私醫聯招◆英文題庫下載題庫

Paul Cézanne is one of the greatest artists of all time. One could say that good art speaks in a language we know: we get the message and then move on. Great art seems to speak in a foreign language we imagine we’ll get with long enough immersion. However, there’s Cézanne, who is like the sound of water dripping or the clank of a train. It’s just there to be known, full of meaning and pleasure, somehow, but without a hope of translation. 

With most of Cézanne’s rivals, however superb, there are certain banalities we utter that also happen to be true: Michelangelo is about cosmic drama and heroic bodies; Monet is about light and brushwork and modern French life. With Cézanne, we don’t have the backup of truisms. Or rather, the ones that do get trotted out are all simply wrong. “Cézanne reduces the world to a few geometric solids”—ludicrous to anyone who really looks at his stew of shapes. “Cézanne simply stared harder at the world than other artists”—absurd to anyone who recognizes how little looking at a Cézanne apple is like looking at a real one. “Cézanne is only about composition and color”—impossible, given how much he labors over getting his card players right as humans. 

There are other great artists who will puzzle us forever—James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Arnold Schoenberg—but that puzzlement seems to come from their willful complexity. Whereas it seems as though Cézanne wants to keep things simple but then can’t. Tapping his head, he once said, “Painting . . . it’s inside here.” The glory of his art is that, no matter how hard we try, we can never quite see it.