The difference between them is subtle but goes very deep. For
both the ultimate and internal significance of what they painted
counted for more than the significance which is momentary and
external. Cezanne saw in a tree, a heap of apples, a human face,
a group of bathing men or women, something more abiding than
either photography or impressionist painting could present. He
painted the "treeness" of the tree, as a modern critic has
admirably expressed it. But in everything he did he showed the
architectural mind of the true Frenchman. His landscape studies
were based on a profound sense of the structure of rocks and
hills, and being structural, his art depends essentially on
reality. Though he did not scruple, and rightly, to sacrifice
accuracy of form to the inner need, the material of which his art
was composed was drawn from the huge stores of actual nature.
Gauguin has greater solemnity and fire than Cezanne. His pictures
are tragic or passionate poems. He also sacrifices conventional
form to inner expression, but his art tends ever towards the
spiritual, towards that profounder emphasis which cannot be
expressed in natural objects nor in words. True his abandonment
of representative methods did not lead him to an abandonment of
natural terms of expression--that is to say human figures, trees
and animals do appear in his pictures. But that he was much
nearer a complete rejection of representation than was Cezanne is
shown by the course followed by their respective disciples.
The generation immediately subsequent to Cezanne, Herbin,
Vlaminck, Friesz, Marquet, etc., do little more than exaggerate
Cezanne's technique, until there appear the first signs of
Cubism. These are seen very clearly in Herbin. Objects begin to
be treated in flat planes. A round vase is represented by a
series of planes set one into the other, which at a distance
blend into a curve. This is the first stage.
The real plunge into Cubism was taken by Picasso, who, nurtured
on Cezanne, carried to its perfectly logical conclusion the
master's structural treatment of nature. Representation
disappears. Starting from a single natural object, Picasso and
the Cubists produce lines and project angles till their canvases
are covered with intricate and often very beautiful series of
balanced lines and curves. They persist, however, in giving them
picture titles which recall the natural object from which their
minds first took flight.
With Gauguin the case is different. The generation of his disciples
which followed him--I put it thus to distinguish them from his actual
pupils at Pont Aven, Serusier and the rest--carried the tendency
further. One hesitates to mention Derain, for his beginnings, full of
vitality and promise, have given place to a dreary compromise with
Cubism, without visible future, and above all without humour. But there
is no better example of the development of synthetic symbolism than his
first book of woodcuts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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