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PARTISAN REVIEW
In his letters, Cezanne speaks of beauty in connection
with
certain atmospheric effects, the sky, the sunlight, the landscape,
and the panorama of Marseilles and the islands. He repeatedly
ascribes beauty to works of art. His works show the mark of this
interest. Yet he lived during a period when the sordid and dis–
tasteful were of persistent interest to writers like Baudelaire,
Flaubert, Zola, and Huysmans.
His intensive study, sustained over almost fifty years, of the
works of his artistic forebearers is resounding evidence for how
solidly he constructed foundations for himself. The paintings and
sculptures of the Louvre gradually came, in a sense, to belong to
him. His own work came to be permeated with the consequences
of this study. For example, while the small, colorful landscape
The
Wall,
1875-76, was most likely painted from an actual motif he
observed in the countryside, the composition is allied to that of
Poussin's
The Four Seasons: Summer (Ruth and Boas)
in the Louvre.
The choice of the motif in itself reflects Cezanne's attachment to
the configurations of form in the Poussin. As well, the distant
cluster of houses welcoming the sunlight owes something to
kindred landscape elements in works by Pissarro, Corot, the
painters of Barbizon, Claude Lorrain, Poussin, Titian, Giorgione,
Raphael, and Giovanni Bellini.
Most obviously in compositions of Bathers and
Cardplayers-but in certain portraits, landscapes and still lifes as
well-he alludes to and plays with the legacy of the genres, the
conventions, the possibilities of leaving the styles pure or mixing
them, the themes, the modes of thinking and feeling
characteristic of older art, visual and literary. Many, many ex–
amples of this might be given. Few would be as important as
those relating to his use of color, one that is versatile and adapt–
able even in comparison with that of the other great colorists of
the nineteenth century. His color has the capacity to reflect the
exaggeration characteristic of certain Romanticizing works; or,
alternately, the proportionateness found in a classicizing art. In
various paintings, his color is somber, buoyant, quiet, busy, phys–
ical, idealizing, raw, delicate, rugged, direct, embellishing,
sculptural, painterly, decorative, uncertain, direct, tenacious, as–
sertive, hesitant, dreamy, palpable, analytical, dispassionate, sen–
suous, monumental, intimate, weighty, intellectual, lyrical. It
changes from work to work, or within a single piece, as Cezanne
