466
PARTISAN REVIEW
from the same weakness. His extreme attention to nature, to color,
the inhuman character of his painting (he said that a face should be
painted as an object), were only compensation; that is, his devotion
to the visible world was a flight from the human world, a trans–
ference of his humanity. These conjectures do not give the positive
meaning of his work; we cannot conclude without purS'uing the
matter further that his painting is a phenomenon of decadence, and,
as Nietzsche says, of an "impoverished" life, or, further, that it has
no lesson for the cultivated man. It is probably because they gave too
great a place to psychology, to their personal knowledge of Cezanne,
that Zola and Emile Bernard believed him a failure. The. possibility
remains that, by reason of his nervous weaknesses, Cezanne conceived
a form of
art
valid for all. Left to himself, he was able to look at
nature as, alone, a man can. ' The meaning of his work cannot be
determined from his life.
Nor could he be better understood through the history of art;
that is, by referring to the influences (of the Italians and of Tinto–
retto, of Delacroix, of Courbet and the Impressionists) on his methods,
or even to his own testimony about his painting.
His early works, around the year
1870,
were painted dreams,
an Abduction, a Murder. They arise from feelings, and aim primarily
to arouse feelings. They are almost always painted with bold strokes
and give the moral physiognomy of movements rather than their
visible aspect. It is to the Impressionists, and in particular to Pissarro,
that Cezanne owes his subsequent conception of painting, not as _the
precise study of appearanoes, less a work of the studio than one of
nature, and his abandonn1ent of baroque methods, which seek
pri–
marily
to render movement, for the small juxtaposed strokes and
patient cross-hatchings.
But he soon broke away from the Impressionists. Impressionism
was attempting to reproduce in painting the effect objects have as
they strike the eye or attack the senses. It repr,esents them in the atmo–
sphere where we perceive them instantaneously, with absolute shapes,
bound to each other by light and air. To render this enveloping lumi–
nosity, it is necessary to exclude the earth colors, and ochres, blacks,
and to use only the seven colors of the prism. To represent the color
of objects it is not enough to record on the canvas their local hue,
that is the color which they have when they are isolated from sur–
rounding objects, it is necessary to take into account the contrasting
phenomena which modify local hues in nature. Moreover, every
