"in the movement." That was because by nature he was what thoughtful
and highly trained artists were making themselves by an effort: he
was direct. To us it seemed, in those days, that a mass of scientific
irrelevancies and intellectual complications had come between the artist
and his vision, and, again, between the vision and its expression. In a
desperately practical and well-organized age, which recognized objects
by their labels and never dreamed of going beneath these to discover the
things themselves, artists, we thought, were in danger of losing the
very stuff of which visual art is made--the direct, emotional reaction
to the visible universe. People had grown so familiar with the idea of a
cup, with that purely intellectual label "cup," that they never
looked at a particular cup and felt its emotional significance. Also,
professional painters had provided themselves with a marvellous
scientific apparatus for describing "the idea of a cup" in line and
colour: they had at their fingers' ends a plastic notation that
corresponded with the labels by which things are intellectually
recognized. They neither felt things nor expressed their feelings. For
even when an artist was capable of a direct, personal reaction it was
almost impossible for him not to lose it in the cogs and chains of that
elaborate machinery of scientific representation to which he had been
apprenticed. A determination to free artists from utilitarian vision and
the disastrous science of representation was the theoretic basis of that
movement which is associated with the name of Cézanne.

From the latter, at any rate, the _douanier_ needed no freeing. Such
science as he acquired in the course of his life was a means to
expressing himself and not to picture-making. As for his vision, that
was as direct and first-hand as the vision of a Primitive or a child;
and to a Primitive his admirers were in the habit of likening him, to a
child his detractors. His admirers were right: his art is not childish.