ART CHRONICLE
CEZANNE AND THE UNITY OF MODERN ART
The number and discord of the tendencies that constitute
modern art are taken for a symptom of decadence. The species as it
declines proliferates in gratuitous mutations. There is a bit of truth
lin
this impression but it derives mainly from the fact that since Chirico
academicism has been able to regain credit in new, avant-garde versions
of itself like Surrealism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Neo-Romanticism, Magic
Realism-even Social Realism. When these manifestations are put aside
--consigned to the outer darkness of academicism in general, where
they really belong-the scene becomes more orderly. Yet not completely
so: four or five different tendencies still seem to move in conflict within
genuinely contemporary painting and sculpture. The reason for their
discord, far from having to do with decadence, lies, however, in the very
vitality of modern art.
The apostles of the modern movement, from Manet on, did not,
contrary to advanced opinion-which often gallops through the history
of art faster than art itself-always finish ,vhat they began. The Im–
pressionists and Post-Impressionists, Rodin, even Turner, Redon, Monti–
celli, even Courbet and Daumier, left behind many loose threads the
tying up of which has provided later artists with tasks whose perform–
ance asks more than unadventurous repetition. Bonnard and Vuillard
did not merely imitate or execute variations on Impressionism: by ex–
tending, they completed it. There was enough left over from what
Rodin had planted to ripen anew in Maillol, Lehmbruck, Despiau,
Kolbe, Lachaise, and others. Matisse did more than add to Gauguin's
beginnings: he fulfilled all in the older master that had been pre-'
mature, clarifying and enlarging his new vision, and rendering it less
self-conscious. In their several and smaller ways Derain, Vlaminck, and
Segonzac filled in what Cezanne, Manet, and Courbet had outlined,
while the Expressionists have not yet finished defining those things that
Van Gogh adumbrated; nor have they exhausted all the hints to be
found in Cezanne's early manner.
That so much of the advanced painting of the first third of this
century is a knitting up of threads spun in the latter half of the nine-
