CEZANNE AND MODERN ART
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supplied by the Impressionist notation of visual experience. The parts,
the atom units, were to be done as much as possible by the Impressionist
method, held to be truer to nature, but put together into a whole ac–
cording to traditional principles. The Impressionists, as consistent in
their logic as they knew how to be, had permitted nature to dictate the
unity of the picture along with its parts, refusing in theory to interfere
consciously with their optical impressions. For all that, their pictures
did not lack structure, as is so often claimed; in so far as anyone of
them was successful it achieved an appropriate and satisfying unity, as
must any successful work of art. (The overestimation by Roger Fry
and others of Cezanne's success in doing exactly what he said he wanted
to do is responsible for the cant about Impressionist "formlessness,"
which
is a contradiction in terms. How could Impressionism have
eventuated in great painting, as it did,
if
it had been "formless"?) What
Cezanne wanted was a different, more emphatic, and supposedly more
"permanent" kind of unity, more tangible in its articulation. Committed
though he was
to
the motif in nature in all its givenness, he still felt
that it could not of its own accord provide a sufficient basis of pictorial
unity; that had to be read into it by a combination of thought and feel–
ing-thought that was not a matter of extra-pictorial rules, but of con–
sistency, and feeling that was not a matter of sentiment, but of sensation.
The old masters assumed that the joints and members of a picture's
composition should
be
as apprehensible as those of architecture; the eye
was led through a rhythmically organized system of concavities and con–
vexities, with manifold gradations of value simulating depth and volume
marshaled around salient points of interest. To accommodate the weight–
less, flattened shapes produced by the divided tones of Impressionism to
such schemes was obviously unfeasible.
1
Cezanne had to fill in his forms
more solidly in order to be plausible in that direction. He set out to
convert the Impressionist method of registering purely optical variations
of color into a method by which to indicate variations of depth and
planear direction
through,
rather than for the sake of, variations of
color. Nature still came first, and indispensable to nature was the direct,
light-suffused color of Impressionism; gradations of dark and light and
the controlled studio illumination of the old masters were unnatural-
1.
Seurat too wanted a design in depth that would
be
tighter and more explic–
itly intelligible than that of the Impressioni;sts. But his
magnum opus,
"La
Grande latte,"
which is now in the Art Institute at Chicago, fails because the
stepped-back, rigidly demarcated planes upon which he set his figures serve only
to give them the character-as Sir Kenneth Clark points out--of pasteboard
silhouettes. Seurat's pointillist, hyper-Impressionist method of filling in color
could not convey a semblance of volume within any illusion of deep space.
