Abstract

While different groups of viewers may have sought different values in Cézanne's art, the artist's manner of painting and personality both contributed to the ambiguity of his work. Until the last decade of his life he seldom exhibited, and even then his paintings seemed unfinished. He was generally regarded as an "incomplete" artist and often as a "primitive," one whose art was in some way simple or rudimentary, devoid of the refinements and complexities of his materialistic, industrialized society.1 He was seen as an isolated man who lived apart from other painters and found human relationship and communication difficult. Yet for some symbolists it was this alienation and mystery which made Cézanne's art so attractive. As early as 1891, Fénéon found it appropriate to refer to "the Cézanne tradition," a designation which indicates the influence of the legendary account of the artist promulgated by Gauguin and his associates.2 Gauguin had painted landscapes with the reclusive artist during the summer of 1881, was impressed by his odd style, both personal and pictorial, and in a letter to Emile Schuffenecker of 14 January 1885 described Cézanne as embodying the mysticism of the Orient.3 Such a characterization held special meaning for those like Gauguin who had come more and more to search for an ultimate truth in the experience of the mystical, the transcendental, the intensely real. For the symbolist painter or writer, primitives lived in harmony with the real world; they had an intuitive, mythic understanding of their environment. Most modern Europeans, in contrast, viewed the world through false and short-sighted analytic reason and thus saw only immediate causes and effects, not eternal universal principles. They were Christians who could not see the truth of Buddhism; they were socially indoctrinated Parisians who could not see the purer structure of human society in provincial Brittany; they were refined painters of nature who could not see the expressive power of a flat area of color surrounded by a broad outline. For Gauguin and the symbolists, Cézanne, living in isolation in his seemingly unsophisticated native Provence, qualified as an enlightened contemporary, an inspiring force, a primitive artist. · 1. For Cézanne as "incomplete," see, e.g. Thadée Natanson, "Paul Cézanne." Revue blanche 9 , p. 496; and Gustave Geoffrey, "Paul Cézanne" , in La Vie artistique , p. 218. For Cézanne as "primitive," see, e.g., Georges Lecomte, L'Arte impressionniste , pp. 30-31; and Maurice Denis, "Cézanne" , in Théories, 1890-1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, 2d ed. , p. 246. The late nineteenth-century notion of the "primitive" artist was very broad. Included in the category of primitives were artists of the ancient Orient, artists of the earlier stages of development of various Western styles , provincial or uneducated European artists, and those of contemporary non-European societies. With regard to the negative evaluation of modern Western European society, see, e.g., Victor de Laprade, Le Sentiment de la nature chez les modernes, 2d ed. , pp. 483-88; and Albert Aurier, "Essai sur une nouvelle méthode de critique" , "Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin" , and "Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh" , in Oeuvres posthumes , pp. 202, 216, 262-63.· 2. Félix Fénéon, "Paul Gauguin" , in Oeuvres plus que complètes, ed. Joan Halperin, 2 vols. , 1:192.· 3. Lettres de Gauguin à sa femme et à ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue , p. 45. Félix Fénéon, André Mellerio, and Emile Bernard also associated Cézanne's style with mysticism. Richard Shiff is an associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written a related article, "The End of Impressionism: A Study of Theories of Artistic Expression". His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship" and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation"