THE GLORIOUS MONSTER OF AIX

...But Sterne neither learned anything from Puvis, nor laughed at Cezanne: "The more I saw of Cezanne, the more Puvis shrank in stature...

...Those familiar with L'Oeuvre, however, immediately understood that the American Art News writer, by mentioning the novel, slyly expressed his own dislike of Cezanne...

...The most admirable thing in the life of 'Father Cezanne' was his perseverance in painting badly . . . Some go as far as to pretend that he was a man of genius: business reasons alone might justify such an exaggeration...

...The novelist pictured him as Claude in L'Oeuvre...

...But this untidy and unsocial recluse was sure about one thing: that he wanted to achieve his aim of creating, with modern means, an art as solid and durable as that of the Old Masters...

...Self-centered though he was, he did not mind instructing the young, that they might avoid his own pitfalls and errors: "The painter must rely on his vision...

...If he did not like the way an argument was going, he simply got up and stalked away in a rage...

...Though considered revolutionaries, the Impressionists were actually the true heirs of the Renaissance men who had striven for the most scientific reproduction of the visible world...

...One may find it shocking that, during the Franco-Prussian War, he dodged the recruiting officers and calmly went on painting landscapes while his native country was being overrun by the Boche...

...Van Gogh had evangelical fervor...

...For years Cezanne worked with the Impressionists, and he was often counted a minor member of the school, perhaps the least gifted of all...

...Among them, I might mention William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast, of "Ashcan School" fame...

...In his youth, he was a silent participant when the Impressionists gathered around a cafe table...

...Cezanne was fifty-six when he had his first one-man show, a show coldly received by the public...

...The other was Max Weber, who arrived in time to see the Salon d'Automne of ]906...

...Yet this unlovely man who would curse violently at the most trivial provocation, rarely had a good word for a contemporary, had no ear for music and no interest in public affairs, was not a monster...

...Just before his death, Cezanne acquired two American disciples, though he never knew of their existence...

...He found all the inspiration he needed in the roundness and full color of an apple, and in a rare outburst of self-assertion once exclaimed: "With an apple I will astonish Paris...

...Only last year Selden Rodman, in The Eye of Man, held him responsible for the avalanche of Abstract Art, occupied with the problems of form and unconcerned with spiritual messages to the public...

...It is, of course, a slander that Cezanne, in his studio at Aix, kept a parrot he had taught to say, "Monsieur Cezanne is a great artist," and that he pointed out to every visitor, "This is my best critic...

...Lautrec had success and an aristocratic name...

...He shows the way to true craftsmanship...

...I have made some progress...

...It is insignificant that he told a friend, "I'm the only living painter," or that he once wrote to his son that compared to him all people were asses...

...Cezanne would have starved to death had he had to depend on the sale of his pictures...

...Cezanne, in a letter to a younger artist, had advised the study of geometric forms, an interpretation of nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone...

...he could eliminate nonessentials, ignore haphazard relationships of forms, arbitrarily construct pictures out of the elements as an architect builds a house, instead of yielding to accident and chaos...

...The lover of art forgets theories in the presence of a painting, and Cezanne, whatever he was, clearly was no philosopher...

...He must do everything according to Nature with much reflection, because every color-touch must contain air, light, the object, the plan, the character, the drawing and the style, in a word, all that which constitutes a painting...

...Her portraits show her utterly fatigued and sullen...

...But whoever invented the story knew how terribly plagued the master was by feelings of insecurity...

...Few are the contemporary painters who will disagree with Max Weber: "The moment you begin to sense the value of Cezanne, he becomes instrumental in leading you away from triviality...

...Few of us who now look with admiration at Cezanne's serene landscapes and poetic still lifes, at the quiet grandeur of his portraits, are aware that the artist lived a life almost as despairing as Gauguin, Van Gogh, or Toulouse-Lautrec...

...Not many liked what they saw, but a few young American artists (and some who were not young any longer) were struck by the timeless strength and convincing finality of this Latin's work...

...Moreover, he knew what good painters have always known: that it was the painter's task to represent, not to reproduce, nature...

...Gauguin at least had an animal sensuality and a more than healthy egotism...

...he must beware of literary spirit and opinion which so often cause painting to deviate from its true path— the concrete study of Nature...

...Hortense's most significant role in his life was to serve as a model who could not rebel when requested to pose for him in the same rigid position hour after hour, and whom he could scold violently if she stirred instead of sitting still as an apple...

...Shall I be like the great leader of the Hebrews or shall I be able to enter it...

...He could not understand why Gauguin (whom he despised) had to go to the tropics to seek new subjects...

...Montagne Sainte-Victoire has really none of the grandeur and monumentality Cezanne bestowed upon this not particularly impressive small mountain by translating its aesthetic possibilities into his own pictorial idiom (he painted the scene more than sixty times...

...Zola saw only what was obvious in Cezanne: his disheveled appearance and gruff manner, his fear of people and lack of success...

...The dealer Vollard sat one hundred and fifteen times for one portrait...

...At the Impressionist group-shows of 1874 and 1877 more critical lightning was drawn by him than by any other of the daring young men...

...Is art indeed a priesthood which demands the pure in heart, completely dedicated to it...

...Fanatically wishing to record the sensations of the eye as faithfully as possible, they dissolved nature into chromatic vibrancies, until they had dissolved and lost form completely...

...The very ordinary pipe smokers and card players he chose to portray were transfigured into solid forms of an austere firmness with the strength of archaic sculpture...

...I find more significance in his countless expressions of dissatisfaction with himself, his endless complaints about not being able to "realize" his pictorial aims...

...I am beginning to see the Promised Land...

...Indeed, he was not easily satisfied...

...Why so late and with such difficulty...

...The official Salon, where he yearned to see his pictures hang, was firmly closed to him...

...All his clumsy "theorizing," all his labors, his persistence, his relentless search would not impress us today, had not his yearning for fulfillment been based on a poetic temperament that could be as tenderly lyrical as the verses of a Li Tai Po (in Cezanne's water colors) or as dramatic as the Shakespeare of King Lear (in his oils of forests, ferocious crags, and ruggedly wild trees...

...They had only one thing in common at the time of their break in 1886: they were financially well-off, Zola because his novels were international best-sellers, and Cezanne because his father, a banker and businessman, had left him a large fortune...

...Cezanne will never be the darling of the multitudes...

...He spent most of his later life in or around his native city of Aix, whose townsfolk considered him a madman, and whose children threw stones at him...

...There had been an ever widening gap between the moody hermit of Aix, and the Parisian novelist who had an inordinate craving for good food and drink, loved big parties and pretty women, and filled his bourgeois home with the most vulgar possessions...

...This obituary appears generous beside the abusive comments in some Parisian papers, such as this one: "An incomplete talent, whose imperfect vision kept his work undeveloped and always in the state of a sketch...

...Cezanne became dissatisfied with their artistic creed and pictures...

...But as an artist he was the most heroic, selfless, indefatigable man of his time...

...Post-Impressionism is now a thing of the past...

...He "distorts" whatever in nature may clash with his concept of beauty...

...But Cezanne isn't...

...He shunned what Renoir, and millions with him, found delightful, such as the delicious flesh of healthy nudes...

...For to comprehend a Cezanne one must stand before it a long while after the spell of subject matter (of which there is little) has worn off...

...He is the most concrete way of binding yourself to the fundamentals of art...

...Since Cezanne, we know better than his predecessors could have known the true meaning of structure, of substance, and of subjective plastic eloquence...

...He was so stingy, despite his wealth, that when the car fare for the trip from his home to the place where he liked to paint was raised, the sexagenarian took the long, wearisome walk with his heavy equipment on his back rather than pay a few extra sous...

...To the American painter, Mary Cassatt, this huge unkempt man looked like a common cut-throat...

...He then met Pis-sarro, from whom he learned to look at nature, to repress his wild imagination, and to paint the outdoors with the love and patience of one who values nothing on earth but the motif...

...He was in Paris when Cezanne died at Aix, and Weber still recalls, with anger, the obituary that expressed contempt for the man "with the eye of an ape...

...But Cezanne was not really discovered by America before 1913, the year of the gigantic Armory Show...

...But a painter does not work to please critics, nor even to instruct his colleagues...

...Yet in 1952 a small Cezanne, Apples and Biscuits, sold in Paris for more than $94,000, the highest price ever brought at auction by any modern painting...

...As a representative, he was no longer Nature's slave...

...The Ecole des Beaux-Arts refused him admission for "lack of talent...

...In time, the intensity and directness of the work seize the beholder until at one point he completely forgets that he is in an exhibition room and, through the magic of contemplation, suddenly submerges in the picture before him, as its maker had, in hundreds of working-hours, completely identified himself with the majesty of nature...

...It was through Weber that two other young Americans, the photographers Stieglitz and Steichen, learned to appreciate the artist whom they, like many others, had considered a joke...

...This is, perhaps, the fault of American museum-goers who rush through the galleries as though they were moving on roller-skates...

...He acquired a wife by whom he had a son, but he preferred to leave them in Paris, while he continued to live in Aix with his mother, and, after her death, with his maiden sister...

...Cezanne knew this: "The artist addresses himself to a restricted number of individuals...

...Had he been an ordinary mortal, Cezanne could be written off as an unfeeling brute...

...His comment on the novel was that Claude wasn't a real painter, for a real one would simply have started another picture...

...He suffered many blows...

...He started out with curiously violent and erotic canvases so undisciplined and baroque that it is difficult to associate these thickly painted romantic fancies with the name of Cezanne...

...In his still lifes of fruit, bottles, and glasses, one can see the objects arranged to achieve a complete synthesis of forms, even if a thing must be flattened out, or given an alien hue, a procedure that made the critics complain that Cezanne could not master the rudiments of accurate drawing...

...Cezanne, who only once ventured outside France, for a brief vacation in Switzerland (whose "picturesque" nature he detested), mocked her lust for travel...

...Rodman does not deny Cezanne's talent, but is shocked by his limitations: "Those who ask of art no more than that it rearrange the scenery of outdoors and indoors in planes of singing color monumentally disposed, are satisfied that no artist offers more...

...as late as 1895, when the Musee de Luxembourg grudgingly accepted two Cezannes as part of a bequest including other works by contemporary Frenchmen, a Cezanne was rated at one-tenth the value of a Renoir...

...when they had to part, Cezanne declared that he was not displeased with the front of the shirt...

...the water colorist Charles Demuth...

...He was eager to grasp the secret organization of 'things, the structure beneath the appearance, the "bones of nature...

...The Cubists certainly interpreted (or perhaps misinterpreted) this dictum as an encouragement to move ahead even further in their development of a plastic language utterly indifferent to the fortuitous appearance of things...

...About two years before his death, when he had, at last, been acknowledged by the more progressive critics, and when he felt that he had managed to "realize" some of his goals, he wrote to the same Vollard: "I am working obstinately...

...As he grew older, he gradually abandoned light and shade, as well as atmospheric perspective, in order to suggest the third dimension by means of color movement, by a rhythmic succession of different color planes...

...In 1937 the Chicago Art Institute paid $110,000 for Cezanne's Bathers, and today some of the finest Cezannes can be found in American museums...

...For Claude Lanier of Zola's novel is a neurotic and miserable painter who kills himself because he cannot finish a picture...

...So unsure was he of himself that when his friend Monet once offered a toast in his honor, Cezanne interpreted it as mockery—and left abruptly, with tears of indignation in his eyes...

...When she opened her mouth in the presence of guests (a rare phenomenon in the Cezanne household), he would silence her: "You talk only nonsense...

...It is touching to hear the lonely and frustrated man trying to instill courage into himself: "To work and not worry about anybody and to become strong, that is the aim of the artist...

...A creative artist uses his motif for a point of departure...

...At an early age, Zola had all the success a writer could possibly want...

...The Glorious Monster Of Aix By ALFRED WERNER IT WAS just fifty years ago that the Paris correspondent of American Art News casually mentioned the recent death of a painter, and then added: "Cezanne was in his 67th year and was a prominent figure in the Zola circle...

...Thanks to the perversity of certain writers and the artifice of certain dealers he cut a brave figure as a great man and a chef d'ecole...

...the artists Samuel Halpert, Preston Dickinson, Bernard Karfiol, and Leon Kroll...

...or that he stayed away from his mother's funeral because he would not sacrifice a half day's work...

...Zola and Cezanne were close friends from boyhood but upon realizing that he had been caricatured in the figure of the impotent Lanier, the artist broke with the novelist, never to see him or write to him again...

...If he was not as articulate and learned as, say, Delacroix, he was, as his letters and conversations indicate, anything but the dolt the slick and celebrated Beaux-Arts graduates claimed him to be...

...Nevertheless, "Cezanne" is not a household word here, and the sensuality of Renoir, the exoticism of Gauguin, the paroxysm of Van Gogh, and the depravity of Toulouse-Lautrec have.a far greater appeal than the Provencal's spiritualized realism...

...But the clumsy Cezanne had few satisfactions and little to endear him to others...

...Inevitably, there will be some who will be unable to follow him into that inner sanctum of thought and feeling where man's communion with the universe is complete...

...One was Maurice Sterne, who had been told to go to the Salon d'Automne of 1904 to see the then very famous Puvis de Chavannes to learn something, and to look at the Cezannes for a good laugh...

...For Cezanne, as for every first-rate artist, form and content were one and the same thing...