Czanne: Words and Deeds

Author(s): Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss

Source: October, Vol. 84 (Spring, 1998), pp. 31-43
Published by: The MIT Press
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Cezanne: Words and Deeds*

YVE-ALAIN BOIS
Translated by Rosalind Krauss
What we know about what is called Cezanne's theory we know through snippets
(reported conversations or maxims, a few sentences on painting in letters to his
son or to young admirers), almost the whole of it dating from the last years of his
life. Even further, Cezanne had a rather ambivalent relation to theory itselfnever ceasing to speak of its necessity and yet of his mistrust of ready-made theories,
which he called doctrines: "I don't have a doctrine like Bernard, but theories are
necessary, the sensation and theories."l
For him, theory was truly indissociable from practice; based on accumulated
experience, it is the logic permitting "the organization of one's sensations" and
thus the "realization," that is, the proposition in painting not of a "servile copy,"
but of a "harmony parallel to nature," an equivalence of relations. Cezanne's
remarks on the necessary connection between eye and brain, which must be
developed in tandem so as "to arrive at the 'realization,'" are numerous, but
perhaps nowhere does he indicate more clearly than in one of his last letters to
Aurenche how much what he calls "reflection" concerns the whole gamut of his
pictorial means:
In your letter you speak of my realization in art. I believe that I attain
it more every day, although a bit laboriously. Because if the strong
sensation for nature-and certainly I have that vividly-is the necessary
basis for all artistic conception and that on which the grandeur and
beauty of all future work rests, the knowledgeof the means of expressingour
emotionis no less essential and is only to be acquired through a very
long experience.2
*
This essay was first delivered at the symposia held in conjunction with the Cezanne retrospective,
organized by the Musee d'Orsay (Paris, November 1995) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (May
1996). For the acts of the Paris symposium, see Cizanne aujourd'hui, ed. Francoise Cachin, Henri
Loyrette, and Stephane Guegan (Paris: Editions de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1997).
1.
Cited by Maurice Denis in his journal (1906); reprinted in Conversationsavec Cizanne, ed. P. M.
Doran (Paris: Editions Macula, 1978), p. 94.
2.
Cezanne to Louis Aurenche, January 25, 1904, in Letters,ed. John Rewald (New York: Hacker
Art Books, 1976), p. 299 (translation modified, my emphasis).
OCTOBER84, Spring 1998, pp. 31-43. C 1998 Yve-AlainBois.

32

OCTOBER

Hence the difficulty posed by having to put together a theory composed of

those snatches of Cezanne's conversation that we possess. Cezanne's famous
doubt about his capacity to "realize"is a worry about the validity of his theory as
well, namely about the knowledge he himself could have of his means.

I will begin with the very well known. Immediately following his injunction
to Bernard according to which one must "treat nature by means of the cylinder,
the sphere, the cone, all of it put in perspective," Cezanne adds:
Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, that is, a section of nature
or, if you prefer, of the spectacle that the Pater omnipotens,aeterneDeus
spreads out before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give
depth. But nature for us humans is more in depth than in surface,
whence the necessity to introduce into our light vibrations, represented
by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of bluish tones, to give the
feeling of air.3
We are used to explaining these remarks by attributing them to the classical
tenets about monocular perspective and aerial perspective that Cezanne could
have read about in a manual of the period. All right. But how do we explain the
linkage of the ideas? If the "perpendiculars to this horizon" give us depth, why not
be entirely satisfied with recourse to that? Why add "But nature for us humans is
more in depth than in surface, whence the necessity to introduce ... a sufficient
amount of bluish tones"? Why this but, and why this supplement of bluish tones?
All the more in that Cezanne, if he does make excessive use of blue, rarely seems
to adhere to the principle of aerial perspective itself. In terms of their local tone
and contours, distant objects are seldom more blue and less well defined than
near ones. In fact, what is often very striking in his work, and not only in the late
paintings, is the way an object or a colored plane surges forth from the distance
like an unexpected arrow to interpellate the spectator by coming toward him. The
most arresting example is perhaps in the 1896 Lac d'Annecy,with its prismatic
chateau as both "culminating point" of the picture and center of the compositionbut this type of violent denial of aerial perspective is frequent from the 1880s
onward, notably in the first of the Sainte-Victoires.
Commenting on the passage from the letter to Bernard just cited, Theodore
Reff has brought to bear a less well known statement by Cezanne to Jean Royere,
but has cut something from its opening on which I would, to the contrary, want to
insist:
You see it. .... It [Sainte-Victoire] is distant from us by a good way, in
itself it is rather massive. At the Beaux-Arts you learn, of course, the
3.

Cezanne to Emile Bernard, April 15, 1904, in ibid., p. 301 (translation modified).

Cezanne: Words and Deeds

33

Cezanne.The Lac d'Annecy. 1896.

laws of perspective, but one has never seen that depth results from the
conjunction of vertical and horizontal surfaces and it is that very thing
that is perspective.4
A peculiar formulation which I will put in direct relation to the Lac d'Annecy(the
remark is almost contemporary with the picture), where the meeting of verticals
and horizontals is particularly noticeable. Indeed, what do we in fact see there if
not a veritable reversal? The surface of the water-the very quintessence of
horizontality--not only becomes a perfectly flat wall as in certain landscapes from
L'Estaque, particularly the one belonging to Picasso, but a wall striated with vertical
lines, those "perpendiculars to the horizon" meant "to give depth" to us. Yet they
don't deliver it to us, this depth; they have rather the tendency to deny it and to
4.
Jean Royere, "Paul Cezanne, Erinnerungen," Kunst und Kiinstler(1912), in Conversations,p. 189
n. 1; discussed by Theodore Reff, "Painting and Theory in the Final Decade," in Cezanne: The Late
Work,ed. William Rubin (New York:Museum of Modern Art, 1977), p. 46.

34

OCTOBER

act like a reverse repoussoirthat propels the chateau's leading edge toward us: like
the Sainte-Victoire, it is perhaps "distant from us by a good way,"but it is "in itself
rather massive."
This matter of distance seems to have obsessed Cezanne during his last
years. Francis Jourdain expressed surprise at hearing him say "that one of his
most constant preoccupations was to render the real distance between eye and
object sensible."5 This surprise, that we perhaps share, is little abated by the linkage of ideas in these remarks to Karl Ernst Osthaus: "The main thing, in a picture,
is to find the correct distance. The color had to express all the ruptures in
depth."6 That is: it is up to color to supplement the insufficiencies of linear
perspective (in the same way as the "bluish tones" of the atmosphere in the letter
of Bernard). We should note in passing that here it is no longer a question of aerial
perspective (which presupposes a continuous and homogenous space), but of
ruptures, which strikes me as being closer to Cezanne's painting.
I nonetheless leave to one side this practice of "depth through color," so
admired by Matisse and so studied by Lawrence Gowing, to linger briefly once
more over this anxiety about distance, which I wish to connect to another remark
to Bernard, speaking "of planes which fall on top of one another," a problem
which "neo-impressionism" tries to resolve by circumscribing "the contours with a
black line, a fault which must be fought at all costs."7 Putting these "planes which
fall on top of one another" in relation in turn with the collapse of horizontal
surfaces into verticality that is so pronounced in many of Cezanne's paintings (for
example the Courtauld's PlasterCupid [circa 1895]), I can only agree with Rosalind
Krauss's analysis in seeing this type of picture as marking the emergence, for the
first time in the history of Western art since the Renaissance, of a hiatus-or
rather the recognition of a hiatus-between the purely visual space of projection
(on the vertical plane of the painting) and the tactile and carnal space in which
our bodies participate. As Krauss has shown in relation to the paintings Picasso
made in 1909 at Horta de Ebro, paintings which she connects directly to the
Cezanne of the PlasterCupid,this disjunction between the vertical cut of the visual
field and the lateral extension of tactility, where "depth is what occurs when the
ground gives way below one's feet," results in a crisis, a doubt about vision's own
capacity to give us access to depth.8 Kahnweiler reports this paradoxical remark
by Picasso: "In a Raphael painting it is not possible to establish the distance from
the tip of the nose to the mouth. I should like to paint pictures in which that
would be possible."9 Of course, we need to recognize the irony in this remark, and
5.
FrancisJourdain, Cezanne(1950), in Conversations,p. 84 n. 1.
Karl Ernst Osthaus, "Cezanne,"Das Feuer(1920-21), in Conversations,p. 97 n. 1.
6.
7.
Cezanne to Emile Bernard, October 23, 1905, in Letters,p. 317.
Rosalind Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign," in Picasso and Braque:A Symposium,ed. William
8.
Rubin and Lynn Zelevansky (New York:Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 267-70.
9.
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism (1920), trans. Henry Aronson (New York:
Wittenborn, 1949), p. 8. On this point, see the remarks by Leo Steinberg reported in my "Kahnweiler's
Lesson," in Painting as Model(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 282 n. 18.

Cezanne: Words and Deeds

35

above all it is my hope that we don't return to the types of "geometrical" reading
of Cezanne that have dominated interpretation for so long and that now seem
finally to have been put out to pasture. But Picasso's fundamental doubt about
illusionistic depth and the idea according to which it is no longer possible in
painting if, as Cezanne said, one owes the truth, seems to me to have the same
source as that which leads Cezanne to fold the ground plane vertically over the
elevation in the lower part of some of his paintings, as if, as the space between
himself and the represented object narrowed, he were forced to lower his eyes to
take in his feet.

Let us return to the letter to Bernard with which I opened. The famous
phrase about "the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone" has given rise, as we know,
to many, many commentaries, most frequently wholly erroneous (we know how
the "cube" has been added in an apocryphal manner to this formula and what use
has been made of this new minting by those who have wanted to read Cubism as a
geometrical exercise for which Cezanne was the precursor). We know today,
thanks to Reff and Gowing, who have both paid more attention than have their
predecessors to the remarks reported by Riviere and Schnerb, that the famous
formula concerns more the general rotundity of volumes and surfaces such as
they appear to perception than any geometrical stylization of bodies. (To recall:
Riviere and Schnerb note that when Cezanne spoke of the spherical quality of
bodies he was not only thinking of all those balls, apples or otherwise, that fill his
paintings, like those ready to tumble down the slope of the Plaster Cupid,but also
of perfectly planar surfaces, such as a wall; in this there would perhaps be an element
to add to the file set up by Reff concerning the relations between Cezanne and
Chardin, whose walls are always established as curving behind his still lifes, even if
they are most often concave.)10
Gowing has very carefully studied the implication of this principle of general
sphericness on what Cezanne called his "modulation" of color. Here I would like
to return to an aspect of this question that has not been sufficiently noticed, one
that concerns the organic character of Cezanne's volumes, particularly in the
landscape paintings and watercolors. The late views of the Bibemus quarry and
the rocks and grottos of the Chateau Noir are certainly the most spectacular from
this point of view,11but everywhere in differing degrees we can detect this tendency to make every form into an organ (for example in the Rocks at L'Estaqueof
1879-82). It has often been noted that the solids that Cezanne lists in his letter to
Bernard have no arris (as he said to Riviere and Schnerb, "I am applying myself to
10.
See Theodore Reff, "Cezanne and Chardin," in Cezanneaujourd'hui,pp. 11-28.
11.
See Cezanne,exhibition catalogue (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1995), nos. 149-51,
p. 175.

Sea at L'Estaque. 1878-79.

i
iii!ilAfit

Rocks at L'Estaque. 1879-82.

-.

Cezanne:Wordsand Deeds

37

portraying the cylindrical side of objects").12 But this interest in curvature has
been connected to considerations of perspective, whereas the simple fact that
Cezanne adds "all of it put in perspective," after having listed cylinder, sphere, and
cone, would indicate that it is not a question of the same thing. I would thus
rather tie this absence of arris to the idea not of a geometric body (and of visual
projection), but to the idea of touch, of "contact," as Cezanne would say (and, if
you want, of caress). We know that Cezanne was panicked by the idea of being
touched, and I wonder if this phobia might not be directly symmetrical with what
he wanted to realize in painting and thus also with the doubt about vision I
evoked above.
Cezanne wrote to Bernard that one must "penetrate what is before oneself,"
which can easily be taken in a banal manner as relating to the traditional optics
from which perspective's visual projection issues.13 But if we relate this saying (with
all the erotic connotations it implies) to the sense of touch, we change registers,
and perhaps we approach more precisely what Cezanne wanted to attempt, namely,
to splice vision and touch together at the very moment when the two sensory fields
were in the process of splitting apart: in some way to invent a tactile vision.
We know how constitutive the sense of touch was in Cezanne's practice
(Richard Shiff has already insisted on this)14 and all that he owed to Courbet in
this domain. But if we pass from the minimal unity of the stroke or "touch" to the
ensemble of the painting, it seems to me that the debt to Courbet is no less great:
the very anthropomorphicizing landscapes of the latter-for example, the famous
series of the Sourceof the Loue (1863-64)-are
marked by an impossible desire to
penetrate into the body of the motif. 15 Perhaps because of how much he learned
from Pissarro, Cezanne knew-more than did Courbet-that this was impossible
(and he would doubtless have considered literal anthropomorphism, such as
Degas had mobilized it in certain of his landscapes, vulgar). But Brice Marden's
quip treating the Montagne Saint-Victoireas a "giant tit" is not the simple schoolboy
R. P. Riviere and J. F. Schnerb, "Cezanne's Atelier" (1907), in Cezannein Perspective,ed. Judith
12.
Wechsler (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 60.
13.
Cezanne to Emile Bernard, May 26, 1904, in Letters,p. 304 (translation modified).
14.
Richard Shiff, "La touche de Cezanne: entre vision impressionniste et vision symboliste," in
Cezanneaujourd'hui,pp. 117-24.
15.
On the anthropomorphic character of Courbet's landscapes and still lifes, see Michael Fried,
Courbet'sRealism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 238-54. See also
Fried's remarks on Cezanne in Manet's Modernism,or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 607 n. 31, which was published after this paper was
delivered.
Another important essay appeared shortly after the Cezanne symposium: T. J. Clark's "Freud's
Cezanne," Representations 52 (Fall 1995), pp. 94-122. Although Clark is chiefly concerned with
Cezanne's Barnes and Philadelphia Bathers, in which there is little "air" indeed (and which thus
contradict what I am proposing here), he demonstrates as well the exceptional status of these works,
noting the paucity and general embarrassment of the literature about them. But I view what he has to
say in general about Cezanne's "materialism,"about Cezanne's desire to "materializethe play of phantasy,"
and the connection he makes between this and the pre-psychoanalyic, positivist (but one could almost
also say "atomist") Freud, as a direct confirmation of my own ruminations.

38

OCTOBER

Sainte-Victoire seen from Les Lauves. 1902-4.

joke that it might at first seem.16 In any event I like Vollard's memory, no matter
how unreliable, according to which one of the first buyers of Cezanne was a person
blind from birth.17
*

The name of Marden, who said that Cezanne was one of his heroes, allows
me to return to the matter of thefeeling of air mentioned in the letter to Bernard,
and to raise a point that might seem to contradict this idea of organic tactility that
I have been sketching. I have already expressed my skepticism about Cezanne's use
of a true aerial perspective and thus my doubt over the status he accorded to his
16.
Cited in Robert Mahoney, interview with Brice Marden, "This Is What Things Are About,"
FlashArt(November 1990), p. 120.
17.
Ambroise Vollard, "Souvenirs sur Cezanne," Minotaure2, no. 6 (1935), p. 14.

Cezanne:Wordsand Deeds

39

"bluish tones." However, I am far from admitting that there is no air in Cezanne's
paintings. I would even go so far as to say that his works are themselves lungs, that
they breathe. And if the Cezannean stroke permits this respiration, this is above all
because it is discrete, discontinuous, and because it presupposes a void-as in the
classical physics of Lucretius, of which Cezanne was an avid reader.
To say this telegraphically, Cezanne's touch, by means of which he transcribed
his "little sensation," his "coloring sensations," was the bridge between his pigment
and the substances, forms, and spatiality of the world: it was an abstraction, practically a musical form of notation, but it was what allowed him to conceive his
paintings as worlds under construction, similar-in their mode of existence for
our perception-to nature itself. As Merleau-Ponty has so well noted, to look at a
Cezanne, particularlya late watercolor, is to see simultaneously its molecular surface
and the depicted object in the act of germinating under our very eyes. However,
we should make slightly clearer how this "germination" works.
I mention watercolor here because this is where we can best grasp Cezanne's
process: his late canvases-Gowing and many others have noted this-adopt a
type of colored construction first explored in watercolor, but I would even say that
the work of his "couillarde" period, above all his portraits and several still lifes,
already seem to me a contradictory anticipation of this method that he couldn't
yet envision (contradictory because the heavy facture of the "couillarde" period,
although strictly atomic, could only prevent the transparency and fluidity essential to
this very method).
What then is this method? It is a matter of a molecular process which is not
simply additive, but multiplying. His works are geologically constructed of layers,
or rather of levels, of skeins of molecules more or less loose, each skein responding
both to the one that precedes it and to the whiteness of the support. None of
these levels entirely fuses with the others. Cezanne is very careful that his colors
don't mix (we know he had a violent dislike of mixture and how his extremely varied palette astonished Bernard)18: the atoms must remain identifiable as such
(the transparency of watercolor, its very rapid drying time, were perfect for this
end). Superimpositions (where the atoms partially cover each other) engender
various colored modulations but are always discernable as combinations of primary
atoms. However, as I've said, this process wasn't additive; despite the temptation
that one might have to retrace the artist's elaboration step by step, this is always
in vain: Cezanne's works cancel the linearity of time; they breathe.

I will allow myself here to quote a commentary at length, particularly

because it has been a bit forgotten. It's from a text by Max Raphael, posthumously
Seenfrom
published in 1968, the pretext for which was above all the Sainte-Victoire
Les Lauves (1902-4) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
18.

Emile Bernard, "Souvenirs sur Paul Cezanne" (1907), in Conversations,p. 61 n. 1.

OCTOBER

40

Let us consider the nearest plane: a dark area made up of various violets
and greens. One color (violet) is decomposed into a warm (reddish)
tone and a cold (bluish) tone; the first comes forward, the second
recedes. This creates a tension which sets these tones apart yet relates
them to each other, so that they seem to belong to distinct layers
although there is no perceptible space between them. The number of
layers employing the same color varies, but whether the contrast involves
two or more layers, our actual perception is one not of movement but of
tension. In consequence, perception of time is eliminated from our perception of three-dimensionality; or, to be more exact, we do not perceive
time as elapsing while we become aware of a multiplicity of layers.19
This passage is complex but it seems to me that in it Raphael gets to something that is unique to Cezanne, at least before Pollock, something that specifically
fascinated Marden, namely, this abolition of perceptual time, corresponding to an
infinite copenetration of levels that nevertheless remain discrete. Here's what
Marden said of Pollock, but he could just as well be speaking of Cezanne, since for
a long time Marden has read the one in terms of the other:
You look at the colors and the marks, and you try to redraw them. You
look at the blacks and you follow the way they went on the canvas, then
you follow the whites, say, then the browns.... But there's always some
point where you lose the trail; you just can't read it because it never
reads as layering. It's nice to think, well, he did the black all at the same
time and we can follow those marks, but when you really start looking
at the painting, there are places where the black is over the white, and
then there are places where the white is over the black. I don't really
knowhow he was working those colors, how he could go back and forth
between colors and layers. The colors may look layered, but I think
there was a more organic flow between what looks like the bottom
layer and what looks like the top layer.... and all those marks and colors
become the real space of the painting.20
This is also perhaps-and here I am referring to a hobbyhorse of my ownwhat relates not only Pollock and Cezanne but both of them to the interlacing
Mondrian effected in his last pictures, weavings that put a space into play that is
not purely visual and thus illusionistic but tactile as well.
*

After this excursion into twentieth-century art, I would like to raise a last
Max Raphael, "The World of Art and the Model in Nature," TheDemands of Art (London: 1968),
19.
pp. 21-22.
Brice Marden, lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 16, 1989, cited in
20.
Brenda Richardson, BriceMarden: ColdMountains (Houston: Fine Arts Press, 1991), p. 43.

Portraitof the Gardener

Vallier. 1906.

point that touches on the famous "unfinished" condition of a large part of

Cezanne's works. This state of "unfinish" is of course not that, and the many commentators on this-from Riviere and Schnerb to Renoir and Matisse-have noted
that every canvas, every watercolor by Cezanne, whatever the moment in the
process at which it has been "interrupted," is always structured as a totality. It is
what, speaking elsewhere of Matisse's debt to C6zanne, I have called "the economy
of the session": Cezanne stops when the ensemble holds and each session, even if
it takes up a picture in process and already reworked a hundred times, is an
absolute recommencement.21 Whence the famous remark made to Vollard about
the two tiny points of empty canvas, or reserve, in his portrait: "If I put something
here by guesswork, I might have to paint the whole canvas over, starting from that
point."22 The whites of Cezanne are thus not open sores but the unavoidable
consequence of his way of working: they are void spaces that are as constructive as
the filled-in ones; at least that's the way Matisse read them.
21.
22.

See my "Matisse and 'Arche-Drawing',"in Painting as Model,pp. 48-51.

Vollard, Paul Cezanne(1914), in Cezannein Perspective,p. 64.

42

OCTOBER

However, Cezanne seems to have complained of these reserve zones (he put
them down to his age and as "abstractions" that are engendered in him by the
"coloring sensations, which give the light").23And in the light of his most workedover canvases-the lumpy portraits from the end, for example those of Vallier or
the Pushkin Museum's Sainte-Victoire-and taking account of what he said to
Riviere and Schnerb in front of the Barnes Foundation GreatBathersas well, namely,
that he wanted "to paint with a loaded brush, like Courbet,"24we might wonder if
the destiny of all of Cezanne's works, even those whose aerated respiration we
acclaim, was not to end by being dark and saturated with matter, as had been the
works of the "couillarde" period.
The contradiction on this point between Cezanne's declared intentions and
the omnipresence of the whites in his painting has been the focus of numerous
commentaries, but even so I would like to return to the matter of the reserve. I
want to bring to bear on this the well-known remarks about the unity of color and
drawing: "Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you
draw."25Rather than wanting to read them, as has been rightly done, as signs of a
simple refusal of linearism on Cezanne's part (and thus in terms of the line/color
alternative as that has been debated in France since the seventeenth century), I
would here like to fold these remarks into the generic issue of the relations
between painting and drawing.
Contrary to what the history of art makes us think, connoisseurs have never
judged paintings and drawings according to the same criteria and have always
been conscious of the fact that they don't belong to the same historical time: from
Pontormo to Poussin, from Guercino to Tiepolo, the art of drawing evolved in a
framework of conventions very different from that of painting (many things
permitted in drawing would never have been accepted in painting). Now, the
major difference between the space of drawing and that of painting concerns the
nature of the support. Since the time of Alberti, the picture plane is assumed as
transparent in painting, but the condition sine qua non of this transparency is
that the supporting ground be covered over without reserve. Conversely, as Walter
Benjamin has remarked, "the graphic line can exist only against this background,
so that a drawing that completely covered its background would cease to be a drawing."26Benjamin made this remark after having seen a show of Picasso's Cubist
paintings, precisely because they seemed to him to put this simple opposition
into question: he would very well have been as troubled by a Cezanne exhibition,
without doubt the first painter to have abolished this constitutive difference.
And maybe it's just for that, for having canceled the difference between
23.
Cezanne to Emile Bernard, October 23, 1905, in Letters,p. 316 (translation modified).
Riviere and Schnerb, "Cezanne's Atelier,"p. 63 (translation modified).
24.
25.
Reported by Emile Bernard; see "Opinion," in Cezannein Perspective,p. 42.
Walter Benjamin, "Painting, or Signs and Marks" (1917), in WalterBenjamin: SelectedWritings,
26.
Volume1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 1996), p. 83.

Cezanne: Words and Deeds

43

these two historically heterogeneous registers, that Cezanne is the father of modern
art. It remains to be seen if such was his intention. I personally believe that he was
obliged to do this: if, as Merleau-Ponty has stated, Cezanne's goal was to paint
perception itself, and if, as he himself put it, he wanted "to see as a newborn,"27
that is to say, at the very moment of an originary discrimination, he would have
had to activate the opposition between figure and ground that is at the foundation
of our human perception; and the ascent of the support-namely, the contamination of the pictorial field by the graphic one-was the best route to take, or perhaps,
even, the only one.

27.

Report byJules Borely (1911); reprinted in Conversationsavec Cezanne, p. 22 n. 1.