Paul Cèzanne's works have been judged as not meeting the minimum standards of quality for inclusion in the ARC Museum. The letter below - and others on the same subject in the ARChives - make our reasons explicit. More of ARC's views on Cèzanne can be found in the ARC Philosophy.
-- ARC Staff
-- ARC Staff
Jeffery,
A fine anthology of D.S. MacColl's [1859-1948] writings exists in What is Art?, published by Penguin. You can find many of these articles (and more) scattered throughout Burlington Magazine, as well as some entertaining exchanges with Roger Fry and Cèzanne's swelling ranks of disciples in the letters columns.
I can post more on request, but I will limit myself now to his specific remarks on Cèzanne's handling of space. The excerpts come from an article entitled "Cèzanne as Deity" (1928), and is a response to Fry's recently published hagiography:
"To forestall a possible misunderstanding let us agree that an artist, for his own purposes, might systematically pervert or distort space. Such distortion might have a 'logic'; but I do not understand that any such claim is made for Cèzanne. We have to do with ordinary three-dimensional space as it reveals itself in perspective. Artists properly take certain liberties with strict perspective, but such humouring would cease to be effective if there were so violent a contradiction that we should not know where we were or where the objects were. Now in the still-lifes the elementary 'planes' on which the constitution of space depends are the floor, the wall or walls, and the table-top. The inclination of these planes as defined by the direction of their limiting lines determines whether the table is standing on the floor, whether even it is in the same space as the room. That being settled, we may go on to inquire whether the lesser objects are standing on the table, or standing at all.
"Turn to Fig. 17 [the reference is to Fry's text]. A glance shows that the table is not standing on the floor. The effect is like what happens in a ship's cabin when, the table remaining level, the floor swings up like a wall beyond it. Nor is that all: the lines of the table-top prove that it is not in the same room with the mantel-piece, screen and chair which define the room's shape. It floats in a space of its own and is rudely dislocated on the near side. Take now the objects upon it. The chief of these is a basket, heavy with fruit. This is so perched that its centre of gravity is well over the edge of the table; indeed it must already be falling backward, compared with the ginger-jar, and that, again, must be toppling forward, unless the coffee-pot and sugar-basin are also falling back, as they are certainly falling sideways. So far then from each object being infallibly in its place, ordained from the beginning of all things, and majestically and serenely reposing there, everything is falling about (is this the 'interplay of their movements' whose significance we are to grasp?) and instead of a vigorous logic in the sequence of planes which evolve in an unbroken succession enforcing irresistibly their exact recession, we are faced with complete incoherence, with several spaces in conflict.
"That example of a still-life is typical; let us turn to the landscapes. It is more difficult here to check the hypnotising, the ritual effect of the word 'planes,' since in pure landscape the only plane of large extent is a lake or sea-surface (which Cèzanne never succeeded in getting flat). But landscapes with an intermixture of architecture offer planes which can be definitely argued about. The Quais (Fig. 9) Mr. Fry accuses of 'romanticism.' I do not know why, for it is a prosaic occurrence of awkward forms. But he admits a 'realistic' treatment. 'All is based on the actual scene. These barrels and warehouses, though summarily expressed, are evidently studies from nature and executed with a certain literalness.' But not with logic; the barrels must be the romantic element, for they are employed to contradict instead of developing and confirming the perspective of the shed and containing wall. A riper example is the Gardanne (Fig. 23). Mr. Fry says: 'It has to a supreme degree that impressive pictorial architecture, that building up of sequences of planes, which has a direct "musical" effect upon the feelings.' Cèzanne knew better than his admirer. He must have felt that all was not well; once more he had been betrayed into an ungainly break of curve into straight (compare Fig. 38) and other defects of arrangement. At least twice he corrected his major misfortunes by re-cutting the subject as an upright. But we have to do with that 'sequence of planes.' The foreground buildings are incoherent enough; the mid-distant vague, but the church and tower and houses on the hill challenge and defeat any attempt to explain their relative positions. The church-front, which is intended to be in a plane parallel to the side of the tower, has faced round in one direction; the house below to the left seems to face round both in that and in the opposite direction: space, in fact, has been doubly twisted.
"Cèzanne, then, when painting from objects and scenes before him, forgot their shapes and spatial interconnections almost as freely as when he drew figures 'out of his head.' His intense application to nature, whatever it resulted in, did not produce a coherent space with objects precisely fitted into its recession. And Mr. Fry, having made that claim for him, suddenly throws it overboard and starts a radically different conception. In a paragraph about a portrait of Madame Cèzanne, in which he still speaks of Cèzanne's desire to be absolutely loyal to visual sensations as an obsession, the result is said 'to be as far from the scene it describes as music.' Mr. Fry cannot of course mean anything so absurd. The reproduction of nature is near enough in its clumsy way for Mr. Fry to have been struck by a deviation in the dado, a 'refraction,' he calls it. It is merely a break in attention on the painter's part, like the grosser dislocation in a panel of the door which takes place behind the other portrait of a servant. Such a deviation, or the fact that Madame Cèzanne is made cock-eyed, takes us a very short way across the gulf between painting and music. 'This picture,' says Mr. Fry, 'belongs to a world of spiritual values incommensurate but parallel with the actual world.' Parallels cannot be incommensurable, and this kind of transcendental slang obscures our problem, namely, what it was that Cèzanne looked for so obstinately and recklessly in 'the actual world' and sometimes transferred happily to the other actual world of his painting." (67-70)
regards,
Iian
