"A STUPENDOUS

L

NOBODY

AST month there was held at the Arden Galleries in New York an exhibition of a number of paintings by Cézanne. Speaking of them in the New York Sun our always amusing but frequently bewildering James Huneker asked: "Is he a stupendous nobody or a surpassing genius?" We have not the slightest hesitancy in saying he is a stupendous nobody!

Let us hear Mr. Huneker: "The critical doctors disagree, an excellent omen for the reputation" (he means notoriety) "of the man of Provence. We do not discuss a corpse, for though Cézanne died in 1906 he is a living issue among artists and writers. Every exhibition calls forth various comments; fair, unfair, ignorant and seldom just."

This profound difference of opinion among cultured thinkers in regard to any artist's works is the surest guarantee that he is an æsthetic dead one. For there is no instance on record where a work of art as hotly disputed as those of Cézanne have been for twenty years, was not pushed into oblivion through the progressive conquering power of the condemnation of men of common sense. And the quarrel now raging over Cézanne is over the question whether he was insane or not, and we have not the slightest doubt that the quarrel will be finally ended in the almost universal verdict that he was just plain crazy! This will become more and more apparent as the facts of his life are brought out and studied.

Huneker admits as much when he says: "He was personally a crank, in the truest sense of that short, ugly word. When I first saw him, he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary, a rare impersonality, I should say."

Well, no great genius ever was a queer crank. Every great artist who ever lived was a great man with his feet on the ground and his soul in the clouds, the two bound together by stern logic, common sense and a quick perception of the eternal fitness of things. The greater the genius, the larger the dose of common sense. Homer, Pheidias, Iktinos, Dante, Giotto, Ghiberti, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, Raphael, Velasquez, Holbein, Cervantes, Murillo, Shakespeare, Milton, Victor Hugo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Veronese, Goethe, were all men of surpassing genius and also of good sense. They were all clear-eyed and vastly practical men; no cranks among these great! Cézanne and his works being insane, all those who respond to their weird appeal may be suspected of also being tainted.

Mr. Huneker says further: "The tang of the town is not in Cézanne's portraits of places. His leaden landscapes do not arouse to spontaneous ac

tivity a jaded retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli or Monet." They certainly are "leaden" indeed, and also wooden and dead. What more could be expected of a man who never had any training worthy of the name and who was driven into art merely by vanity, which gradually developed into ego-mania?

Huneker continues: "He is a primitive, not made like Puvis, but one born to a crabbed simplicity." Well, what right has any one in the twentieth century to affront mankind with his inept creations just because they are "primitive"? We pardon Cimabue for his "primitiveness" because he came at the end of an intellectual night and the barbarism of five hundred years. But we cannot pardon in this age such childishness as Cézanne manifests. And as for his "crabbed simplicity" it is surely "crabbed," but not simple. aberration and emptiness. but not empty. It is "primitive."

It is mere pathological The Parthenon is simple simple but far from

Then we learn further: "If you don't care for his nudes, you may console yourself that there is no disputing tastes with the tasteless. They are uglier than the females of Dégas and twice as truthful." Well, as Dégas's females are about the limit of ugliness, Cézanne's are beyond the limit. And ugliness in art is the sin against the Holy Ghost and condemns everything that a man may create in or out of art. And further on he says: "What's the use of asking whether he is a sound draughtman? Huysman spoke of his defective eyesight. But disease boasts its discoveries as well as health. The abnormal vision of Cézanne gave him glimpses of a 'reality' denied to other painters."

What a joker Huneker is! He knows as well as any one that sound drawing is the very foundation of any sane, not to speak of great art. Cézanne's lack of sound drawing condemns his work utterly and his "abnormal vision" made him see all things abnormally, crooked, cramped and diseased, as a crank with diseased eyes naturally always will. Here is proof furnished by Huneker himself that Cézanne's works came by their evidently diseased nature logically and fatally, and when he says: "Had Cézanne the 'temperament' that he was always. talking about?" (His constant talking about it is another sign of intellectual degeneration). “If so, it was not decorative in the rhetorical sense." (It surely does lack decorative beauty, and this lack makes it worthless.)

And then he continues: "A unwearying experimenter, he seldom finished a picture." All incompetent artists experiment, but never get anywhere. But why inflict on the public an experiment that is not finished? In art the public is only interested