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

is a good book to consult; but it should be only an intermediary. The real
and prodigious study to undertake is the diversity of nature’s pictures.”
Of the old masters he preferred the Venetians, particularly Paul Veronese,
and the Spaniards. There seems to be no doubt that at some period of his
career he visited Spain and gained the fuller knowledge, possible only in
this way, of the work of Velasquez and Goya and El Greco. Cezanne’s nude
figure studies suggest most strongly the influence of the Toledan master,
with whose example his own theory of the painter’s art very remarkably
coincides. “The painter,” as one of Cezanne’s letters puts it, “makes concrete
his sensations and perceptions by means of design and color.”
On the other hand, there was at least this difference between the motive
of El Greco and that of Cezanne. While both derived their perceptions from
nature, the sensations that the Spaniard experienced were in the main inspired
and colored by spiritual ecstasy; whereas Cezanne’s were intellectual. He
saw nature, as it has been remarked, not only with the optical eye, but with
the eye of logic. He subjected his sensations to logical analysis, tried to
formulate them on the basis of reasoning and to realize them in a manner that
would stand the test of scientific scrutiny. Perhaps he had more sense of
truth than of beauty; at any rate, in lieu of creative imagination, he brought
to bear upon nature a scientific attitude of mind, tempered by a taste unusually
fine. It was this attitude toward art, harmonizing with the scientific trend
of the time, which explains the influence he is exerting upon the younger
generation.
It was one of Cezanne’s sayings that it is necessary again to become
classic through nature, that is to say, through sensations. Just as the Greeks
and, later, the Masters of the Renaissance, headed by Da Vinci, had formu-
lated principles for realizing their respective visions of nature, so he devoted
his life to the formulating of principles that would realize the new kind of
vision which is evoked by the mental and esthetic needs and conditions of the
present. If one thinks but for a moment of the positions occupied by music
and literature today, compared with the past, of the multiplication of our
inherited and actually realized experiences, of the complexity of modern
life, and, above all, of the closer intimacy between science and nature, it is
to be aware of the difference of our modern sensations, and to catch a hint of
Cezanne’s meaning. Too long have painters been chewing the cud.
Nor are the principles which Cezanne formulated revolutionary in
character. They are rather in the nature of old principles, newly applied.
Thus, first and foremost, he reasserted the principle of design as being the
foundation of all art. It was his practical protest against the greater part of
modern impressionism. The latter, he considered, did not go far enough. It
was based upon nature, viewed through the sensations, but it had not learned
to organize the sensations, or to realize them in a design that is suggestive
of authority and finality. Cezanne, in fact, anticipated the verdict of today, that
the greater part of Nineteenth Century Impressionism was confused and
embarrassed, a product of that chaotic condition of society in which the old
standards were disappearing and no new ones were as yet established. It
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