Since Cezanne written by Clive Bell
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Clive Bell >> Since Cezanne
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12 [Illustration: (_Photo: E. Druet_) CEZANNE]
SINCE CEZANNE
BY
CLIVE BELL
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Most of these Essays appeared in THE NEW REPUBLIC and THE ATHENAEUM:
some, however, are reprinted from THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, THE NEW
STATESMAN, and ART AND DECORATION. I take this opportunity of thanking
the editors of all.
C.B.
CONTENTS
I. Since Cezanne
II. The Artistic Problem
III. The Douanier Rousseau
IV. Cezanne
V. Renoir
VI. Tradition and Movements
VII. Matisse and Picasso
VIII. The Place of Art in Art Criticism
IX. Bonnard
X. Duncan Grant
XI. Negro Sculpture
XII. Order and Authority (1 and 2)
XIII. Marquet
XIV. Standards
XV. Criticism:
1. First thoughts
2. Second thoughts
3. Last thoughts
XVI. Othon Friesz
XVII. Wilcoxism
XVIII. Art and Politics
XIX. The Authority of M. Derain
XX. "Plus de Jazz"
ILLUSTRATIONS
_CEZANNE_
_SEURAT_
_MATISSE_
_PICASSO_
_BONNARD_
_DUNCAN GRANT_
_OTHON FRIESZ_
_DERAIN_
[Illustration: (_Photo: E. Druet_) SEURAT]
SINCE CEZANNE
With anyone who concludes that this preliminary essay is merely to
justify the rather appetizing title of my book I shall be at no pains to
quarrel. If privately I think it does more, publicly I shall not avow
it. Historically and critically, I admit, the thing is as slight as a
sketch contained in five-and-thirty pages must be, and certainly it adds
nothing to what I have said, in the essays to which it stands preface,
on aesthetic theory. The function it is meant to perform--no very
considerable one perhaps--is to justify not so much the title as the
shape of my book, giving, in the process, a rough sketch of the period
with certain aspects of which I am to deal. That the shape needs
justification is attributable to the fact that though all, or nearly
all, the component articles were written with a view to making one
volume, I was conscious, while I wrote them, of dealing with two
subjects. Sometimes I was discussing current ideas, and questions
arising out of a theory of art; at others I was trying to give some
account of the leading painters of the contemporary movement. Sometimes
I was writing of Theory, sometimes of Practice. By means of this preface
I hope to show why, at the moment, these two, far from being distinct,
are inseparable.
To understand thoroughly the contemporary movement--that movement in
every turn and twist of which the influence of Cezanne is traceable--the
movement which may be said to have come into existence contemporaneously
almost with the century, and still holds the field--it is necessary to
know something of the aesthetic theories which agitated it. One of the
many unpremeditated effects of Cezanne's life and work was to set
artists thinking, and even arguing. His practice challenged so sharply
all current notions of what painting should be that a new generation,
taking him for master, found itself often, much to its dismay, obliged
to ask and answer such questions as "What am I doing?" "Why am I doing
it?" Now such questions lead inevitably to an immense query--"What is
Art?" The painters began talking, and from words sprang deeds. Thus it
comes about that in the sixteen or seventeen years which have elapsed
since the influence of Cezanne became paramount theory has played a part
which no critic or historian can overlook. It is because to-day that
part appears to be dwindling, because the influence of theory is growing
less, that the moment is perhaps not inopportune for a little book such
as this is meant to be. It comes, if I am right, just when the movement
is passing out of its first into the second phase.
During this first phase theory has been much to the fore. But it has
been theory, you must remember, working on a generation of direct and
intensely personal artists. In so curious an alliance you will expect
to find as much stress as harmony; also, you must remember, its
headquarters were at Paris where flourishes the strongest and most vital
tradition of painting extant. In this great tradition some of the more
personal artists, struggling against the intolerable exactions of
doctrine, have found powerful support; indeed, only with its aid have
they succeeded at last in securing their positions as masters who,
though not disdaining to pay homage for what they hold from the new
theories, are as independent as feudal princes. But the more I consider
the period the more this strange and restless alliance of doctrine
with temperament appears to be of its essence; wherefore, I shall not
hesitate to make of it a light wherewith to take a hasty look about me.
Here are two labels ready to hand--"temperamental" and "doctrinaire."
I am under no illusion as to the inadequacy and fallibility of both;
neither shall I imagine that, once applied, they are bound to stick.
On the contrary, you will see, in a later chapter, how, having dubbed
Matisse "temperamental" and Picasso "theorist," I come, on examination,
to find in the art of Matisse so much science and in that of Picasso
such extraordinary sensibility that in the end I am much inclined to
pull off the labels and change them about. But though, for purposes
of criticism coarse and sometimes treacherous, this pair of
opposites--which are really quite compatible--may prove two useful
hacks. As such I accept them; and by them borne along I now propose to
make a short tour of inspection, one object of which will be to indicate
broadly the lie of the land, another to call attention to a number of
interesting artists whose names happen not to have come my way in any
other part of this book.
I said, and I suppose no one will deny it, that Paris was the centre
of the movement: from Paris, therefore, I set out. There the movement
originated, there it thrives and develops, and there it can best be seen
and understood. Ever since the end of the seventeenth century France has
taken the lead in the visual arts, and ever since the early part of
the nineteenth Paris has been the artistic capital of Europe. Thither
painters of all foreign nations have looked; there many have worked, and
many more have made a point of showing their works. Anyone, therefore,
who makes a habit of visiting Paris, seeing the big exhibitions, and
frequenting dealers and studios, can get a pretty complete idea of what
is going on in Europe. There he will find Picasso--the animator [A] of
the movement--and some of the best of his compatriots, Juan Gris and
Marie Blanchard for instance, to say nothing of such fashionable figures
as MM. Zuloaga _et_ Sert. There he will find better Dutchmen than Van
Dongen, and an active colony of Scandinavians the most interesting of
whom is probably Per Krohg. The career of Krohg, by the way, is worth
considering for a moment and watching for the future. Finely gifted
in many ways, he started work under three crippling disabilities--a
literary imagination, natural facility, and inherited science. The
results were at first precisely what might have been expected. Now,
however, he is getting the upper hand of his unlucky equipment; and his
genuine talent and personal taste, beginning to assert themselves, have
made it impossible for criticism any longer to treat him merely as
an amiable member of a respectable group. What is true of Spain and
Scandinavia is even truer of Poland and what remains of Russia.
Goncharova and Larionoff--the former a typically temperamental artist,
the latter an extravagantly doctrinaire one--Soudeikine, Grigorieff,
Zadkine live permanently in Paris; while Kisling, whom I take to be the
best of the Poles, has become so completely identified with the country
in which he lives, and for which he fought, that he is often taken by
English critics for a Frenchman. Survage (with his eccentric but sure
sense of colour), Soutine (with his delicious paint), and Marcoussis (a
cubist of great merit) each, in his own way, working in Paris, adds to
the artistic reputation of his native country. In the rue La Boetie you
can see the work of painters and sculptors from every country in Europe
almost, and from a good many in Africa. The Italian Futurists have
often made exhibitions there. While the work of Severini--their
most creditable representative--is always to be found _chez_ Leonce
Rosenberg, hard by in the rue de la Baume.
[Footnote A: For this word, which I think very happily suggests
Picasso's role in contemporary painting, I am indebted to my friend M.
Andre Salmon.]
However, most of the Futurists have retired to their own country, where
we will leave them. On the other hand, the most gifted Italian painter
who has appeared this century, Modigliani, was bred on the Boulevard
Montparnasse. In the movement he occupies an intermediate position,
being neither of the pioneers nor yet of the post-war generation. He was
not much heard of before the war, [B] and he died less than a year after
peace was signed. In my mind, therefore, his name is associated with
the war--then, at any rate, was the hour of his glory; he dominated the
cosmopolitan groups of his quarter at a time when most of the French
painters, masters and disciples, were in the trenches. Modigliani owed
something to Cezanne and a great deal to Picasso: he was no doctrinaire:
towards the end he became the slave of a formula of his own
devising--but that is another matter. Modigliani had an intense
but narrow sensibility, his music is all on one string: he had a
characteristically Italian gift for drawing beautifully with ease: and I
think he had not much else. I feel sure that those who would place him
amongst the masters of the movement--Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Bonnard,
and Friesz--mistake; for, with all his charm and originality, he was too
thoughtless and superficial to achieve greatly. He invented something
which he went on repeating; and he could always fascinate simply by
his way of handling a brush or a pencil. His pictures, delightful and
surprising at first sight, are apt to grow stale and, in the end, some
of them, unbearably thin. A minor artist, surely.
[Footnote B: He was at work, however, by 1906--perhaps earlier.]
Though Paris is unquestionably the centre of the movement, no one who
sees only what comes thither and to London--and that is all I see--can
have much idea of what is going on in Germany and America. Germany has
not yet recommenced sending her art in quantities that make judgement
possible, while it is pretty clear that the American art which reaches
Europe is by no means the best that America can do. From both come
magazines with photographs which excite our curiosity, but on such
evidence it would be mere impertinence to form an opinion. Of
contemporary art in Germany and America I shall say nothing. And what
shall I say of the home-grown article? Having taken Paris for my point
of view, I am excused from saying much. Not much of English art is seen
from Paris. We have but one living painter whose work is at all well
known to the serious amateurs of that city, and he is Sickert. [C] The
name, however, of Augustus John is often pronounced, ill--for they
_will_ call him Augustin--and that of Steer is occasionally murmured.
Through the _salon d'automne_ Roger Fry is becoming known; and there is
a good deal of curiosity about the work of Duncan Grant, and some about
that of Mark Gertler and Vanessa Bell. Now, of these, Sickert and Steer
are essentially, and in no bad sense, provincial masters. They are
belated impressionists of considerable merit working in a thoroughly
fresh and personal way on the problems of a bygone age. In the remoter
parts of Europe as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century
were to be found genuine and interesting artists working in the Gothic
tradition: the existence of Sickert and Steer made us realize how far
from the centre is London still. On the Continent such conservatism
would almost certainly be the outcome of stupidity or prejudice; but
both Sickert and Steer have still something of their own to say about
the world seen through an impressionist temperament. The prodigious
reputation enjoyed by Augustus John is another sign of our isolation.
His splendid talent when, as a young man, he took it near enough the
central warmth to make it expand (besides the influence of Puvis,
remember, it underwent that of Picasso) began to bear flowers of
delicious promise. Had he kept it there John might never have tasted the
sweets of insular renown: he would have had his place in the history of
painting, however. The French know enough of Vorticism to know that it
is a provincial and utterly insignificant contrivance which has borrowed
what it could from Cubism and Futurism and added nothing to either. They
like to fancy that the English tradition is that of Gainsborough and
Constable, quite failing to realize what havoc has been made of
this admirable plastic tradition by that puerile gospel of literary
pretentiousness called Pre-Raphaelism. Towards these mournful quags and
quicksands, with their dead-sea flora of anecdote and allegory, the best
part of the little talent we produce seems irresistibly to be drawn: by
these at last it is sucked down. That, at any rate, is the way that most
of those English artists who ten or a dozen years ago gave such good
promise have gone. Let us hope better of the new generation--recent
exhibitions afford some excuse--a generation which, if reactionarily
inclined, can always take Steer for a model, or, if disposed to keep
abreast of the times and share in the heritage of Cezanne as well as
that of Constable, can draw courage from the fact that there is, after
all, one English painter--Duncan Grant--who 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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
Cezanne 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.
Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne.
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 Cezanne: 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 Andre 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 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 Cezanne 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
Cezanne.
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 Cezanne during the last seventeen years has
manifested itself most obviously in two characteristics--Directness and
what is called Distortion. Cezanne 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;
Cezanne 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, Cezanne 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 Cezanne 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 aesthetic even. Put on a fresh track by Cezanne's
practice, a group of gifted and thoughtful painters began to speculate
on the nature of form and its appeal to the aesthetic 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 Cezanne'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 Cezanne 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 Cezanne's
descendants the seeds of two schools were sown. Already by 1910 two
tendencies are visibly distinct; but up to 1914, though there is
divergence, there is, I think, no antipathy between them--of antipathies
between individuals I say nothing. Solidarity was imposed on the young
generation by the virulent and not over scrupulous hostility of the old;
it was _l'union sacree_ in face of the enemy. And just as political
allies are apt to become fully alive to the divergence of their aims and
ambitions only after they have secured their position by victory, so
it was not until the new movement had been recognized by all educated
people as representative and dominant that the Fauves felt inclined to
give vent to their inevitable dislike of Doctrinaires.
Taken as a whole, the first fourteen years of the century, which my
malicious friend Jean Cocteau sometimes calls _l'epoque heroique_,
possessed most of the virtues and vices that such an epoch should
possess. It was rich in fine artists; and these artists were finely
prolific. It was experimental, and passionate in its experiments. It was
admirably disinterested. Partly from the pressure of opposition, partly
because the family characteristics of the Cezannides are conspicuous,
it acquired a rather deceptive air of homogeneity. It was inclined to
accept recruits without scrutinizing over closely their credentials,
though it is to be remembered that it kept its critical faculty
sufficiently sharp to reject the Futurists while welcoming the Cubists.
I cannot deny, however, that in that moment of enthusiasm and loyalty
we were rather disposed to find extraordinary merits in commonplace
painters. We knew well enough that a feeble and incompetent disciple of
Cezanne was just as worthless as a feeble and incompetent disciple of
anyone else--but, then, was our particular postulant so feeble after
all? Also, we were fond of arguing that the liberating influence of
Cezanne had made it possible for a mediocre artist to express a little
store of recondite virtue which under another dispensation must have
lain hid for ever. I doubt we exaggerated. We were much too kind, I
fancy, to a number of perfectly commonplace young people, and said a
number of foolish things about them. What was worse, we were unjust
to the past. That was inevitable. The intemperate ferocity of the
opposition drove us into Protestantism, and Protestantism is unjust
always. It made us narrow, unwilling to give credit to outsiders of
merit, and grossly indulgent to insiders of little or none. Certainly we
appreciated the Orientals, the Primitives, and savage art as they
had never been appreciated before; but we underrated the art of the
Renaissance and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Also,
because we set great store by our theories and sought their implications
everywhere, we claimed kinship with a literary movement with which,
in fact, we had nothing in common. Charles-Louis Philippe and the
Unanimistes should never have been compared with the descendants
of Cezanne. Happily, when it came to dragging in Tolstoyism, and
Dostoievskyism even, and making of the movement something moral and
political almost, the connection was seen to be ridiculous and was duly
cut.
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