The Death of Cézanne

JÓZEF CZAPSKI

A few weeks ago, two articles published by Kisiel[1] in Tygodnik Powszechny[2], polemicising with his politician peers, stirred my curiosity. Kisiel explains that it is quite pointless to tutor people who are younger by at least a generation on how they should behave in politics. “They will not–I’m quoting from memory–listen to you anyway and they will only know what to do once they have learned it the hard way.”

The reason for my curiosity was that I transposed Kisiel’s ideas to my own narrow field of painting. For many years I have been trying write down what painting should and should not be! For a long time it seemed to me that the things I was writing might be needed. Now I’m getting the impression, like Kisiel, that I have been repeating what once seemed so important to me over and over as if into a void. Why do I have this feeling all of a sudden? Because I understood far too late (as is usually the case) that the era in which I wrote my many articles is long gone.

I fervently defended Cezanne’s attitude to painting, most of all his famous phrase faire du Poussin sur nature[3]. I remember when, in my youth, my professor, Pankiewicz[4], spoke with indignation about the painting of his friend Bonnard who disregarded value in favour of colour, and whose compositions, which were very much anticlassical, he found to be incorrect in painting. In 1934, as I was writing a book about Pankiewicz, I repeated his words exactly, but personally I believed that the classicising Pankiewicz completely misunderstood Bonnard, whom I found illuminating exactly because of what so offended Pankiewicz. As I reread my book today I have not changed my opinion: it was Bonnard who, through his compositions and accentuation of only colour, affected my own work the most. Yet I no longer find Pankiewicz’s position absurd. Bonnard’s innovative take on colour had its merits and it really revealed to my generation a new approach to the meaning of colour as such. As I read anew the chapters in the book on Pankiewicz, in which I wrote an account of our strolls in the Louvre, I am struck by his intelligence and insight, as well as his excellent knowledge of painting in general. The chapters about painting in which I only repeat his statements could be educational for any painter even today. Kisiel’s opinion that it is pointless to teach the young how to think does not seem right to me. I am writing about this because nowadays, in my polemics with painters several generations my junior, I always return to Cézanne, namely his main proposition that working “on nature” is a step that every painter has to go through.

I still remember the early years of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. My friends already worshipped Cézanne, while some were infatuated with abstraction and admired not just Picasso but even Léger. I looked at Cézanne in the Academy’s library, in a large book with black and white reproductions and understood nothing of his painting.

It was only in Paris in 1924 that he gained such a central importance for me. Why? Why not Monet, who was so much more brilliant? Why not Manet, whose famous painting with the odalisque so offended the ladies visiting the exhibition that they wanted to puncture it with their umbrellas? Why not Renoir, who is so much easier? After all, I admired all of those painters as well. The reason lies in something small but extremely important. In his paintings, Cézanne had the courage to leave white spots; in his sketches we sometimes see the white of the canvas between every spot, because what he most cared about was the proper application of the paint, every spot of it, more than the presentation of one landscape or another, one portrait or another. For me, this is where the lesson in Cézanne began, and for several years I laid spots of colours next to each other without mixing them, always leaving a band of white canvas. It came to pass that I had a series of literally pointillist paintings in which I laid not just spots, but actual dots that were independent of each other. I still have some unfinished paintings like this. I am convinced that it was that technique, which I had not learned from anyone but which I owe to the worship of Cézanne, that brought me to painting. This example, which is my own, would not demonstrate anything if not for the fact that everyone went through Cézanne in their own way. Pretty much the entire Ecole de Paris, from Derain to Sutin, came as if from him.

His effort was incessant, his torment over each painting, those canvases he abandoned in the field when he was unhappy with them, his loneliness when his impressionist colleagues were already famous, his old age and final letters to his son (J’ai fait, je crois, un peu de progrès[5], to quote from memory) surrounded him with an aura of almost holiness. His style, untainted by cutting corners, produced paintings that became models of a unique qualité[6] for generations to come.

Yet, the cult of Cézanne, which I shared with my most progressive colleagues and a multitude of painters I did not know, began to pale and vanish, almost imperceptibly for me. I have only understood it now but I could have understood it the best part of two decades ago. Young painters nowadays speak of Cézanne with respect, his paintings adorn all galleries and dozens of volumes have been written about him, but there is nothing of the spirit of discovery in the attitudes towards him. This is my attitude to Delacroix, for example: I admire to this day some of his sketches, his studies for the great paintings, but I care little for his great works which played an enormous role in the development of the art of painting.

The last Biennale[7] in Paris left me with an even stronger impression that we are living in a different era and that things vital to me seem less important now. A painter nowadays draws as much from masters who have always worked on nature as he does from Malevich or Mondrian. And suddenly, only now, I realised that I belong to the post-Cézanne era, which is long, long gone. In the present Biennale I cannot find a single painting that even remotely resembles Cézanne. What sets today’s painters apart from Cézannism the most may be their careless attitude towards colour. It is not the abstraction that offends me the most, but an outrageous carelessness, even sloppiness when it comes to using the study of nature. In addition, paintings that could even be interesting seem to me to be soiled with black, whereas in my tradition black was almost forbidden. The most interesting example of a painter using black and white almost exclusively is Anselm Kiefer, about whom Pomian has already written in Kultura[8]. Kiefer is exhibiting three large paintings at the Biennale, also painted in black and white (they are less impressive there than in his individual exhibition in the Musée d'Art Moderne[9]). Abuse of black seems to me extremely widespread at the Biennale. Not only that: we often see the return of the theme that–in my generation–seemed almost non-existent, apart from still lifes. Perhaps it is here that we are facing an essential change: the hierarchy of importance is once again inverted. One thing would be desirable: for the memory of the colour of the Cézanne era to be retained in this reversed hierarchy, so that the major achievement of painting, for which my generation fought, is not neglected.

Kultura 1985, no. 6/453
English translation by Piotr Sut