Art
azanne and His Contemporaries
TILE tracing of influences, a favourite pursuit of modern artzhistorians, never provides the explanation of any artistic phenomenon. To say that Delacroix' style changed because he studied the paintings by Rubens in the Louvre is only the first step in an explanation of the change in Delacroix' style. For the question still remains : why, of all the paintings in the Louvre, was it precisely the Rubens and not the Velasquez or the Raphaels that attracted Delacroix ? And this question cannot generally be answered in terms of pure painting, but only in terms of the general situation in which Delacroix found himself. Very often the explanations given in terms of influences are actually misleading. It is often said, for instance, that the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii produced the neo-classical revival in decoration at the end of the eighteenth century, whereas it was the revival of classical feeling which led to the renewal of excavations on the sites of the two cities, which had been known since the sixteenth century.
But if influences can give no complete explanation they can often offer indications, and it is therefore of interest to all students of Cezanne to look at the drawings included in the exhibition of his works at Agnew's which belong to the great collection of studies made after works of art, particularly after sculpture, in the Louvre: If we group together all the known studies of this kind it appears that Ckzanne drew mainly on two sources : the Mannerist and Baroque artists. Among the former the French sixteenth- century artists are perhaps the most frequently copied by Cezanne, whose drawing after Pilon's Three Graces is at Agnew's (2). Among the seventeenth-century Frenchmen his passion was above all for the baroque Puget, whose Amour • he painted and drew constantly, and whose Heracle Gaulois appears in drawing 17. In painting his leanings were in the same direction : he hated all the primitives, had little use even for the Quattroeento, admired the late Venetians but relied above all on Rubens, as drawing 20 shows us, and on Greco; the fullest exponent of Mannerism. That is to say, Cezanne seems not to have made use of the naturalistic schools (Dutch seventeenth-century or Florentine fifteenth- century), but rather of those artists who were deserting naturalism in favour of some sort of abstract or emotional interpretation of the visible world. And this is important since. it emphasises the fact that, in spite of his attention to the motif, Cezanne was inaugurating a movement of Mannerism and abstraction which was to reach its full development in Cubism. The exhibition at Agnew's contains in addition to the studies after sculpture a magnificent series of Ckzanne's water- colours, mostly landscapes, some of them in his most realistic style, others (e.g., 12, 27) showing how completely he was prepared at moments to twist nature into a pattern of lines and primary colours.
Messrs. Wildenstein have house-warmed their new premises in Bond Street with pictures from the Stransky collection, roughly by artists of Cezanne's generation. The tragedy of Courbet is summed up in his two paintings on view here : a realistic landscape (surely nearer to 1848 than 1858 as suggested in the catalogue) and a late Femme au Chat (5) which is merely sensual—like a Greuze, but better painted. A little study for La Grande Jatte is typical of Seurat's pre- liminary sketches and shows the sort of spontaneously collected documents from which he built up his very calculated com- positions (cf. Zola). The other lovely sketch of his, Le Moteur (14), seems never to have been developed into anything larger, but is one of his most perfect notes. Two of the Gauguins are typical of . the artist at .his most attractive, but not at his most monumental : the Baigneuses a Tahiti (22) is a lovely piece of succulent decoration and Reverie (25) has an almost Gothic sweetness of line and prettiness of colour. The most interesting point in the exhibition is perhaps the juxtaposition of two portraits of boys, one a late Ckzanne painted in 1896, the other a van Gogh of 1889. The mixture of elements in these two paintings illustrates the struggle which was going on at the end of the nineteenth century, in which naturalism was gradually forced out leaving painting emotional or abstract—anything, in fact, but realistic,
ANTHONY BLUNT.
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