Fabbri.)

70. Cezanne to Aurenche, 25 January 1904, p. 257. Cf. Cezanne to Marx, 23 January 1905, p. 273.

71. Cezanne to his son, 8 September 1906, p. 288. 72. See, e.g., Cezanne to Bernard, 15 April 1904, and 23 October 1905, pp. 260, 277.

See also Geffroy's testimony in his Claude Monet, sa vie, son oeuvre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1924), 2:68.

Critical Inquiry


According to the critic, Cezanne, like these others, distorted forms "de-

liberately." Marx had argued that the modern revolutionary artist, like Cezanne, had made his work classic by moving from an overly refined

analytical approach (Academic impressionism) to a simplicity dear to the old masters. Marx, like Denis, defined Cezanne's style largely in terms of

symbolism and a related primitivism and classicism. Associating Cezanne with the avant-garde, Marx gave to him a very significant position in the

history of art: Cezanne became an important "link" in what the critic had called an historical "chain."73 Cezanne's written reply to Marx followed the publication of the article by about a month. He humbly acknowl-

edged the critic's honor: "In my opinion," the artist wrote, "one does not substitute oneself for the past, one just adds a new link." He then went on to present Marx with his own "impressionist" theory of art: with a

"temperament" and a "conception of nature" one needs only the "means of expression" in order to communicate to the public and "occupy a

proper rank in the history of art." In reply to the critic's rather complex symbolist-oriented analysis, Cezanne presented a very traditional naturalist and impressionist formulation.

Similarly, when the symbolist-oriented artist Emile Bernard had visited Cezanne early in 1904, he too had received a dose of impressionist theory. Bernard wrote home to his mother: "Cezanne speaks only of

painting nature according to his personality and not according to [the idea of] art itself.... He professes the theories of naturalism and Im- pressionism."74

We have seen that Cezanne's flatness and distortion may properly be linked to his impressionist concerns. The artists who followed him, however, most often associated these two stylistic characteristics with a symbolist aesthetic, an aesthetic that is still very much with us. Cezanne's

"impressionism" would not appear convincing without the presence of a third stylistic trait much more commonly associated with naturalism-

73. Marx, "Le Salon d'Automne," pp. 459, 462-64. 74. Bernard to his mother, 5 February 1904, printed in "Un Extraordinaire Docu-

ment sur Paul Cezanne," Arts-documents, November 1954, p. 4. As is well known, Bernard's official publications on Cezanne never alluded to any final acceptance of impressionist theory. Reff ([ 1960], p. 153) is the only Cezanne scholar to note the Bernard letter of Febru-

ary 1904, and he does not seem to attach any special significance to it. It is inaccurate to as- sert, as does Reff, that Bernard's article on Cezanne of July 1904 is consistent with the account of the artist offered to Bernard's mother. Although Cezanne, in the published article, is described as initially concerned with a personal vision of nature, Bernard insists that the artist's ultimate goal is "une conception decorative" and a radical abstraction of nature; according to Bernard, Cezanne "se differencie essentiellement de limpressionnisme." See Bernard, "Paul Cezanne," L'Occident 6 (July 1904): 21-22, 25, 28. Publicly, Bernard insists that Cezanne shares his own symbolist orientation; his personal observations, at least in 1904, are quite different.


bright atmospheric color. If we reconsider the artist's depiction of Mont Sainte-Victoire, we need not attribute the odd color and brushwork to his individual temperament; we can, paradoxically, attribute it to late nineteenth-century conventions for rendering the effect of bright light.

Although in the earlier stages of impressionist naturalism many critics may have emphasized an assumed search for scientific objectivity on the part of the artists, subjectivity, as we have seen, was always the key element in impressionist theory. It was this concern for temperament and personal sensation which prevented Monet and Pissarro from adopting the photographic style of a Meissonier or a Jean Beraud. In the later stages of impressionist criticism, in the 1880s and 1890s, subjectivity was more commonly the issue-one need only read the statements of the neo-impressionists for proof of this.75 But from the very beginnings of their careers, the independent impressionists were conscious of the con- flict between their goal of an immediate art of the individual and the

concept of art itself. To be true to one's own spontaneous impressions, one could not use preconceived formulas, one could not be conventional; yet in order to communicate an artistic experience of some kind, one had to use a language which would be understood by others, a

language that in fact was based on accepted conventions.76 The im-

pressionists then, like Cezanne, had to be concerned with the "means of expression," technical procedure, the language of artistic communication. But whatever technique was used, no matter how self-conscious it might be, it had to appear fresh and unconventional; in order to communicate an original sensation, his own sensation, the impressionist had to develop a technique which would seem spontaneous and yet be com-

prehensible. The task was well defined. The impressionist was seeking the ex-

pression of a very specific effect, the atmospheric effect of light, that which was regarded as the elemental sensation, the impression.77 This atmospheric effect was held to be naively and spontaneously perceived and hence the most intimately personal and subjective aspect of the natural environment; yet it was also considered the most objectively real phenomenon, the element of nature known most directly-it was sensed, felt. The search for the expression of this elemental sensation led to color; for traditionally bright color had been associated with bright at-

75. See, e.g., Paul Signac's basic distinction between impressionism and neo-impressionism in his D'Eugkne Delacroix au nto-impressionnisme (1899), ed. Francoise Cachin (Paris, 1964), p. 114.

76. A symbolist, however, might argue that the expression of any "truth" is universally recognizable on a level of communication more elemental than the conventional modes.

77. For a more detailed analysis of the concepts of "atmosphere" and "effect," consult Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1971), and my diss., pts. 2 and 3.

799

800 Richard Shiff

mospheric light.78 The use of bright color, that is, unusually pure, chromatic hue, was considered in polar opposition to the use of chiaroscuro, the use of a broad range of dark/light values within the painting.79 This view was supported by aspects of the scientific study of color and vision and by the fact that the more chromatic pigments commonly used (as opposed to various browns and earth colors) formed a relatively narrow range of value. Only when white and black were added could a full range of value be derived from these colors. But a limited range of value, that is, a lack of full chiaroscuro, was itself advantageous for the impressionist; for chiaroscuro was considered a conventional, labored technique for creating an illusion of atmospheric perspective. While bright hues might suggest spontaneity and the immediacy of the impression, chiaroscuro could not.80

There was, however, a way of using chiaroscuro values which was not inconsistent with impressionist concerns, and we see it in Cezanne's portrait of the mid-1860s, "Uncle Dominic" (fig. 10). Here Cezanne used values on a broad scale but used a limited number of them. He employed a technique which critics were in the habit of calling "summary model-

ing [modele sommaire]." Individual strokes of paint are clearly visible, and the transitions between their values are often abrupt-in other words, the painting lacks what critics called "finish." This sketchlike brushwork and lack of subtle chiaroscuro modeling, this unconventional, perhaps unordered, surface suggested for the viewer that the artist was concerned with the direct rapid rendering of his impression, his personal sensation of nature. (Of course, unsympathetic viewers interpreted the same formal elements as a sign of haste and lack of manual skill.) Among the painters whom the young Cezanne admired, Courbet was most often associated with the heavy impasto of a clearly visiblefacture and Manet with the relatively limited number of values and the abrupt transitions. The critic Marx, to cite only one example, readily linked Cezanne to both these artists.81

The style of Cezanne's maturity, however, is, as I have intimated, the result of a concern for rendering the atmospheric effect in terms of

unusually bright hues, the "spectral" color of the impressionists.82 In the 1870s the artist worked closely with Pissarro, and both men developed a

78. This and some following generalizations are supported by detailed arguments in

pts. 2 and 3 of my diss. 79. Eugene Fromentin is perhaps of most value on this issue; see his Les Maitres

d'autrefois (Paris, 1876), pp. 236-37. 80. A very limited range of values without bright hue could also suggest the atmo-

spheric effect but was not as directly associated with spontaneity and lack of convention. 81. On Cezanne and Courbet, see Marx, "Le Salon d'Automne," pp. 459-60, 462-63;

on Cezanne and Manet, see Marx, "Un Siecle d'art" (1900), in Etudes sur 1'Ecole Fran- (aise (Paris, 1903), p. 35.

82. See Cezanne to Pissarro, 2 July 1876, to Bernard, 15 April 1904, undated 1905, and 23 October 1905, and to his son, 3 August 1906, pp. 127, 259, 276, 277, 281.

Seeing Cezanne

Summer 1978 801

FIG. 10.-Paul Cezanne, Uncle Dominic (c. 1865-66). Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Museum, New York.

manner of using a brighter color, freer of chiaroscuro conventions, yet still capable of suggesting a unity, an ordering of the pictorial surface.83 This was a significant development, for the departure from conventional chiaroscuro had brought with it problems of structure. The creation of a

83. Reflecting on his work with Cezanne, Pissarro on 22 November 1895 wrote of the two artists' mutual influence. He added: "But what cannot be denied is that each one kept the only thing that counts, his own 'sensation'! " See Camille Pissaro, Lettres d sonfils, Lucien, ed. Rewald (Paris, 1950), p. 391.

Critical Inquiry


logical illusionistic space through a continual gradation of chiaroscuro had traditionally been conceived of as a unifying device that made the total image comprehensible to the viewer as a picture, as a completed "tableau." Having rejected a subtly gradated chiaroscuro as contradicting an immediacy of vision, the impressionist sought other means of achiev- ing a structural unity. To some extent any suggestion of the impression could itself be considered unifying, for this immediate perception of nature was characterized as a simple, undifferentiated totality.84 But Pissarro and Cezanne were a bit more conservative and less abstract in their reasoning than the positivist-oriented critics who suggested such

things. They sought unity through what became for them a convention, a means of expression; they created an overall color harmony by mixing as many hues as possible from a relatively limited palette. This technique enabled them to use bright hues (and to maintain a relatively limited range of values) while at the same time avoiding overly harsh juxtaposi- tions of these highly chromatic colors. Pissarro's "Kitchen at Piette's, Montfoucault," dated 1874 (fig. 11), exhibits an early and rather ex-

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FIG. 11.-Camille Pissarro, The Kitchen at Piette's, Montfoucault (1874). Photo courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts, bequest of Edward E. Rothman.

84. Ernest Chesneau had ridiculed such an attitude toward the impression in L'Art et les artistes modernes en France et en Angleterre (Paris, 1864), p. 195.

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Summer 1978 803

treme use of the new method. The palette employed in this painting consists almost exclusively of pigments resembling bright spectral colors-ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow, red lead (a strong orange- red), alizarin crimson, cobalt green, and lead white. (Minute quantities of

ivory black are also present on the surface in the darkest areas.) Despite the highly chromatic palette, the painting appears quite "gray," for Pis- sarro has produced many neutralized tones by mixing blue, yellow, and red, and small amounts of green.85 He thus achieved a very unified and harmonious color, but one suggesting, through its relatively even value and chromatic hue,86 a spontaneous impression of natural light.

Cezanne's palettes of the 1870s and early 1880s seem to have been somewhat more complex than Pissarro's, but he followed a similar method, mixing from the relatively intense colors most of the more neutral ones. The aim seems to have been to maximize the use of the

brighter colors which were most directly associated with the atmospheric effect while avoiding extremes of hue contrast which might seem to break up the desired unity of the pictorial surface. Cezanne related this technical issue to his observation of nature when he wrote to Pissarro in 1876 from L'Estaque, a town near Marseilles: "It seems to me that the

objects [here] are defined in silhouette not only in white or black, but in blue, in red, in brown, in violet. I may be mistaken but it seems to me to be the antithesis of modeling."87 In other words, the artist saw color, brilliant color, not chiaroscuro.

Cezanne's "Plate of Apples" of the late 1870s (fig. 12) is a work which resulted from the study of technical procedure which we have been discussing. It has a harmonious close-valued surface of many different hues mixed from a relatively limited palette. Although a still life and presumably painted indoors, it suggests, through its color, an atmo-

spheric effect similar to that resulting from strong outdoor light. Cezanne, like the other impressionists (but unlike the neo-impressionists), rarely distinguished between indoor and outdoor light in terms of color. Thus, a portrait or still life may appear equal in chromatic

intensity to a landscape. What seems to have been most important was not the specific identification of a type of color or light with a particular

85. I am indebted to Meryl Johnson at the Detroit Institute of Arts for the analytical identification of the pigments in this Pissarro and also in the Tannahill "Bathers." Inge Fiedler at the Art Institute of Chicago kindly identified the pigments present in Cezanne's "The Plate of Apples" (fig. 12) and Pissarro's "The Warren at Pontoise in the Snow" (1879), both in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. These two paintings proved to be similar in pigment composition to their counterparts in Detroit. On the subject of pigment composition I have received much welcome advice from Johnson and Fiedler and also from Mary Lou White and Marigene Butler.

86. That is, the resultant color is derived from the "spectral" hues of the prism or rainbow, associated with natural light, and is "pure"; nonspectral neutralized colors (such as the earth colors) have been added only minimally or not at all.

87. Cezanne to Pissarro, 2 July 1876, p. 127.

Critical Inquiry

804 Richard Shiff

FIG. 12.-Paul Cezanne, The Plate of Apples (c. 1877). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

subject but the general suggestion that the color and light had in fact been perceived spontaneously. Somewhat paradoxically, but not inconsistent with the artist's search for a means of expression, Cezanne gave the effect of atmosphere, of immediately perceived color and light, to images which he in fact did not observe. His studies of bathers were

apparently not painted from life but from drawings of individual figures (many of which were copied from works by the artists Cezanne referred to as "masters") and from photographs.88 To form simple compositions the artist grouped his individual figures of bathers in several standard arrangements along with tree trunks and foliage. He constructed these synthetic images not so much in terms of drawing but in terms of a

patchwork of brushstrokes of color. The Tannahill "Bathers" (fig. 2) is such a composition, and the color which was employed here is similar to that of Cezanne's earlier works. A relatively limited number of pigments were used, and many of the more neutral colors were mixed from the most intense primaries. The range of hue used to "model" the figures is

88. On this issue, see Gertrude Berthold, Cezanne und die alten Meister (Stuttgart, 1958); she discusses the composition of the Tannahill "Bathers" on p. 39.

Seeing Cezanne

Summer 1978 805

broad-blues, greens, pale yellows, oranges, and touches of red-while the range of value is relatively narrow; we recall what Cezanne observed at L'Estaque in 1876.

The viewer of the Tannahill "Bathers" may find its brushwork (facture) more remarkable than its color. The work exhibits a relatively uniform surface of short, distinct strokes of paint. We might compare this

very deliberate repetitious patterning to the more varied surfaces often seen in the works of Monet and argue that Cezanne seems to have lost the sense of immediacy. Yet Cezanne's surface was still clearly associated with the sketch (hence, the criticism of "lack of finish") and his technique still implied that an impressionist image was the goal.89 His more regular patterning of brushstroke held out one advantage-it created a more

obviously unified surface. Such an impersonal stroke (figures and land-

scape are rendered in similar manner) emphasized the immediate atmo-

spheric effect as the unifying element rather than suggesting the exis- tence of a complex, highly differentiated compositional order. Cezanne

subjected all aspects of this imaginary composition of figures in a land-

scape to the same immediate, unifying vision. The artist's portrait of his wife (fig. 7), a work of the late 1880s or

early 1890s, exhibits a much more loosely structured pattern of brushstrokes, the kind of pattern which suggests the rapid execution which we today associate with impressionism. This sketchier surface may, however, simply reflect a less "finished" (or less reworked) painting, for Cezanne often seems to have worked from a broadly brushed surface to a pattern of smaller strokes.90 "Madame Cezanne" is remarkable in its color, for the artist here has obviously extended the spectral range of the local color, as was the custom of Monet and Renoir. He modeled a dress which was in actuality probably blue by using a narrow range of values but a broad range of hues-blues, greens, and various violets. Similarly, the figure's face and hands were defined with tones of rose, pale orange, and green. Again, Cezanne conceived his image in terms of "immediate" color rather than "conventional" chiaroscuro.91

The artist's "Three Skulls" (fig. 6), painted sometime during the last seven or eight years of his career when he was rapidly gaining recognition within the art world, is obviously not as bright in color as his "Bathers" or "Madame Cezanne." Yet its color is "impressionist" in the sense that it suggests the ubiquitous chromatic presence of natural atmo-

89. Signac considered Cizanne'sfacture more methodical than Monet's, but still "im-

pressionist" ("D'Eugene Delacroix," p. 105). 90. The dramatic difference in scale in these two works is not necessarily relevant to

this issue. Many smaller works are loosely brushed, many larger ones tightly organized. 91. Later, Denis, R. P. Riviere, and J. F. Schnerb, who had all visited Cezanne's studio,

reported independently that he spoke of using hue (color) and not value (chiaroscuro). See Denis, "Cezanne," pp. 249-51; and Riviere and Schnerb, "L'Atelier de Cezanne," La Grande Revue 46 (25 December 1907): 814.

Critical Inquiry


spheric light. We would generally conceive of the three skulls and the wooden table on which they rest as quite uniform in hue; but Cezanne has characteristically given these objects a range of color which departs radically from the local norm. The skull to the left, for example, has been rendered with broad strokes of green, pale blue, dull yellow, pink, and reddish violet; even its contour outlining is multicolored. More re-

markably perhaps, the table top which we would assume was flat has been rendered in various hues as if a modeled volumetric form. This

type of "atmospheric" color which seems to fail to distinguish between the flat and the rounded was commonly employed by Cezanne; Denis, in fact, described the background of a painting by Ce/zanne as a "fabric" of color accompanying the principal motif and added that "whatever the

pretext, one finds there [a full] chromatic range."92 The Tannahill "Mont Sainte-Victoire" (fig. 8), another work of

Cezanne's last years, is perhaps the easiest to see in terms of an im-

pressionist vision; it is a small-scale work, probably painted outdoors at the site, with unusually bright, light-valued color and a relatively uniform pattern of sketchy brushwork carried even into the sky. It is simple and direct in all of the ways we associate with the impressionist's elemental sensation of nature. Is it disturbing then to know that Cezanne was

probably working on his large-scale and synthetic "Large Bathers" (fig. 1) at the same time? It should not be; for given the scale of the image and the number of figures within it, the "Large Bathers" is itself a relatively simple composition containing a dominant triangular motif which few commentators have failed to notice. The very evident distortions of

figural form create repetitive rhythms of similar formal elements rather than distinguishing one figure from another. If the forms of the figures seem to merge with the forms of the landscape (as in the Tannahill "Mont Sainte-Victoire" where foliage, mountain, and sky are linked), this only enhances the unity and immediacy of the vision. The surface of this painting, like those of earlier, smaller bather compositions, is ulti-

mately organized in terms of a unifying patchwork of impressionist at-

mospheric color.93 Cezanne, then, seems to have felt free to apply his impressionist

vision to any subject, at any scale, and for any length of time. It is evident that he (and the other independent impressionists) recognized the essential dichotomy of an immediate vision and a communicating visual art. What he came to value was not the externalized, objective appearance of the art work, but the sincerity of the artistic process which led to that result-not the subject represented, but the vision experienced.

92. Denis, "Cezanne," p. 250. Riviere and Schnerb remarked upon the same

phenomenon in "L'Atelier de Cezanne," p. 814. All of the references to Cezanne's "tapestry" effect (discussed above) also relate to this issue.

93. For a more detailed analysis of this composition of color, see my diss., pt. 4.

Critical Inquiry Summer 1978 807

What came to be expressed was the search for truth.94 For Cezanne the search for truth led to and was conveyed by an art of the atmospheric effect, an art of the immediate sensation of color and light.

We have been seeing Cezanne through himself and his con-

temporaries, but we have not yet seen him through a present-day perspective. Today we do not readily recognize his nineteenth-century lan-

guage of conventions for expressing atmospheric light; yet we recognize his painting as art. Why?

Cezanne's art, like much impressionist and symbolist art, seems to have broken down the barrier between subject and object, between "sensation" as feeling and "sensation" as seeing. Although of concern in earlier ages it is especially common in the twentieth century to argue that art should do just this, that is, reveal the essential continuity of being in the world, reveal the essential wholeness of experience. We have come to

regard the key aesthetic relationship not as that between the artist's

image and nature, nor even as that between the artist and his viewer, but rather as that between the viewer and the object the artist created. Our direct experience of art, art's direct effect on our consciousness, is all-

important. Modern critics have related this viewpoint, either overtly or tacitly, to the theory of "empathy" or "expression."

"Empathy" is a term used to translate the German word "Ein-

fuhlung," which means "feeling oneself into." The concept gained cur-

rency in the 1870s, but its sources go further back in time. The ideas which came to be associated with empathy theory are found in idealistic theories of "correspondence" and positivistic, physiologically oriented theories of psychology.95 A late but historically significant statement on the subject was provided by Wilhelm Worringer in 1908. The adherent of the theory of empathy, he wrote, "no longer takes the esthetic [object] as the starting-point of [his] investigations, but proceeds from the behav- ior of the contemplating subject."96 Empathy, then, involves the direct relationship between viewer and object, a living, growing relationship.

Twentieth-century critics applied this aesthetic, which Worringer labeled the "modern" one, to Cezanne. The German Julius Meier- Graefe, for example, described his response to the artist's painting in terms of an intimate, unfolding process of conscious experience. He wrote: "There is no movement; the subject before me is a simple still life;

94. Cf. Geffroy writing on Cezanne in 1894, "Histoire de l'impressionnisme," pp. 253-54.

95. On the idealistic side, see the writings of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Humbert de Superville; among the positivistic scientific studies are those of Hermann Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt. Charles Henry and Adolph von Hildebrand drew from both types of sources.

96. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1908; London, 1963), p. 4.

808 Richard Shiff

and yet I feel something in the pupil of my eye quivering, as if set in motion by some movement taking place in a higher dimension."97 The British critic Roger Fry also tended to think of the act of painting and its

appreciation in terms of an internalized "creative" process, a continuing personalized experience. He called attention to distortions in Cezanne's still lifes and figure paintings and explained them as necessary to the

working out of a formal harmony, that kind of abstract order with which an empathetic relationship was said to hold; he described this creative, artistic process as an "endless search."98 This sense of process, this com-

ing into being, which one seemed to be able to experience before a

painting by Cezanne, appealed to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his essay "Cezanne's Doubt," he pointed out what others had called gaucherie-the distortions of perspective and the technical oddities, especially the multiple outlining. This indicated a lack of finish and a lack of realization; but, Merleau-Ponty argued, Cezanne can never finish, he is continually experiencing the world, his mind is one with nature.99

By his own admission, Cezanne's art was incomplete, unrealized. But how could it have been otherwise? He was a "modern" artist. His contemporaries admired, and today we still admire, his search for artistic expression, his search for truth. In a society which lacks absolute standards, in a society of doubt, what more could be expected?

97. Julius Meier-Graefe, The Development of Modern Art, trans. Florence Simmonds and

George W. Chrystal, 2 vols. (New York, 1908), 1:267. Theories of eye movement were often related to the general theory of empathy.

98. Roger Fry, Cezanne, A Study of His Development (New York, 1927), pp. 48-49, 60. 99. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Le Doute de Cezanne," Sens et non-sens (Paris, 1948), pp.

15-49.

Seeing Cezanne

seeing cezanne

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