stick, a hold, a stepping-stone--something he was ready to discard as
soon as it had served his purpose. He had no use for his own pictures.
To him they were experiments. He tossed them into bushes, or left them
in the open fields to be stumbling-blocks for a future race of luckless
critics.
Cezanne is a type of the perfect artist; he is the perfect antithesis
of the professional picture-maker, or poem-maker, or music-maker. He
created forms because only by so doing could he accomplish the end of
his existence--the expression of his sense of the significance of form.
When we are talking about aesthetics, very properly we brush all this
aside, and consider only the object and its emotional effect on us; but
when we are trying to explain the emotional effectiveness of pictures we
turn naturally to the minds of the men who made them, and find in the
story of Cezanne an inexhaustible spring of suggestion. His life was a
constant effort to create forms that would express what he felt in the
moment of inspiration. The notion of uninspired art, of a formula for
making pictures, would have appeared to him preposterous. The real
business of his life was not to make pictures, but to work out his own
salvation. Fortunately for us he could only do this by painting. Any two
pictures by Cezanne are bound to differ profoundly. He never dreamed of
repeating himself. He could not stand still. That is why a whole
generation of otherwise dissimilar artists have drawn inspiration from
his work. That is why it implies no disparagement of any living artist
when I say that the prime characteristic of the new movement is its
derivation from Cezanne.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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