Since Cézanne | Page 4

takes
honourable rank beside the best of his contemporaries.
[Footnote C: The Irish painter O'Conor, and the Canadian Morrice, are
both known and respected in Paris; but because they have lived their
lives there and known none but French influences they are rarely
thought of as British. In a less degree the same might be said of that
admirable painter George Barne.]
It is fifteen years since Cézanne died, and only now is it becoming
possible to criticize him. That shows how overwhelming his influence
was. The fact that at last his admirers and disciples, no longer under
any spell or distorting sense of loyalty, recognize that there are in
painting plenty of things worth doing which he never did is all to the
good. It is now possible to criticize him seriously; and when all his
insufficiencies have been fairly shown he remains one of the very
greatest painters that ever lived. The serious criticism of Cézanne is a
landmark in the history of the movement, and still something of a
novelty; for, naturally, I reckon the vulgar vituperation with which his
work was greeted, and the faint praise with which it was subsequently
damned, as no criticism at all. The hacks and pedagogues and
middle-class metaphysicians who abused him, and only when it
dawned on them that they were making themselves silly, in the eyes of
their own flock even, took to patronizing, are forgot. They babble in the

Burlington Fine Arts Club--where nobody marks them--and have their
reward in professorships and the direction of public galleries. The
criticism that matters, of which we are beginning to hear something,
comes mostly from painters, his ardent admirers, who realize that
Cézanne attempted things which he failed to achieve and deliberately
shunned others worth achieving. Also, they realize that there is always
a danger of one good custom corrupting the world.
Cézanne is the full-stop between impressionism and the contemporary
movement. Of course there is really no such thing as a full-stop in art
any more than there is in nature. Movement grows out of movement,
and every artist is attached to the past by a thousand binders springing
from a thousand places in the great stem of tradition. But it is true that
there is hardly one modern artist of importance to whom Cézanne is not
father or grandfather, and that no other influence is comparable with his.
To be sure there is Seurat, of whom we shall hear more in the next ten
years. Although he died as long ago as 1891 his importance has not yet
been fully realized, his discoveries have not been fully exploited, not
yet has his extraordinary genius received adequate recognition. Seurat
may be the Giorgione of the movement. Working in isolation and dying
young, he is known to us only by a few pictures which reveal
unmistakeable and mysterious genius; but I should not be surprised if
from the next generation he were to receive honours equal almost to
those paid Cézanne.
The brave douanier was hardly master enough to have great and
enduring influence; nevertheless, the sincerity of his vision and
directness of his method reinforced and even added to one part of the
lesson taught by Cézanne: also, it was he who--by his pictures, not by
doctrine of course--sent the pick of the young generation to look at the
primitives. Such as it was, his influence was a genuinely plastic one,
which is more, I think, than can be said for that of Gauguin or of Van
Gogh. The former seemed wildly exciting for a moment, partly because
he flattened out his forms, designed in two dimensions, and painted
without chiaroscuro in pure colours, but even more because he had very
much the air of a rebel. "Il nous faut les barbares," said André Gide; "il
nous faut les barbares," said we all. Well, here was someone who had
gone to live with them, and sent home thrilling, and often very
beautiful, pictures which could, if one chose, be taken as challenges to

European civilization. To a considerable extent the influence of
Gauguin was literary, and therefore in the long run negligible. It is a
mistake on that account to suppose--as many seem inclined to do--that
Gauguin was not a fine painter.
Van Gogh was a fine painter, too; but his influence, like that of
Gauguin, has proved nugatory--a fact which detracts nothing from the
merit of his work. He was fitted by his admirers into current social and
political tendencies, and coupled with Charles-Louis Philippe as an
apostle of sentimental anarchy. Sentimental portraits of washerwomen
and artisans were compared with Marie Donadieu and Bubu de
Montparnasse; and by indiscreet enthusiasm the artist was degraded to
the level of a preacher. Nor was this degradation inexcusable: Van
Gogh was a preacher, and