Читать книгу Cubists and Post-Impressionism онлайн

52 страница из 70

“What is lacking,” he said to me while contemplating the three heads, “is the realisation. Perhaps I shall get it, but I am old and it may be that I shall die without having reached the highest point: To realise! like the Venetians.”

Not unlike the lament of Hokusai at seventy over his imperfections as a draftsman.

CÉZANNE

Still Life

One’s first impression from even half-tone reproductions of his paintings is a feeling of construction. I have before me a still-life—the fruit, the bowl, the piece of stuff are not simply painted but built up as firmly and scientifically as a builder builds a house—the materiality as well as the beauty is there.

It is just the same with his portraits, his figure pieces and his landscapes; one cannot escape the sense of the substance, the fundamental reality.

And to attain it all he used the simplest and most direct technic, not a brush-stroke, not a line, not a spot of color wasted.

It was these characteristics which made him a profound Impressionist, in the wider significance of the term, but also the first of the Fauves, the father of the revolt from Impressionism in its more superficial significance.