Since Cézanne | Page 5

too often his delicious and sensitive works of
art are smeared over, to their detriment, with tendencious propaganda.
At his best, however, he is a very great impressionist--a
neo-impressionist, or expressionist if you like--but I should say an
impressionist much influenced and much to the good, as was Gauguin,
by acquaintance with Cézanne in his last and most instructive phase.
Indeed, it is clear that Gauguin and Van Gogh would not have come
near achieving what they did achieve--achieved, mind you, as genuine
painters--had they not been amongst the first to realize and make use of
that bewildering revelation which is the art of Cézanne.
Of that art I am not here to speak; I am concerned only with its
influence. Taking the thing at its roughest and simplest, one may say
that the influence of Cézanne during the last seventeen years has
manifested itself most obviously in two characteristics--Directness and
what is called Distortion. Cézanne was direct because he set himself a
task which admitted of no adscititious flourishes--the creation of form
which should be entirely self-supporting and intrinsically significant, la
possession de la forme as his descendants call it now. To this great end
all means were good: all that was not a means to this end was
superfluous. To achieve it he was prepared to play the oddest tricks
with natural forms--to distort. All great artists have distorted; Cézanne
was peculiar only in doing so more consciously and thoroughly than
most. What is important in his art is, of course, the beauty of his
conceptions and his power in pursuit: indifference to verisimilitude is
but the outward and visible sign of this inward and spiritual grace. For

some, however, though not for most of his followers his distortion had
an importance of its own.
To the young painters of 1904, or thereabouts, Cézanne came as the
liberator: he it was who had freed painting from a mass of conventions
which, useful once, had grown old and stiff and were now no more than
so many impediments to expression. To most of them his chief
importance--as an influence, of course--was that he had removed all
unnecessary barriers between what they felt and its realization in form.
It was his directness that was thrilling. But to an important minority the
distortions and simplifications--the reduction of natural forms to
spheres, cylinders, cones, etc.--which Cézanne had used as means were
held to be in themselves of consequence because capable of fruitful
development. From them it was found possible to deduce a theory of
art--a complete æsthetic even. Put on a fresh track by Cézanne's
practice, a group of gifted and thoughtful painters began to speculate on
the nature of form and its appeal to the æsthetic sense, and not to
speculate only, but to materialize their speculations. The greatest of
them, Picasso, invented Cubism. If I call these artists who forged
themselves a theory of form and used it as a means of expression
Doctrinaires it is because to me that name bears no disparaging
implication and seems to indicate well enough what I take to be their
one common characteristic: if I call those who, without giving outward
sign (they may well have had their private speculations and systems) of
an abstract theory, appeared to use distortion when, where, and as their
immediate sensibility dictated, Fauves, that is because the word has
passed into three languages, is admirably colourless--for all its
signifying a colour--and implies the existence of a group without
specifying a peculiarity. Into Doctrinaires--Theorists if you like the
word better--and Fauves the first generation of Cézanne's descendants
could, I feel sure, be divided; whether such a division would serve any
useful purpose is another matter. What I am sure of is that to have two
such labels, to be applied when occasion requires and cancelled without
much compunction, will excellently serve mine, which may, or may not,
be useful.
I would not insist too strongly on the division; certainly at first it was
not felt to be sharp. Plenty of Fauves did their whack of theorizing,
while some of the theorists are amongst the most sensitive and personal

of the age. What I do insist on--because it explains and excuses the
character of my book--is that in this age theory has played so prominent
a part, hardly one artist of importance quite escaping its influence, that
no critic who proposes to give some account of painting since Cézanne
can be expected to overlook it: some, to be sure, may be thought to
have stared indecently. The division between Fauves and Theorists, I
was saying, in the beginning was not sharp; nevertheless, because it
was real, already in the first generation of Cézanne's descendants the
seeds of two schools were sown. Already by 1910 two tendencies are
visibly distinct; but up