330
PARTISAN REVIE W
for his taste. Yet the path-<>f which he said he himself was the primitive,
and by following which he thought
to
rescue Western tradition's
p ledge to the three-dimensional from both Impressionist haze and Gau–
guinesque decoration-led straight, in an interval of only five or six
years after his death, to a kind of painting as flat as any the West had
seen since the Middle Ages.
Picasso's and Braque's Cubism, and Leger's, completed what Cezan–
ne had begun, by their successes divesting his means of whatever had
remained problematical about them and finding them their most ap–
propriate ends. These means they took from Cezanne practically ready–
made, and they were able to adapt them to their own purposes after
only a relatively few trial exercises. Because he had exhausted so little
of his own insights, he could offer the Cubists all the resources of a
new discovery without requiring that much effort be spent in the
process itself of discovery. This was the Cubists' luck, and it helps ex–
plain why Picasso and Braquc were able, in the four or five years between
1909 and 1914, to turn out a well-nigh uninterrupted succession of
"realizations," classical in the sufficiency of their strength, the unerring
adjustment of means to ends, and the largeness, ease, and sureness of
their unity.
. . . Cezanne's sincerity and steadfastness are exemplary. Great
painting, he says in effect, ought to be produced the way Rubens, Velas.–
quez, Veronese, and Delacroix did, but my sensations and capacities
don't correspond to theirs, and I feel and paint only the way I must.
And so he went at it for forty years, day in and out, with his clean,
careful
metier,
dipping his brush in turpentine between each stroke to
wash it, and then carefully depositing its load of paint in its determined
place. As far as I know, no novels have been made of his life since his
death, but it was more heroic as an artist's than Gauguin's or Van
Gogh's, notwithstanding its material ease. Think of the effort of ab–
straction and of eyesight that was necessary in order to analyze every
part of every motif into its smallest calculable plane. And then there
were the crises of confidence that overtook him almost every other day
(he was also a forerunner in his paranoia) . Yet he did not go altogether
crazy; he stuck it out at his own sedentary pace, rewarded for his pre–
mature old age, his diabetes, his lack of recognition by the public, and
the crabbed emptiness of what seems to have been his existence away
from his art, by absorption in the activity itself of painting-even if,
in his own eyes, it was without final success. He considered himself a
weakling, "a Bohemian," frightened by the routine difficulties of life,
but he had a temperament, and he sought out the most redoubtable
challenges the art of his time could offer.
Clement (ireenberg
