In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway speaks about “learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret.” Hemingway never quite revealed what this secret was. We know that when he was living in Paris writing the stories that make up his first collection, In Our Time, he frequently spent early afternoons in the Musée du Luxembourg staring at the three landscapes by Paul Cézanne that were on display there. It was his substitute for eating lunch. He was by no means starving: his midday hunger was by choice. It helped him concentrate his attention on the pictures.
What did he see in them? These days, nobody seems to understand how to look at Cézanne’s paintings, or anyone else’s, for that matter. At a recent Cézanne exhibition in London at the Tate Modern, it often seemed impossible to see anything. Modern museum-goers have the habit of standing no more than five or six feet away from the canvases that they are pretending to enjoy. Much of this is simply the result of macular degeneration, of course. But most people also seem to think that this sort of close-up scrutiny is how cultured, educated people ought to behave when looking at art.
Obviously you cannot inspect a miniature portrait, or an Old Master drawing or engraving, except up close, otherwise you will be unable to see the details which amount to the main reason to look at these things in the first place. But paintings are different, at least in the Western tradition. Any oil painting that is larger than a standard laptop computer ought ideally to be examined from ten feet away or more, and most pictures are created to be viewed from at least twenty feet away. Cézanne seems to have created much of his best work to be viewed from a distance of thirty or forty feet, ideally without half a dozen old people’s heads in one’s way.
When you stand far enough away from a Cézanne to see it properly, you begin to see that the blocky masses of color and seeming crudeness of how the paint is handled are not, in fact, important. Cézanne is trying to render light and color as they are experienced by someone who is standing too far away from what he is looking at to register details. Once you realize what he is trying to do, he becomes far more “realistic” than a photo-realist. His effects can be startling, but only if you look at his pictures from a distance that enables you comfortably to ignore the finer points of his technique. You are not supposed to notice the technical elements or care about them.
Cézanne was an eccentric artist, to be sure. He was weak in many of the conventional technical skills that even his most mediocre contemporaries could take for granted—perhaps this is why his pictures look so good from forty feet away. Only a genius can overcome a lack of basic competence, and even then only through patient, dogged hard work. But once you have learned how to look at—or through—his pictures, and see what he is trying to make you see, then you can begin training yourself to engage more deeply with the entire Western tradition of art.
Cézanne, like every other artist who was active from the 1860s onwards, had to grapple with the ever-growing popularity of still photography. Prior to the advent of the snapshot, well-trained draughtsmen and painters were indispensable where recording and preserving visual information was concerned. But at least he could rely on an audience that was not yet substantially different from previous generations in the way that it looked at pictures. In fact, this was one of Cézanne’s greatest professional obstacles as an artist: he was painting in a world where even the most sensitive and refined connoisseurs could not look beyond his obvious basic weaknesses. He struggled painfully to find ways of communicating something that nobody else had expressed before him, and few others could see. But how was anybody to see his genius, or trust his judgment, when he could barely compete with his contemporaries when it came to depicting conventional subjects in an ordinary manner?
Throughout his life, Cézanne was confronted with the reality that only other geniuses could grasp when he was trying to make people see. He himself did not have the natural talent easily to make his insights visible or comprehensible to normal people. Or to other great painters: Édouard Manet, one of the most pivotal figures in modern art, dismissed Cézanne as “a mason who paints with a trowel.” In fact, Manet refused to participate in the Impressionists’ first exhibition in April 1874 because he did not consider Cézanne a peer. To be fair to Manet, much of Cézanne’s work from before 1880 is awkward, and some of it is simply awful. Even with hindsight it can be difficult to see much promise in him. He often appears to be inept rather than innovative; certain “experimental” elements in the early work could easily be mistaken for clumsy shortcuts. We only know that there is something worth staring at in Cézanne’s pictures thanks to the efforts of fellow geniuses, including Camille Pissarro, who was the father of the Impressionist movement—and perhaps of the “Post-Impressionists” too (he was as shrewd as he was generous).
It makes sense to look at Cézanne first if you are trying to learn how to look at pictures: he had little interest in symbolism, imagery, metaphor, narrative, or any of the elements in a painting that require explanation. He simply wanted his viewers to see what he saw, in the simplest possible sense. This idea seems easy enough to grasp at the most basic verbal level. Even so, Cézanne’s original audience was in many senses far too sophisticated and visually literate to sympathize with such a radical aim. We moderns suffer from the opposite problem.
Even talented artists no longer have much opportunity to develop any sensitivity to painting. Photography is partly to blame, although of course our entire mass culture is so deeply saturated with images that we now need consciously to practice how to stare at things that are not digital images on screens. Purely as “recording technologies,” painting and drawing have been overtaken by photography, just as the oral transmission of poetry had been overtaken by written verse when writing was invented. But no mere mechanical innovation can render an entire tradition obsolete: only a culture can do this, collectively, and with a great deal of coercion from a society’s more influential leaders. It takes effort, will, and excellent luck to subvert a tradition once it takes root.
From around the First World War onwards, the increasing sophistication of motion pictures presented interesting problems for visual artists seeking to reflect or illuminate the modern world. The advent first of widespread television, then of computers, and finally of smartphones and tablet computers as virtual necessities in every household in the (self-described) “civilized world” has changed the way in which most of us handle visual information. Yet the process is hardly irreversible. To see Cézanne more or less as Hemingway learned to see him takes a certain amount of patience and effort. But there is no special gift involved in learning how to look. You simply need to train yourself to stand at an appropriate distance and stare.
Cézanne’s pictures are easy to read, in the sense that there is no complicated intellectual content. There is never a sense that an ignorant viewer will ever miss anything in looking at one of his landscapes, portraits, or still lifes. Old Master paintings, by contrast, have the power to intimidate and even demoralize us because we always think we know too little to be able to understand them. Essays on the Old Masters in exhibition catalogues are often the opposite of informative: there is so much knowledge taken for granted that they make most readers feel illiterate and uncultured.
Gert Schiff’s 1988 anthology German Essays on Art History: Winckelmann, Burckhardt, Panofsky, and Others (part of Bloomsbury’s Continuum German Library series) is perhaps the best single short introduction to art writing available, featuring perceptive and influential essays by some of the greatest names in German literature, academic history, and art history, from the mid-eighteenth century to just before the Second World War. You can learn a lot from this volume; the most important single lesson it teaches is that great thinkers can teach you nothing about looking at paintings.
Most art writing is similar to literary criticism, in that it generally amounts to an attempt indirectly to discuss some other, more urgent, subject. Often it serves as a form of stealth indoctrination: if you can shape how your readers approach, examine, and think about a given subject, you have the opportunity to mold and influence their thinking on more urgent materials as well. It would be paranoid to assume that this is a conscious process in all but a minority of instances. Also there is nothing necessarily sinister about using art writing or literary criticism as a vehicle for other thoughts. Yet throughout the twentieth century these things have so often been used as Trojan horses that a little suspicion and skepticism seems warranted.
German Essays on Art History is a reminder that there is no such thing as “neutral” or “objective” art history. This is such an obvious point that it seems impossible for most of us to internalize it, or recognize its full import. If you have an idea of how to look at pictures, art history is useful for establishing names and dates, and pinning down facts, data, and evidence. But it can teach you nothing until you have acquired the confidence that can only come with hundreds of hours spent in galleries and museums staring at images, burning their details in your memory, then letting your memory and imagination play over each other as you gradually develop something like an independent sense of judgement.
Ernst Gombrich first published The Story of Art in 1950. This is one of the only useful histories of art for the beginner, other than the works of Kenneth Clark, the other titan of twentieth-century art history. Yet even these men, the greatest public educators British society has ever known, can only take you so far. Their work has inflamed the passions of amateur connoisseurs for decades; their tastes are an education in themselves. But have either of these men ever influenced or inspired the creation of great art?
This might be an unfair question; indeed it might be wholly irrelevant to the question of how one goes about the process of looking at pictures. Also, it could be argued that twentieth-century Britain was too busy losing its empire, destabilizing its own society, and making itself weak, uncomfortable, and ugly (particularly in its cities) to be hospitable to the creation of great art. A shrinking, decaying, self-loathing society rarely creates anything that can last through the ages, other than cautionary tales based on its own self-destructive tendencies.
But I’ll insist on the question anyway, at the risk of possible unfairness: if one were to go through Clark’s or Gombrich’s work and isolate principles, virtues, and a fundamental philosophy from the chosen body of text, and identify a coherent attitude towards reality, would this prove to be viable as the basis for creating a durable work of art, or literature, in a society where such things were possible?
The question might not be unfair. After all, we simply want to ask whether it seems possible to reflect or illuminate reality permanently based on what Clark or Gombrich tried to teach their vast respective audiences during their many decades as public intellectuals. It might well be. Then again, these men were scholars, not poets or philosophers. Their achievements were necessarily of limited scope and application. Perhaps they could only teach you to look at art in the ways that scholars do. This is nothing to sneer at: how many of us could hope to rise above that modest level?
Scholars are distinguished from the rest of us, at least in theory, by their mental stamina, intellectual discipline, and demonstrable competence in some field of expertise. This does not necessarily make them more perceptive than the rest of us. What about poets, novelists, or other creative artists? If they can reveal various aspects and elements of the world to us, or teach us something about ourselves, surely they might also be able to shed light on the activities of seers who work in other media.
We might almost think that Hemingway was bluffing in his comments about learning from Cézanne, were it not for the fact that his early short stories are so startlingly original and evocative in a way that nobody else successfully accomplished before him. It might be impossible to look at Cézanne through his eyes, but at least he left us clues to help us see those pictures as he saw them. In a deleted section from the manuscript of his story “Big Two-Hearted River,” he wrote:
He wanted to write like Cézanne painted. Cézanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing. . . . He, Nick, wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cézanne had done it in painting. You had to do it from inside yourself. There wasn’t any trick. Nobody had ever written about country like that. He felt almost holy about it. It was deadly serious. You could do it if you would fight it out. If you’d lived right with your eyes. . . . Nick, seeing how Cézanne would do the stretch of river and the swamp, stood up and stepped down into the stream. The water was cold and actual. He waded across the stream, moving in the picture.
Whether or not you find this illuminating perhaps depends on whether you have the capacity to think in non-linear terms. Fewer of us have this capacity than we realize.
Yet Hemingway does seem to be onto something here. Without quite articulating it directly, he has managed to express a shrewd insight into Cézanne’s technique of transforming his perceptions into art. Admittedly, he has done this purely as a means of “thinking aloud,” and working out the sorts of issues that are best discussed in an essay. This is why the quoted passage was cut from “Big Two-Hearted River.” Such content could only violate the simplicity that the young Hemingway imposed on himself as an aesthetic criterion—perhaps a little too strictly.
Hemingway ended up learning the wrong lessons from his own insights: after publishing his masterpiece A Farewell to Arms, he failed to develop as an artist. Instead, he ended up compromising his artistic integrity by fixating on a simple style as an end in itself. A style as radically simple as Cézanne’s can only be adopted if you are communicating something that cannot be expressed in any other manner. Otherwise you condemn yourself to bluntness, crudeness, and the middlebrow vulgarity of virtually everything Hemingway wrote after 1930. But his unfortunate degeneration as an artist takes nothing away from his early achievements, or the truth of what he perceived—and tried to learn from—in Cézanne.
Hemingway is neither the first nor the greatest major writer to explore his own insights into great art. Many of the most important French writers of the nineteenth century wrote extensively about painting. The most keen-sighted of all was Stendhal, who was not only the inventor of the modern French novel but also a perceptive connoisseur of art, no less than of music. In fact, his tastes appear to have been superhumanly refined. He was in no way prissily fastidious; rather he had an extraordinary knack for identifying mediocrity that the rest of us might not merely tolerate, but even fail to notice altogether.
For all his genius, I cannot really recommend any of Stendhal’s writings on art to anyone who is not already steeped in both art history and Stendhal. Stendhal’s tendencies towards laziness, dishonesty, self-indulgence, and general lack of discipline (except when creating prose fiction) render many of his review essays on painting all but unreadable, to say nothing of his (sometimes brilliant, sometimes embarrassing, largely plagiarized) history of Italian painting. His best writing on art is found in passing, in his letters, or in ruminative passages in his travel books or charmingly unreliable memoirs. You can even stumble on it here and there in his one disastrous attempt to write a book on art history, where there are some astonishingly sympathetic passages on Renaissance painters. But he never wanted to dwell for too long on other creators’ greatness when he fixated so intently on attaining a little greatness himself.
Hemingway, with the straightforward guilelessness of an old-fashioned Midwesterner, ended up revealing more or less everything he learned from Cézanne. Stendhal was much more self-protective: his discussions of painters and painting were ultimately intended to remind readers that they were in the presence of an adorable genius. From anyone else, such a claim would be hubristic; but nobody has ever successfully proved Stendhal wrong on this point.
Even less reliable than Stendhal is Baudelaire, who was surely the greatest French poet of the nineteenth century, but also stands as the most prominent art critic of the period. Many of his essays remain influential, not least his criticism of official “salons,” and his seminal “manifesto” of 1863, The Painter of Modern Life. Baudelaire was a magician with words; his prose remains charming and seductive. But when it comes to art, he tells his truth, not the truth; his real concern is to develop ideas that will ultimately ripen in his own poetry. Pictures are never more than an incidental or secondary concern.
Baudelaire and Stendhal died before things really became interesting in French art. For both men, the greatest living painter was Eugène Delacroix, who was a captivating writer in his own right (in his letters, and his later journal entries, if not the essays that were published during his lifetime). But Delacroix was a sort of transitional figure at best: his contemporaries all hailed him as an innovator and a visionary, mainly because there was nobody else around who seemed able or willing to assume such a role. Then, shortly after he died, everything changed.
The Franco-Prussian War disrupted French culture to a degree that seemed impossible for most of us to imagine until the last several years of worldwide catastrophe. There are excellent reasons to claim that “modern art” began in France at some point during the 1860s, 1863 being the usual date provided by those who hold this view, because that was the year when Manet exhibited his then-scandalous Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe—“Lunch on the Grass”—featuring two fully-clothed dandies picnicking casually with a naked woman while a scantily clad second woman bathes in the background. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe is a picture of some historical importance, to be sure. Yet its impact has grown dull. The precise subject is difficult to make out, and in technical terms the picture is surprisingly awkward: Manet, for all his daring, appears to have lost his nerve and faltered. As a painting, this feels unfinished and under-thought in many sections. Artistically it seems incoherent, as though the image were held together by a collection of ideas that were never fully explored before Manet decided to begin putting his brush to the canvas. The picture is certainly provocative in its attempt to stage an erotic scene from a Renaissance painting in modern dress. Without the pretence of a tale from ancient Greek mythology, or the prestige of a literary precedent in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the scene seems a little sleazy, and that is precisely the point. But what is the point of the point?
Manet, for all his intelligence, energy, and gifts, lacked both the technical mastery and the visionary quality to capitalize fully on his instincts and insights about reality, and the purpose of art. His work sometimes requires interpreters to explain how he was reacting to now-obscure contemporary situations, or alluding to paintings by Goya and Velázquez that are no longer well known even among the cultured public. As a result, his most important canvases can seem almost as dated as the supposedly pompous, official “academic” paintings that he so despised.
“Modern art,” as it began to be conceived in the mid-nineteenth century among Parisian painters, was meant to be an escape from texts, learning, and all the detritus of civilised culture, into a world of pure perception and sensation. This sometimes led artists to choose their subjects not from history books but newspaper headlines or contemporary literature. As a result, “accessible” art from the period often turns out to require far more interpretative text and scholarly explanation for today’s viewers than even the most complex compositions produced by the Old Masters before the French Revolution. “Modern artists” tried actively to compete with photography in capturing fleeting moments and impressions. Everyone’s favorite colorful Impressionist paintings are essentially arrangements of pure color that convincingly reproduce certain atmospheric effects in sunlight. There are also urban scenes: Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec surpass all others in capturing elements of cities. Only Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec ever succeeded in showing both the glamour and the sordid melancholy of Parisian nightlife during the Belle Époque.
Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Cézanne are unquestionably the most important painters of their period, with Degas as the greatest, Toulouse-Lautrec the most naturally virtuosic, and Cézanne the most weirdly original. Not only could they create images that no camera would ever be able to capture; they also produced work that photographs badly, and never quite succeeds in reproduction (something they have in common with many of the Old Masters). Unlike their peers, these men defeated photography completely. Their finest work will never grow stale.
For many of us, not least in America, the finest, most accomplished paintings we can conveniently experience in person were produced between the 1870s and the First World War. Those who do not live in Paris, London, New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, or some other city that provides easy access to good examples of the most influential “modern art” will often feel tempted to learn about painting from books. This is a mistake. The photographs in expensively produced exhibition catalogues are useful mainly to jog your memory about a picture you might have seen. Otherwise, such books are best left on coffee tables to impress and intimidate visitors.
If you read academic studies on Cézanne, you might never guess that from 1891 he was a regular Mass-goer, devoted alms-giver, and serious Catholic. The fact shames and embarrasses art historians, who cannot accommodate this reality in their various preferred narratives. To miss this point is to miss everything of importance in Cézanne’s art. Once you start to notice the absences and distortions in art historians’ accounts of their chosen subjects, you begin slowly to trust your own eyes, instincts, and judgments. The young Hemingway turns out to have been right: no matter where you come from, you can pick up everything you need to know from repeatedly contemplating pictures by Cézanne during your lunch hour. Everything else follows from there, as long as you are prepared to stand back, focus, and blink every now and again.
