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PARTISAN REVIEW
the more revelatory because they are offhand-to refer to two of his
favorites, Rubens and Veronese, as "the decorative masters."
No wonder he complained to the day of his death of his inability
to "realize." The aesthetic effect toward which his means urged was not
that which his mind had conceived out of the desire for the organized
maximum of an illusion of solidity and depth. Every brush-stroke that
followed a fictive plane into fictive depth harked back by reason of its
abiding, unequivocal character as a mark made by a brush, to the physi–
cal fact of the medium; the shape and placing of that mark recalled
the shape and position of the flat rectangle that was the original can–
vas, now covered with pigments that came from tubes or pots. Cezanne
made no bones about the tangibility of the medium: there it was in all
its grossness of matter. He said, "One has to be a painter through the
qualities themselves of painting, one has to use coarse materials."
For a long while he over-packed his canvases as he groped his way,
afraid to betray his sensations by omission, afraid to be inexact because
incomplete. Many-though by no means all-of his reputed masterpieces
of the 1870's and 1880's I find too redundant, too cramped, lacking in
unity because lacking in modulation. There is feeling in the parts, in the
magnificent execution, but too little of feeling that precipitates itself as
an instantaneous whole. In the last ten or fifteen years of his life, how–
ever, pictures whose power is complete as well as striking and original
come from his easel more frequently. Practice, the means, fulfills itself.
The illusion of depth is constructed with the surface plane more vividly
in mind; the surface does not override the illusion but it does control it.
The facet-planes jump forward from the images they define, to become
more conspicuously elements of the abstract surface pattern; distinct
and more summarily applied, the dabs of paint stand out in Cubist
fashion, dilating and their edges trembling. The artist seems to relax
his demand for exactness of hue in passing from one form to the next,
and he no longer clots his dabs and facet-planes so close together.
More air and light circulate through the imagined space. As Cezanne
digs deeper behind his shapes with ultramarine, instead of fixing their
contours more firmly in place in the illusion, he makes them oscillate,
and the backward and forward movement within the picture spreads
and at the same time becomes more majestic in its rhythm because more
unified and all-enveloping. Monumentality is no longer secured at the
price of a dry airlessness. The paint itself becomes more succulent and
luminous as it is applied with a larger brush and more oil. The image
exists in an atmosphere made intenser because more exclusively pictorial,
the result of a heightened tension between the illusion and the inde–
pendent abstractness of the formal facts. This tension is the emblem
