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PARTISAN REVIEW
objects into planes where tone, weight, and color should absorb
each other indeterminately, with contours added as a sort of visual
reinforcement. Seurat combined the classical and impressionist
approaches; atmospheric effects were stippled in with dots of
color that tend to fuse when seen from a distance. Through this
laborious method he endowed his forms with the sculptural qual·
ities of figure
l
coupled with the illusion of being viewed through
atmosphere {the cardinal characteristic of figure 2). Van Gogh
handled impressionism impetuouslY., and through violent color–
contrasts and swirling lines raised an emotional excitement that for
him replaced sculptural solidity and led on to the fauves and
expressionists. The cubists, reacting from this new impetus they
originally had followed, returned to the austerity of Cezanne's
surfaces of broken yet ordered planes. They broke the object more
and more for added movement until the design began to flatten and
spread the object in shallow sections over the picture surface. The
way is now open for our last diagram, the abstract, which retains
no perceptible trace of the wine-glass at all; only a few rhythms
remain, fused with new forms dictated by the artist's sensibility.
The painter has become free to broaden his design and to juxta·
pose the shapes according to the dictates of his esthetic require–
ments.
Perhaps the most noticeable change between the first and last
figures charted above is the progression from an illustrative or
"external" emphasis to one which is esthetic or "internal." So
essential is an understanding of these opposing properties that I
feel a brief analysis to be in order; and I shall include examples
which, conceived in the interest of clarity, may sometimes appear
unduly elementary.
The subject may be well summarized by a comparison of two
famous examples of nineteenth century still-life painting, one
entitled
Symbols of Justice
by Daumier and the other
Still-Life
with Or((Jlges-
by Cezanne. The choice of titles is significant and
the choice of objects even more so. Daumier selected a lawyer's
hat, a quill-pen and inkwell, an open book. Cezanne depicted a
bowl and some oranges;
h~
often used oranges because, in his
own phrase, an orange was "quieter" than a face. (Kandinsky
was to remark a generation later that he was using circles because
a circle was "quieter" than an orange.) Daumier's objects are
