International studio (57.1915/1916)

Patil Cezanne

admiration and to keep the critic and the novice
busy studying and thinking until a more com-
prehensive exhibition makes its appearance.
And there are enough works to urge the serious
seekers after great achievement on to renewed
effort. Here should be the student’s—not the
pupil’s—inspiration.
In the water-colours we have the essence of
Cezanne. The virility of his organisation, the
hardy surety of his lines, the justness of his
colour-form juxtapositions are all set down, one
might say, without adjectives, adverbs or par-
ticiples. There is no apparent striving for photo-
graphic realism; and no one can accuse Cezanne
of making illustration his objective. Lines which
delimit volumes which, in turn, are colours, are
drawn, not to give us a reproduction of the
subject, but to make of that subject a theatre
where vast volumnear forces balance and sway
rhythmically, on the threshold of eternal
action, in counter-balance with other poised
masses, thus creating that movement which
translates itself into our physical consciousness
and causes what Lipps has termed Einfuehlung.
In these pictures one will notice that where a.
stone or tree trunk has been outlined against a
hill or ravine, the colour is placed only along the
contours of these objects, and that these thin
strips of colour indicate the relative spatial re-
lation between the picture’s volumes. So ac-
curately consistent are these colours that they
“carry” for the entire mass which is left nine-
tenths white. Regard for instance the White
Tree Trunks.
The truest test of Cezanne’s formal depth is to
visualise one of his pictures hours or days after
it has actually been seen. It is impossible to
remember the picture as flat, for subjectively we
have experienced a qualitative depth. The ex-
perience has become part of us; and though our
memory of an actual landscape may call up a
flat scene, our recollection of a Cezanne water-
colour is always three-dimensional. This quali-
tative depth is brought about by the logical
placing of lines and colours in an ordinance of
extentional relations, and is as far removed from
quantitative depth (which consists in painting
mountains light lavender, in drawing receding
roads to sharp points, in working out objective
perspective, etc.), as a drawing by Michelangelo
is from a Holbein. Indeed, just as Michelangelo
can, with a few lines, give us a complete sensation

of a moving body, so can Cezanne, with four or
five colours and a few lines, construct for us a
complete landscape in which masses of rock, trees
and foliage play the part of muscles and limbs.
Cezanne has done many insignificant things.
Nos. 16, 17, 18, 33 and 35 are unworthy of their
author; and No. 15 is little better. On the
other hand, one may mention such completely
beautiful works as The Ditch, The Ravine (in
which there is a continuous struggle of vast
volumes), The Forest, Trees Amongst Rocks,
Landscape (No. 30), and Rocky Ridge. When we
stand for a moment before this last picture its
seemingly abstract lines and colours take form
little by little until finally they appear to possess
all the solid and fantastically ordered beauty of
an Indian temple.
The least interesting water-colour, from both
the philosophical and aesthetic standpoint, hap-
pens to be the most finished and, I believe, the
highest priced—The Watermelon. Here is the
most superficially realistic picture in the show; it
is inferior even to his early canvas, The Oil Mill.
In this latter work, imitative as it undoubtedly is,
are those painter-like qualities which later
Cezanne was to develop to so superlative a degree.
It recalls Courbet at his best, and is more com-
petent than Manet whom, the reactionary critics
insist, he copied.
The Portrait of a Man though a slight work, is
worth more to the serious artist in search of in-
formation than a year at the art schools. Let
him stand before this canvas and forget that he
is looking at an objective portrait. Let him ignore
the face and body as such, and look a t it simply as
a series of colour patterns. Fix tlie eye steadily
on one spot—gradually those colour patterns will
shift, contract and expand, ally themselves one
to another in such a way that finally they will
form a solid mass out of which will spring bumps
and into which hollows will sink, all converging
to make a face. With Cezanne this is the only
possible method of approach. We cannot force
realism from his colours at first glance, or ex-
perience his rhythm by a mental process; nor can
we sense his impenetrable solidity by a recognition
of natural objects. Appreciation of Cezanne is
wholly a question of experiencing, passively and
in spite of ourselves, the coming together of his
colour planes (or coordinated forces) whose total
result is reality.
The same process holds good for the oil, Still

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