326
PARTISAN REVIEW
regardless of all the masterpieces that had been produced with their aid.
Recording with a separate dab of paint almost every perceptible-–
or inferred-shift of direction by which the presented surface of an ob–
ject defines the shape of the volume it encloses, he began in his late
thirties to cover his canvases with a mosaic of brush-strokes whose net
effect was to call attention to the physical picture plane just as much as
the tighter-woven touches of the orthodox Impressionists did. The dis–
tortions of Cezanne's drawing, provoked by the extremely literal exact–
ness of his vision as well as by a growing compulsion, more or less un–
conscious, to adjust the representation in depth to the two-dimensional
surface pattern, contributed further to his inadvertent emphasis on the
flat plane. Whether he wanted it or not-and one can't be sure he did
-the resulting ambiguity was a triumph of art, if not of naturalism.
A new and powerful kind of pictorial tension was set up such as had not
been seen in the West since the mosaic murals of fourth and fifth century
Rome. The little overlapping rectangles of paint, laid on with no at–
tempt to fuse their dividing edges, drew the depicted forms toward
the surface while, at the same time, the modeling and contouring of
these forms, as achieved by the paint dabs, pulled them back again into
illusionist depth. The result was a never-ending vibration from front to
back and back to front. The old masters had generally sought to avoid
effects like
this
by blending their brush-strokes and covering the sur–
face with glazes to create a neutral, translucent texture through which
the illusion could glow with the least acknowledgment of the medium
-ars est artem celare.-This
is not to
say,
however, that they paid no
heed at all to surface pattern; they did. But given their different
aim,
they put a different, less obvious yet less ambiguous emphasis upon it.
Cezanne, in spite of himself, was trying to give the picture surface its due
as a physical entity. The old masters had conceived of it more abstractly.
He was one of the most intelligent painters ahout painting whose
observations have been recorded. (That he could be rather intelligent
about other things too has been obscured by his eccentricity and the
profound and self-protective irony with which he tried, in the latter part
of his life, to make himself a conformist in matters separate from art.)
But intelligence does not guarantee a precise awareness on the artist's
part of what he is doing or really wants to do. Cezanne overestimated
the power of a
con~eption
to control, or deposit itself in, works of art.
Consciously, it was the most exact reproduction of his sensations in the
presence of nature that he was after, ordered more or less according to
classical precepts of design. This, he seemed to feel, would assure to the
individual work a unity, and therefore a power, analogous to nature's
own. The power would be made permanent by human thought as felt
