Page 2 -  CJack Tworko - Four Exerpts .... / November

other blood-entities. Universality is in number, in discreteness, not in continuousness; in a running out all over as if there were no boundary. In the many there is number, awareness, universality. In the one is substance.

A container must be closed to what it contains. But it can be open to other substances. A basket designed to contain pebbles may leak sand. A net is closed to fish and open to the water, as it must be. To be closed and open is a necessary and simultaneous function of all vessels. A completely closed vessel is the end. A completely open vessel is without substance.

September 8, 1953

Picasso very often turns to the primitive and paints like a primitive. Matisse allowed his early start to be influenced by children�s work. But neither artist displays anything in his nature that could be called innocent. To paint like a primitive would have been inconceivable to Cezanne. Yet what really impresses about Cezanne�s style, as much as its complexity, is its complete un-self-conscious innocence.

Picasso and Matisse are extremely facile. Either one could as well have been a stage designer, a chic window-display artist, an engineer or a magnificent ultra-smart tailor. They would have been modern and successful at whatever work they might have turned to. Such a facility was by his nature

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denied to  Cezanne. He turned to art, I suspect, because he would have failed at nearly everything else. He nearly failed at art. Yet more than Matisse or Picasso he is the very image of the artist in our time. Picasso is modern but he is not necessarily of our time. If he had been born in the Renaissance he would have carved out his career with the same authoritarian vehemence. Not Cezanne. It is possible for him to be an artist only in the peculiar conditions of our time-at this moment only, when the artist ceases to be a master-craftsman, entrepreneur, the servant of prince, church, or merchant. Cezanne has almost none of the virtues or talents which make a career in society. He lacks the guile, the scheming, the carefully built up façade, the ruthlessness, the readiness for treachery. True, he longs for success, for a recognition even from the most hostile and unlikely quarters, but he longs always in terms that are manifested in his paintings, through his paintings, for his paintings.

Cezanne is the very image of the artist in our time: the alienated intellectual deeply concerned with meaning, awkward with all those who get along smoothly in life, and especially awkward in fashionable settings, slightly incompetent, and lost beside those whose religion is to get on in the world. He is a person, however, who in this innermost center has a fierce pride and sure conviction about the values of the artist in the world.

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