KAREN WILKIN
141
lifelong quest for intensity, for painted images that provoked the
same powerful sensations as the artist's sensations in the face of ac–
tuality, for what a British sculptor friend calls "making a work of art
REAL." Seeing so many of the early pictures suggested unexpected
connections, as well as unexpected interpretations. I kept thinking of
the Black Goyas. Did Cezanne know them? What did he think of El
Greco?
It is obvious, given the values of the current art world, why this
would be the moment to examine Cezanne in his most obviously pas–
sionate, ham-fisted phase. Happily, the catalogue essays, by Gow–
ing and other scholars , with an introduction byJohn Rewald, are in–
formative , perceptive and free of art world politics, but there is
nonetheless the lingering feeling that work of this period would have
been received less enthusiastically a decade ago. It comes as no sur–
prise, though, to see how extravagant Cezanne's early work was.
The same pounding emotion is present, just below the surface, in
even the driest of his mature paintings, detached from explicit refer–
ence, transformed into scrutiny and disguised as scrupulous modu–
lation of tones. Seeing
The Early Years
makes you admire all the more
the intelligence that allowed Cezanne to channel that emotion, to
subsume it with formal considerations, to the enduring benefit of his
art.
Self-indulgent young painters can learn a lot from Cezanne's ex–
ample . They can learn even more from the details of his twelve-year
fight with his own abilities and weaknesses. A gifted French sculp–
ture, with whom I saw the exhibition, summed it up nicely as we
left. "My god," he said, "what
it
takes to make an artist!"
