Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 34-35))

A NOTE ON PAUL CEZANNE
Jr""l THROUGH the medium of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession,
New Yorkers have had the chance of tasting Paul Cezanne’s work in
water colors. Since it was the first occasion of his art being shown in
this country, the exhibition embarrassed the professional writers in the Press
but interested a goodly portion of the public, both artists and laymen. As
for the writers, they are in the state of the fuglemen, who are swept aside when
there is anything actively a-doing. For a fugleman, you may remember, is a
“soldier, specially expert and well drilled” (I quote the Century Dictionary),
“who takes his place in front of a military company as an example or model
to the others in their exercises.” His use, apparently, is to produce a machine-
like effect of conventional regularity on the parade ground. But when an
action is ahead and an advance is to be made, the fugleman drops back into
the ranks or falls in in the rear. Meanwhile each private is permitted some
initiative: makes his own dash forward, ducks for a space, and makes a
further dash, seeking the cover of a tree or mound—each doing the best he
can for himself, but all united in the common purpose of advance. This has
been the way at the Little Galleries.
The significance of Cezanne, which for some time has been recognized
abroad, is beginning to percolate through American consciousness. The
latter is discovering—mostly on hearsay, unfortunately—that his work has a
twofold value. On the one hand, his paintings appeal to those who have had
the opportunity of studying them extensively and intensively with a continuing
and growing suggestion of satisfaction. On the other hand, as the principles
embodied in his work are becoming understood, their influence upon the
younger generation of painters is proving to be potent. This is what he
hoped would follow his life of study and experiment. A year or two before
his death he said, “I am too old; I have not realized, I shall not realize now.
I remain the Primitive of the way which I have discovered.”
Paul Cezanne was born at Aix, in Provence, in 1839. His father, a
hatter in a small way of business, recognized early his son’s genius and, at
the same time, the struggle that was before him. “My son,” he said, “is a
Bohemian who will die in misery. I am going to work for him.” The father
had gained the confidence of the best people in his city and opened a bank,
in which he rapidly amassed what, in France, passes for a fortune. At his
death he settled this upon Paul and his sister, so that the former had, as he
expressed it, enough to paint on. His earliest interest, however, was rather
in literature than painting. During his college days in Aix he composed
Latin and French verses in rivalry with his fellow student, Zola, who after-
wards dedicated to Cezanne his Confession de Claude. It was Zola who
introduced him to Manet. Cezanne’s shyness stood in the way of any intimacy
with the artist, but Manet’s and Courbet’s pictures so strongly affected him
that his own life work was determined. Henceforth he lived only to be a
painter. He drew from the nude and frequented the Louvre. The latter, as
he wrote in a letter to Emile Bernard, shortly before his death, “The Louvre

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