Neutral on Paul
Sir: There is a respect in which I welcome Paul Johnson's tirade against Cezanne's painting and influence on 20th-century art (And another thing, 17 February). Though blind to Cezanne's greatness, Johnson nonetheless detects the emptiness of most of what has been written and said in Cezanne's praise. He writes, 'Oddly enough, in all the hundreds of thousands of breathless words published in the last week about Cezanne's "masterpieces" it is nowhere explained why, precisely, they are worth admiring. Nor is this surprising. It cannot be done.' Why it hardly ever has been done is because almost all the writing and talking about the visual arts, and the current Cezanne exhibition in particular, has been by writers, with hardly a word sought from those who might reasonably be expected to have most of interest to say, namely, painters.
I recently reviewed for The Spectator a book co-written by the blind philosopher Martin Milligan in which he said, 'I think that it is quite right that we should demand of anything which is to be granted the sta- tus of knowledge that it should be express- ible in verbal language.' Although they would not necessarily put their name to such a belief, most writers seem to veer dangerously near to it when they write about painting. Here I would include most of the art historians, art critics, novelists, poets, politicians and the rest of the word- smiths who have been wheeled on in the last week or so to give their 'expert' opin- ions on azanne. When most of these peo- ple look at a painting by Cezanne they say, this is not what things look like, so either he is no good at painting figuratively (the Paul Johnson view) or he isn't really a figurative painter, he's the first abstract painter (the more sophisticated, art-world reading).
To judge Cdzanne like this is a bit like reading a poem that is in a foreign lan- guage with the unshakeable conviction that it has been written in English — the 'what I don't know isn't knowledge' principle. One would conclude either that the poem was nonsense, or that the poet was utterly incompetent with no grasp of the English language, or that the poet was an abstrac- tionist.
It takes time and humility to learn Cdzanne's new, decorative language of fig- uration. Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Gia- cometti and the hundreds of other artists who have done so were and are in no doubt about Cezanne's genius and are deeply indebted to him for having virtually rein- vented figurative painting at a time when it was being undermined by photography and the 'skilful' descriptive painting of the salons.
Sargy Mann
Lawn Meadow, Bridge Street, Bungay, Suffolk
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