Slouching to Philistia...

But in all fairness, Lucy, I gotta say that I do not like--do not get--the art of Paul Cézanne.  At all.  What I see in one of Cézanne's so labored/laborious paintings is an indifferent, dull/drab

color sense and piss-poor draughtsmanship.  I mean, the man couldn't draw for sour apples.  I realize of course that no one's on my side in this, and that people like Monet and Renoir would have said that my opinion of Cézanne is vulgar and ignorant--although during his lifetime the opinion that  he was an inept draughtsman was fairly common, and it was often said that the reason he did so few nudes was that he simply didn't, or couldn't, draw the human form very well.

And yet further, I must say that the most favorable and sympathetic criticism of Cézanne's art (including the kind remarks of Monet and Renoir) has a distinctly hollow, suspiciously empty sound.  Like the faint, distant, heart-stopping rattle from the bottom of a funerary urn, or the suggestive hint or whiff of something unmentionable which ought long ago to have been voided:

"You could say that good art speaks in a language we know: we get the message, then move on.  Great art seems to speak in a foreign language we imagine we'll get with long enough immersion.  And then 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...

"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, and then can't.  Tapping his head [Cézanne] 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 in."  ----Blake Gopnik (in Newsweek)