ABSTRACT
Cézanne and Bion each rejected the idea of himself as a master. ‘Ne m’appelez pas maître’, snapped the painter to Gasquet. Cézanne turned his back on the Parisian art world, where, in theory, he might have founded a ‘Cézanne school’, preferring the independence and relative seclusion of Aix. ‘To paint’, said Cézanne, ‘is to record our coloured sensations’. The painter’s own understanding of the childlike rests in large part on Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, in Emile; ou, De l’éducation, had suggested that a child’s ‘sensations’ are imbued with pleasure or pain and therefore carry meaning. Cézanne’s form-finding activity as a painter grew out of a practice and a craft so deeply internalised over time that it can feel to the viewer as if the forms have grown spontaneously out of the landscape itself. Furthermore, Cézanne made for himself the gripping discovery, already familiar to the painters, that there are no lines visible in themselves.
