Cézanne at the Musée du Luxembourg

My apologies if I’m repeating myself, but I think I said this only on Facbeook so far. Before lunch I did have the chance to visit the Cézanne show currently up in the rather small space at the Musée du Luxembourg.

No fewer than four of the paintings are ones that I saw within the past year at various American museums: Portland, Chicago, Providence, and Philadelphia. I remember each and every one of them.

It’s a strange experience to see the same painting in such different places as Paris and these others. It also highlights the fact that I really love Cézanne.

Why do I love Cézanne? Well, apart from the usual ineffable things that make us love this or that artist, musician, or author, I love Cézanne for his aptitude at what McLuhan would call retrieval. That is to say, I hate it when people try to make advances by mere extrapolation, as though the breakthroughs of yesterday simply need to be intensified in order to yield the breakthroughs of tomorrow.

For example, if someone were to say “the trend in philosophy has been away from realism, and thus philosophy in the future must be even less realistic in order to avoid becoming reactionary,” this is an example of the lazy method of extrapolation at work. History simply doesn’t work that way most of the time. History often works by strange reversals, and quite often they aren’t “reactionary,” but more like the recovery of old insights for the purposes of a new medium.

Leibniz is a good example of this. The true plurality of myriad individual substances seemed to be on the ropes after Descartes and Spinoza. Leibniz brought it back. Substantial forms seemed to belong to a fossilized, moribund Scholasticism that the 17th century seemed to have annihilated; he brought them back. And he didn’t do these things in “reactionary” fashion at all, but translated them into a modern idiom.

This, in my eyes, is the hardest thing to do. It’s relatively easy to take a principle that your predecessors discovered and make it even more radical. At times this can be heroic as well, but often it’s simply robotic.

What Leibniz did so well was revive much of what was good about the Scholastics.

The same with Cézanne in painting. After the impressionists had begun to break down the tradition of three-dimensional illusionistic painting dominant since the Renaissance, Cézanne felt that something was being lost. He worked in depressing isolation for decades trying to save what was being lost. And he saved it, while adapting it.

And ironically, this apparent throwback is the one who paved the way for radical cubism, just as Leibniz in some respects paved the way for the very radical Einstein. History has strange twists in that way.

But avoid extrapolating radicalism as a method, at all costs. Too often it will turn you into a parody, not an innovator.