The Birth of Tragedy |
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived … I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms..." (Walden, 1854). |
For one cannot deny that Cezanne gave a new character to his still-lifes. Nothing else but still-life allowed him sufficient calm and leisure, and admitted all the delays which were necessary to him for plumbing the depth of his idea. But there, before the still-life, put together not with too ephemeral flowers, but with onions, apples, or other robust and long-enduring fruits, he could pursue till it was exhausted his bewildering labyrinth of this analysis he held always, like Ariadne’s thread, the notion of that changes of color correspond to movement of planes. He sought always to trace this correspondence throughout all the diverse modification which changes of local color introduced into the observed resultant.
… the intellect is bound to seek for articulations. In order to handle nature’s continuity it has to be conceived as discontinuous; without organization, without articulation the intellect gets no leverage. And with Cezanne the intellect — or, to be more exact, the intellectual part of his sensual reactions — claimed its full rights.
From this point of view we may regard the history of art as a perpetual attempt at reconciling the claims of the understanding with the appearances of nature as revealed to the eye at each successive period. Each new discovery in the world of visual experience tends to invalidate the constructions which had proved adequate theretofore, and the spirit is bound to reconstruct its shelter, taking into account the new data. This was notably the case with new data supplied by the Impressionist discipline of the eye. Some artists were so enamored of these new visual truths that it was sufficient for them merely to state and restate them in all their complexity. Monet’s Haystacks and Water-lilies are there to prove it. But the greater spirits in this group sought from the very first to draw from these experiences the basis for new constructions. With Cezanne this need proclaimed itself as more urgent and imperious than with Renoir and Degas themselves. Scarcely had he grasped the principles of Impressionism before he set himself to utilize them for further ends. And it is perhaps most evidently in this series of still-lifes that he arrived at a synthesis based on the new analysis of atmospheric color.
P39-40 X
"Cezanne: a Study of His Development
by Fry, Roger
