CEZANNE AND MODERN ART
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through the design and composition. Loyalty to his sensations meant for
him transcribing the distance from his eye of every part of the motif,
down to the smallest facet-plane into which he could analyze it. It also
meant disregarding the texture, the smoothness and roughness, hardness
and softness, the tactile feel of objects, and seeing color exdusively as
a determinant of spatial position- just as the orthodox Impressionists
saw it exclusively as a d eterminant of light. But Cezanne's actual view
of nature----with its habit of bringing the background and distant ob–
jects closer than the ordinary eye saw them--could no more be fitted
into the spacious architectural schemes of the old masters than could
that of the Impressionists. The old masters did not sniff every inch of
space and fix it exactly; they elided and glided, stopping to be definite
only at those places to which they designedly pointed the spectator's
eye ; in between they painted for realistic effect, but not for the optical
or spatial substance of reality. That was left for the nineteenth century,
for painters most of whom Cezanne scorned. But he was even further
from the old masters in his means than they: his registration of what
he saw was too dense, not in detail but in feeling; his pictures were too
compact and the individual picture too even in its compactness, since
every sensation produced by the motif was equally important once its
"human interest" was excluded. As often happens when the rectangle
is tightly filled, the weight of the painting was pushed forward, with
its masses and hollows squeezed together and threatening to fuse into a
single form whose shape coincided with that of the canvas itself. Ce–
zanne's desire to give Impressionism a solid aspect was thus shifted in
its fulfillment from the structure of the pictorial illusion to the con–
figuration of the picture as an object-as a flat surface. He got the
solidity he was after, but it became in large part a two-dimensional
solidity.
It
could hardly have been otherwise in any case once he
abandoned modeling in darks and lights--even though his perception
of cool tones such as green and blue in receding planes preserved some–
thing of the essence of that kind of modeling. This too was a factor in
the play of tensions.
The real problem would seem to have been, not how to re-do Pous–
sin according to nature, but how to relate more carefully than he had
every part of the illusion in depth to a surface pattern endowed with
equally valid aesthetic rights. The firmer binding of the three-dimen–
sional illusion to a decorative surface effect, the integration of plastic–
ity and decoration-that was the true object of Cezanne's quest. And it
was here that his expressed theory contradicted his practice most. As
far as I know, not once in his recorded remarks does he show any con–
cern with the decorative factor except-and his words here are perhaps
