Since Cézanne by Clive Bell
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page 12 of 166 (07%)
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preacher. Nor was this degradation inexcusable: Van Gogh was a preacher,
and 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. |
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