Worried Master

The bald, bearded Frenchman hunched painfully over his writing table was feeling old, ill and a bit sorry for himself. Painter Paul Cezanne had studied hard, but had he learned, at 67, to paint intelligibly? Hardly anyone thought so. The old man scrawled the question once again. "Shall I ever reach the goal so eagerly sought and so long pursued?" he wrote. "A vague feeling of discomfort persists which will not disappear until I shall have gained the harbor, that is, until I shall have accomplished something more promising than what has gone before. . . ."

A month later--on Oct. 15, 1906--Cezanne was drenched by a thundershower which came up while he painted in a field. Within a few days he was dead. But his art was not. The huge Cezanne exhibition which opened in a Manhattan gallery last week--probably the largest ever to be seen in the U.S.--proved once again that his work had been infinitely better than the worried master dared hope.

After Retreat. By far the boldest paintings in the show were the products of his Paris period: the days when Cezanne lived on the Left Bank, sat up late sipping red wine with a young writer named Emile Zola.

Of the 68 oils and 18 watercolors in last week's show, most looked hesitant and patchy, and a few were seriously out of whack. Cezanne never learned to draw as fluently as the average commercial artist, and like most perfectionists he was stammeringly conscious of his failure to paint perfectly. If he had not inherited a comfortable income from his banker father, and been blessed with a stoically believing wife and a businesslike son to manage his affairs, the "Hermit of Aix" might never have created such powerful art.

Building with Dabs. Cezanne has a lot of bad drawing besides his own to answer for. The 19th Century's conscientious master did more than any other artist to make awkward drawing, dabs, distortion, and the fracturing of space fashionable in the 20th. Glimpsing a solid geometry in nature, Cezanne spent most of his life trying to apply it to art. Seen close up, his later paintings, such as Gardanne (see cut), look like Cubist abstractions and were, in fact, the point at which Cubism first left the world behind.

But Cezanne would doubtless be shocked by the modern artists who paint from imagination--and most of whom (Picasso, Braque and Duchamp) credit him with showing the way. For him, nature was everything, in spite of the fact that what he kept seeing in nature was, he insisted, "the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, all put into perspective. . . ."

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