m not here to speak; I am concerned only with its
influence. Taking the thing at its roughest and simplest, one may say
that the influence of Cezanne during the last seventeen years has
manifested itself most obviously in two characteristics--Directness and
what is called Distortion. Cezanne was direct because he set himself a
task which admitted of no adscititious flourishes--the creation of form
which should be entirely self-supporting and intrinsically significant,
_la possession de la forme_ as his descendants call it now. To this
great end all means were good: all that was not a means to this end was
superfluous. To achieve it he was prepared to play the oddest tricks
with natural forms--to distort. All great artists have distorted;
Cezanne was peculiar only in doing so more consciously and thoroughly
than most. What is important in his art is, of course, the beauty of his
conceptions and his power in pursuit: indifference to verisimilitude is
but the outward and visible sign of this inward and spiritual grace. For
some, however, though not for most of his followers his distortion had
an importance of its own.

To the young painters of 1904, or thereabouts, Cezanne came as the
liberator: he it was who had freed painting from a mass of conventions
which, useful once, had grown old and stiff and were now no more than so
many impediments to expression. To most of them his chief importance--as
an influence, of course--was that he had removed all unnecessary
barriers between what they felt and its realization in form. It was
his directness that was thrilling. But to an important minority the
distortions and simplifications--the reduction of natural forms to
spheres, cylinders, cones, etc.--which Cezanne had used as means were
held to be in themselves of consequence because capable of fruitful
development. From them it was found possible to deduce a theory of
art--a complete aesthetic even. Put on a fresh track by Cezanne's
practice, a group of gifted and thoughtful painters began to speculate
on the nature of form and its appeal to the aesthetic sense, and not to
speculate only, but to materialize their speculations. The greatest
of them, Picasso, invented Cubism. If I call these artists who forged
themselves a theory of form and used it as a means of expression
Doctrinaires it is because to me that name bears no disparaging
implication and seems to indicate well enough what I take to be their
one common characteristic: