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PARTISAN REVIEW
His painting would be a paradox: to seek reality again without quit–
ting sensation, without taking any other guide than nature as imme–
diately perceived, without outlining the contours, without enclosing
the color within the design, without "composing" either perspective
or "picture." It is here that Bernard finds what he calls the suicide
of Cezanne: he saw reality and forbade himself the means to attain it.
:Here might be found the cause of his difficulties and of the deforma–
tions found especially 'in his work between 1870 and 1900. The plates
and fruit dishes placed in profile on a table ought
to
be ellipses, but
the two ends of the ellipse are clumsy and out of proportion. The
work table in the portrait of Gustave sprawls over the lower part of
the picture against the laws of perspective. By abandoning design,
Cezanne would have delivered himself to the chaos of sensations.
But the sensations would make the objects run wild and would con–
stantly suggtest illusions, as they sometimes do-for example, the illu–
sion of a movement of objects when we move our heads-if judgment
did not unceasingly set appearances right. Cezanne would have, says
Bernard, engulfed "painting in ignorance and his mind in darkness."
In reality,
we
can so judge his painting only by dropping half
of what he said and closing our eyes to what he actually painted.·
In his conversations with Emile Bernard, it is evident that
Cezanne always seeks to avoid the ready-made alternatives proposed
to him: of the senses or the intelligence, of painting which sees and
painting which thinks, of nature and composition, of primitivism and
tradition. "An illusion must be created," he says, but "I understand
by illusion a logical vision, that is to say, a vision without anything of
the absurd." "Is it a question of our nature?" asks Bernard. Cezanne
answers: "It is a question of the two."-"Are not nature and art
different?"-"! would like to unite them. Art is a personal apper–
ception. I place that apperception within the sensation and I demand
of the intelligence that it organize it into a work." But even these for–
mulas are far too much related to current notions of "sensibility" or
"sensation," and of "intelligence"; that is why Cezanne was unable
to convince and preferred to paint.
Instead of applying to his work dichotomies which, moreover,
belong more to the traditions of a school rather than to the founders–
whether they
be
philosophers or painters-of these traditions, it would
be better to be receptive to the peculiar meaning of
his
painting, which
puts these dichotomies in question. Cezanne did not believe that he
had to choose between sensation and thought, as between chaos and
