Since Czanne Author:Clive Bell General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1922 Original Publisher: Harcourt Brace Subjects: Art Post-impressionism (Art) Art, Modern Impressionism Art / General Art / Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions Art / Criticism Art / History / General Art / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945) Ar... more »t / Popular Culture Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Was he really a great painter ? TA new generation is beginning to ask the question that we answered, once and for all as we thought, ten years ago. Yes, of course, the douanier was -- a remarkable painter. The man who influenced Derain, and to some extent Picasso, is not likely to have been less. But a great painter ? For the present, at any rate, let us avoid great words. In 1903, when first I lived in Paris, Rousseau appeared to be very much " in the movement." That was because by nature he was what thoughtful and highly trained artists were making themselves by an effort: he was direct. To us it seemed, in those days, that a mass of scientific irrelevancies and intellectual complications had come between the artist and his vision, and, again, between the vision and its expression. In a desperately practical and well-organized age, which recognized objects by their labels and never dreamed of going beneath these to discover the things themselves, artists, we thought, were in danger of losing the very stuff of which visual art is made -- the direct, emotional reaction to the visible universe. People had grown so familiar with the idea of a cup, with that purely intellectual label " cup," that they never looked at a particular cup and felt its emotional significance. Also, professional painters had provided themselves with a marv...« less