Two Masters

Several weeks ago Picasso phoned his dealer Kahnweiller in a state of great excitement. He called to say he had just purchased "Cezanne's Mont Saint-Victoire."

"Which Mont Saint-Victoire?" Kahnweiller wanted to know. Cezanne painted the theme many times.

"The original." exclaimed Picasso triumphantly. In fact, Picasso had acquired the site his predecessor and mentor made famous with a number of late and exemplary canvases. The event itself is striking, the stuff of which Maupassant stories are made. The virtuoso pupil becomes lord of the very scene where his master of old perished neglected and alone. The act embodies a particularly exalted form of homage; it also represents an exotic sort of justice, ironic and bitter.

At the moment, a collector who has chosen recently and enigmatically to become anonymous, has presented Fogg with the loan of several Cezannes, including one of the late Mont Saint-Victoires. Coincidentally, the museum is host to a number of later French canvasses featuring Picasso, also anonymously offered. The resultant exhibition, then, is a fortuitous affair and a particularly happy one. It makes for many good paintings and a few tangential observations.

Real estate is, of course, the least of Picasso's inheritance from Cezanne. The transition from one painter to the other is direct and complete. Their aesthetic credos coincide and their sucessive development is a matter of logical procession. Yet, it is seldom that one sees the two exhibited side by side. Collectors whose tastes embrace Cezanne somehow are wont to find Picasso extreme and lately it has become fashionable to see the older master as a conservative, so a chance to see the two in close proximity is welcome and valuable.

Of the two, I think it can be said that Cezanne is first and foremost the painter's painter. Whether he deals with a mountain or an apple he concentrates upon the inner architecture of his subject. An analogy with Bach is entirely correct--the partitas and fugues rather than the masses and cantatas. In both cases pure form is the object; in both the most complete spiritual clarity is achieved; in both sentimentality is banished. Emotion is there, but it serves to enrich a work which is as intellectually controlled as art in any form can be. In short, it represents that inspiration which is the tool of complete consciousness.

This particular version of Mont Saint-Victoire just approaches being over-labored, a flaw to which Cezanne was susceptible. Nevertheless, he stopped in the nick of time. A living spontaneity illuminates this painting. For that matter, two small canvases, a portrait of the artist's son, and a bather, are fresher still and the more marvelous for it.

In the next room Picasso takes up approximately where Cezanne left off. His Small Composition and a drawing, Head with Pipe, are comparatively early and in many ways as pure as the Cezannes. The two still-lifes of the twenties, controlled but more exuberant and a fuller statement of the personality, are another story.

In all fairness, though these are good Picassos they are not among the best. Why, is a question not easy to answer. Their color could not be improved. Their handling of shapes is as fine as anyone might hope. In theory everything is au juste. In practice, from afar, the two paintings are exciting and of the highest caliber. Yet, on successive viewings they lose impact where the Cezannes and earlier Picassos get better. The two still-lifes become vulnerable to the charge that they are more decorative than substantial.

At least one answer eventually works its way to the surface. To every Cezanne here, there is a vision and a philosophy which might be called epical. The works evoke and perpetrate personality via a willing subservience to canons beyond personality, to classicism in its most unadulterated form. So with the Picasso drawing and Small Composition. Both are dry in the word's complimentary sense. They exult in maximum integrity.

In comparison, the later Picassos enter the more vulnerable realm of the first person singular and juggle an ingenuity, a coquetry, a sense of invention, which may triumph but which, on the other hand, may adulterate the goal. Picasso is a conspicuous example of one who has used personal invention to the most effective degree, witness a Guernica or a Weeping Woman. On the other hand, fatalities exist too. The ingenuities of the twenties no longer spread as far as they once did. The first days of true retrospective judgment on that era are just commencing.

No one need doubt the eminence of Picasso. He is the aesthetic dynamo of our century and his place is assured. Cezanne, however, still contains the heart of it all in magnificent concentration. To painters interested in substance, he has always been the king. It looks as if he will continue to be for a very long time.