BOB KIRSCH
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his investigation of plant morphology was carried out apart from
his investigation of earlier art; yet, he spent more time in the
countryside than in the Louvre. In 1902 he said, "To see the work
of God. This is what I apply _myself to." He did not wish to be lit–
eral. He did wish to be connected to the solid existence of things,
and to be capable of convincing the viewer that the artist had ac–
tually seen the motif painted. Furthermore, he made of his study
of nature, and this includes that of plants, a basis upon which his
pictorial means are founded. "Consulting nature provides us with
the means for achieving our goal," he wrote one young painter.
To another, "Drawing is no more than the configuration of what
you see."
He had to journey some distance before he came to the place
where he was able simply to face a motif in an unassuming way.
By then he understood so much about what was going on in a
patch of forest or in a grouping of apples and cloth that he was ca–
pable of making great art from this alone. The shape of the enter–
prise itself helped him, as D. H. Lawrence says, to defeat the
cliche. He was able to free himself of much unnecessary super–
structure. That this is not some fantasy constructed after the fact is
suggested by a note by Zola in the
Dossier for L 'Oeuvre
in which he
refers to "Paul, who always believed he was discovering paint–
ing." The formal rapport of his works of art are fully bound up in
his sense of the unity, the affiliations, the correspondences
among phenomenal entities; the connections, the interrelation–
ships, the parallelisms that may actually be experienced by the
artist in the perception of his motif.
Asked in a ,questionnaire, "What is your greatest aspira–
tion?" Cezanne replied, "Certainty." He sought and he found. He
said repeatedly that as a painter he had within his grasp numer–
ous points of moral support. Many different types of support–
some provided by the land and the rocks and the plants, the sun–
light, the beautiful views themselves, some by his family,
friends, and fellow painters, some by the ancestors he had found
among the artists of the museums, some by his religion, some by
less specifiable familiar things, objects, ideas, attitudes, and cul–
tural forms-he gathered together for the benefit of his art.
One may focus on those positive forces that touched upon his
creative work in part because of his decision to preserve only the
more successful of his paintings and drawings. There are thou-
