rate TT TN G

1 9 39 marks the centenary anniversary of the French painter, Paul

Cézanne, who was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839. His
canvases have subsequently influenced the course of European painting;
so much so indeed, that he has been referred to as “the Father of Modern
Art.” We have seen fit, therefore, to reserve the contribution blow, from
the Senior Painting Class, for a fitting conclusion to this Annual.

_ The name of Cézanne is mentioned often in our classes. He found
his inspiration immediately around him, painting every nook and corner
of his native town, from which he seldom wandered. Possibly Canada,
perhaps Vancouver, harbors a potential Cézanne who will explore and
create from our own environment. We need and we await him.

PA UL. Ce a. NE
(A Digest)
“Wwe can’t you sit as still as an apple?” Just a hundred years ago in
January, the originator of that remark, Paul Cézanne, was born.
And that remark, by the way, gives us an important clue to his method
of research, for Cézanne was a prober into the anatomy of nature, and
anything that could not be held down on a dissecting table while he
worked at it, was likely to provoke such a remark, because there is no
doubt that Cézanne was a slow, clumsy worker. Painting was to him an
interminable and painful business. He had nothing of the spectacular
and arresting like Gauguin and Van Gogh, none of the human appeal of
Degas and Lautrer, and certainly none of the fluency of Manet or the
captive transcience of Monet. Monet and Manet were each striving to
catch to perfection the transient and the fleeting. To Cézanne there lay
the danger. He saw that Art had to be put back on the firm foundation
from which it was slipping, that a picture ought to be something more
than an impression of a passing effect. He resolved to build slowly, a
balanced, organized thing. So he set to work in the spirit of an anatomist
who starts by finding the skeleton, then the muscles, then the nerves and
arteries, and finally the skin. And gradually, out of this extraction of
the eternal and universal, from beneath the particular and transient, he
constructed a convincing, bony world—a solid, three-dimensional world,
very different from the flimsy, accidental world of Manet. Cézanne
then, must be regarded as a primitive — and a very necessary aid to
Impressionism if it is to survive. And he may be regarded as a standard
of honesty for anyone who would create, out of his own environment,
something “‘as solid and enduring as the art of the museums.”