CEZANNE'S DOUBT
471
Nor did Cezanne neglect the physiognomy of objects and faces:
he wished only to seize it as it emerged from the color. To paint a
face "as an object," is not to rob it of its "thought." "I understand
that the painter interprets it," Cezanne said, "the painter is not an
imbecile." But this interpretation must not be a thought separate from
vision.
"If
I paint all the little blues and all the little browns, I make
him look as he looks.... The deuce with them if they suspect how,
by marrying a shaded green to a red, the mouth is made sad or the
cheeks to smile." The mind is seen and read in the looks, which
ailC!,
however, only color ensembles. Other minds are only offered to us
incarnate, bound to a face and gestures. It is of no use to oppose
here distinctions of soul and body, of thought and vision, since Cezanne
r(.!turns precisely to the primordial experience whence these notiOill>
are drawn and which gives them to us as inseparable. The painter who
thinks a..'"1d who seeks expression at once misses the mystery-renewed
each time that we look at someone--of appearance in nature. Balzac
describes in his
Wild Ass's Skin
a "tablecloth as white as a blanket of
newfallen snow, on which the table-things arise symmetrically, crowned
by yellow rolls." "Throughout my youth," said Cezanne, " I wanted
to paint that : that tablecloth of newfallen snow.... I know now that
one must
will
to paint only: 'The table-things arose symmetrically,'
and: 'yellow rolls.'
If
I paint 'crowned,' I am up a tree, understand?
And if I balance and shade my cloths and my rolls truly as in nature,
be sure that the crowns, the snow and all the trembling
will
be there."
We live surrounded by objects contructed by men, among uten–
sils, houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only
through the human actions of which they can be the points of appli–
cation. We are accustomed to think that all this exists by necessity and
is immovable. The painting of Cezanne suspends these habits and
reveals the non-human background of nature on which ·man estab–
lishes himself. This is why people arc strange, as though seen by a
being of another species. Nature itself is despoiled of the attributes
which prepare it for animistic communions: the countryside is with–
out wind, the water of the lake of Annecy motionless, the congealed
objects hesitant as at the beginning of the world. It is an unfamiliar
world, we are uneasy in it, it forbids all human effusion.
If
we go to
set~
other painters upon leaving the pictures of CezarJle, there is a
relaxation, as conversations, resumed after a period of mourning,
conceal this absolute newness and restore to the living their solidity.
But man alone is really capable of this vision that goes to the very
roots, on this side of established humanity. Everything shows that
ani-
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