Elie Faure e Joachim Gasquet - Paul Cézanne Seguido de o que Ele me Disse…

Élie Faure (1873-1937), a doctor but above all a writer, in newspapers, magazines, and books, conceived of art, all art, as "the great mystery of lyrical transposition," and of men as obscure "builders" with an ignored collective effort, responsible for the appearance of superior spirits in the world. [...] The text "Paul Cézanne" is from 1914 and is among those he dedicated to notable "builders of the world," that is, to authors of "an organizational work sketched in a destroyed society." In this light, the considerations that his History proposes about the painter are significant: "Even when he tries to compose, as in those extraordinary gatherings of nude figures where he made the effort, visibly obsessed by the memory of Poussin, to awkwardly construct a long sensual melody amidst the great chorus of trees, the vast sky, the flowing waters, he still shows himself free from any kind of psychological or literary intention." And his classicism, that need for order and measure that had haunted him since childhood, even then he was mistaken about its true meaning. He, a provincial, he, a Catholic, was in tune with the secret rhythm of his century, impelled towards the unknown organism, which hesitated, by profound forces of which he was no more aware than the stonemasons of the last Roman churches before a nave that was suddenly about to leap, lighten, lengthen, glide like a wing with the rising generation.

Joachim Gasquet (1873-1921) left in French literature an almost forgotten image of a lyric poet, and it has even been said that it was the strongest since Victor Hugo. […] He was only a day older than Élie Faure, but his lungs – ravaged by the hydrochloric gas of the chemical attacks of the First World War – reduced his life to forty-eight years, the last spent in an unsuccessful struggle for survival. Although Cézanne was a childhood friend of his father, Joachim only met him in April 1896 (the year of the portrait where we see him today, exhibited in the Prague Gallery of Modern Art, and with an appearance difficult to associate with the twenty-three years of age he was at that time). Between the two there was an intense relationship, the four years of meetings and letters that we will see reflected in "What He Told Me…", followed by periods of relative estrangement until the political disagreement that definitively separated them in 1904.