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PARTISAN REVIEW
instance, each show the admiring viewer-and there were many of
these by the time they were made-that they are not only the
product of over forty years of personal effort by Cezanne but
as
well of centuries and centuries of achievement by the artists of
Greece, Rome, Italy, Flanders, Holland, Spain, and France.
He had by the time he created these works made hundreds of
copies of earlier works, and engaged in much study without pencil
or brush in hand. "There are, you see," said Matisse,
"constructional laws in the work of Cezanne which are useful to a
young painter." This is so in part just because he had penetrated
into such laws in the art of the past. According to Maurice Denis's
Journal
of 1906, Cezanne spoke frequently of the contrasts in
Veronese's
Marriage at Cana
in the Louvre; he had made a
schematic diagram of it and then rediscovered the very same
contrasts in a painting by Delacroix.
His method was to go from his works to the museums then
back to the canvas and again to the museums. Of course, the
rhythm at which this occurred varied greatly. However, his own
paintings were thus in a sense formed as a part of his study of the
art of the past. A fine example of this is provided by the groupings
and the interaction of figures in the Bathers compositions. These
groupings have been shaped by means of patterns of gesture,
glance, interconnected pose and mutually responsive movement
that actively recall those in the art of the past. Figures look at one
another, respond to the glance of other figures, look deep into the
space of the painting or out at the viewer, work together in han–
dling objects, point and reach out to one another. There are as
well contrasts analogous to those in the art of the museums be–
tween figures who are relatively isolated from one another and
others far more actively engaged. Some of the compositions,
Three
Bathers Surprised,
c. 1874-75, for example, are linked to
Michelangelo's
The Bathers
(or
The Battle of Cascina) ,
which
Cezanne had in a reproduction. The dangerous encroachment to
which Michelangelo's bathers are subject interested Cezanne. (He
encountered a related theme in Correggio's
Venus, Cupid and a
Satyr
in the Louvre.) He was also impressed with certain of
Michelangelo's specific gestures, and took some of these over for
his own bathers. Others of the Bathers compositions, outgrowths of
Cezanne's early multifigure compositions in which one per–
-sonage in the middle of a landscape is speaking while others lis-
