·Cezanne's Doubt-
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
H
E NEEDED
one hundred sessions of work for one still life, one
hundred and fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was
for him only a series of attempts towards the completed work. He
wrote in September, 1906, he was then sixty-seven and within a
month of his death: I "am in such a state of mental upheaval, under
a tension so great, that I am afraid at times of losing what feeble hold
I have on my reason. Now it seems to me that I am working better
and that I
am
beginning to find myself in my studies. Will I arrive
at the remote goal I have so long pursued? I study constantly from
nature and it seems to me that I am making slow progress." Painting
was his world and his way of existence. He worked alone, without
pupils, without the admiration of
his
family or the encouragement
of juries. He painted on the afternoon his mother died. In 1870 he
was painting at Estaque while the police sought him for dodging
conscription. And yet he came to have doubts about
this
vocation.
As
he grew old he wondered if the originality of his painting did
not come from a visual defect, if his entire life had not been based
on a physical accident. The uRcertainties and abuse of hiS contem–
poraries echoed this strain and doubt. "The painting of a drunken
scavenger," said a critic in 1905. Today C. Mauclair brings forth
once more as an argument against him Cezanne's own confessions of
lack of ability. Meanwhile his pic;tures are known all over the world.
Why so much uncertainty, so much labor, so many restraints, then
suddenly the greatest success?
Zola, a friend of Cezanne from childhood, was the first to find
genius in him, and the first to speak of him as "genius miscarried."
Anyone looking at the life of Cezanne, as did Zola, with more atten–
tion to the character of the man than to the meaning of his painting,
could very well treat it as an unhealthy manifestation.
For from the time of his entrance in the College Bourbon at Aix
in 1852 he disquieted his friends by his periods of anger and depres–
sion. Seven years later, having decided to become a painter, he
