Skip to main content

D.H. Lawrence on Cezanne

Paul Cezanne, "Still Life with Apples"
I have a book called Poets on Painters which contains essays long and short by many well-known twentieth century writers about artists. Here is the English novelist D. H. Lawrence talking about some of Cezanne's paintings:

Cezanne wanted something that was neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual. And to introduce into our world of vision something which is neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual-psychological requires a real revolution. It was a revolution Cezanne began, but which nobody, apparently, has been able to carry on.
He wanted to touch the world of substance once more with the intuitive touch, to be aware of it with the intuitive awareness, and to express it in intuitive terms. That is, he wished to displace our present mode of mental-visual consciousness, the consciousness of mental concepts, and substitute a mode of consciousness that was predominantly intuitive, the awareness of touch. In the past the primitives painted intuitively, but in the direction of out present mental-visual, conceptual form of consciousness. They were working away from their own intuition. Mankind has never been able to trust the intuitive consciousness, and the decision to accept that trust marks a very great revolution in the course of human development...When he said to his models: "Be an apple! Be an apple!" he was uttering the foreword to the fall not only of the Jesuits and the Christian idealists altogether, but to the collapse of our whole way of consciousness, and the substitution of another way.  If the human being is going to be primarily an apple, as for Cezanne it was, then you are going to have a new world of men: a world which has very little to say, men that can sit still and just be physically there, and be truly non-moral. That was what Cezanne meant with his: "Be an apple!" (1929)
In much of this, Lawrence is writing about himself rather than Cezanne, I think. For us, it's a settled fact of art history that Cezanne was the founder of a more scientific way of looking at nature, and of analysing reality. Lawrence sees the break from the traditions of realist painting in Cezanne's art, but he claims Cezanne for the very Lawrentian cause of living your life by following your most essential human desires and urges. Lawrence grew up, like me, in a mining town, and came to despise what he saw as the effects of industrialism on modern lives, not merely in terms of poverty and physical degradation, but the way he thought it led to a whole world of mechanised human beings who were fucked up on the inside, by suppressing their natural animal instincts. A lot of that "he felt the desire in his blood" stuff makes us laugh, nowadays, and rightly so. But there's a lot of stuff here to agree with -- particularly that idea of the muteness of the object that Cezanne tried to capture ("Be an apple!")

Popular posts from this blog

Restoring my Printing Press

I've just finished restoring and assembling my large etching press -- a six week process involving lots of rust removal, scrubbing with steel wool, and repainting. Here is a photo of the same kind of press from the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative: And here is a short YouTube video of me testing the press, making sure the motor still works after nearly seven years of lying in storage:

Brancusi in Plastic

Artist Mary Ellen Croteau is showing these columns made from recycled plastic cartons and lids in the window of the Columbia College bookstore on Michigan Avenue. They are a playful homage to Brancusi's "Endless Columns", with a serious environmental message for our times: Image copyright Inhabitat.com and Mary Ellen Croteau Mary Ellen also runs a wonderful experimental art gallery in a window space in west Chicago, called Art on Armitage . I will be exhibiting a mixed media piece there during August 2012.

How to etch a linoleum block

Linoleum as a material for printmaking has been used for nearly a hundred years now. Normally, you cut an image out using special gouges similar to woodcut tools, cutting away the lino around the image you want to print. This is called relief printmaking, because if you look at the block from the side, the material that remains stands up in relief from the backing material. You then roll ink with a brayer over the surface of the block, place paper over it, and either print by hand or run it through a press. You can do complex things this way (for example, reduction linocuts), but the beauty of the process is that it is quick, simple, and direct. Incised lino block, from me.redith.com Etched lino block, from Steve Edwards A few years ago, I saw some prints that were classified as coming from etched linoleum blocks, and I loved the textures I saw in them. In the last few months, I've been trying to use this technique in my own studio, learning about it as one does these d