"The time, moreover, that a person requires - as I required in the case of this sonata - to penetrate a work of my depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of the years, the centuries even, that must elapse before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new. So that the man of genius, to spare himself the ignorant contempt of the world may say to himself that, since one's contemporaries are incapable of the necessary detachment, works written for posterity should be ready by posterity alone, like certain pictures which one cannot appreciate when one stands too close o them. But in realithy any such cowardly precaution to avoid false judgments is doomed to failure; they are unavoidable. The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply. It was Beethoven's quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth) that devoted half a century to form, fashioning and enlarging the audience for Beethoven's quartets, thus marking, like every great work of art, an advance if not in the quality of artists at least in the community of minds, largely composes to-day of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of appreciating it. What is called posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work (leaving out of account, for simplicity's sake, the contingency that several men of genius may at the same time be working along parallel lines to create a more instructed public in the future, from which other men are genius will benefit) should create its own posterity. For if the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that particular work, would be not posterity but a group of contemporaries who were merely living half-a-century later in time. And so it is essential that the artist (and this is what Vinteuil had done), if he wishes his work to be free to follow its own course, should launch it, there where there is sufficient depth, boldly into the distant future. And yet, if leaving out of account this time to come, the true perspective in which to appreciate a work of art, is the mistake made by made judges, taking it into account is at times a dangerous precaution of good ones. No doubt it is easy to imagine, by an illusion similar to that which makes everything on the horizon appear equidistant, that all the revolutions which have hitherto occurred in paint or in music did at least respect certain rules, whereas that which immediately confront us, be it impressionism, the pursuit of dissonance, an exclusive use of the Chinese scale, cubism, futurism or what you will, differs outrageously from all that has occurred before. That is because everything that went before we are apt to regard as a while, forgetting that a long process of assimilation has converted it into a substance that is varied of course but, taken as a whole, homogeneous, in which Hugo is juxtaposed with Moliere. Let us try to imagine the shocking disparities we should find, if we did not take account of the future and the changes that is must bring, in a horoscope of our own riper years cast for us in our youth."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 572-573
One of my favorite, if not my outright favorite, class to teach here at Champlain is COR 220, Aesthetic Expression. Not surprisingly in a class that deal with art and the development of the individual aesthetic, the question of genius pops up quite a bit in the discussion. Inevitably, at some point in the course, I will hold forth on my views on genius, because, seriously, why would we devote so many years to acquiring a doctorate if not to have a ready opportunity to hear ourselves talk? I always tell my students that one way to think of genius is that it is a woman or man who comes along and changes the world, and does that, partially, by changing the rules. Now,they may not set out to change the rules (although some do) by changing the rules (again, although some do). Rather, they cannot not change the world, and in the process cannot not change the rules. Their view of reality is so profoundly different that the world has essentially changed. Normally, one of the most direct ways that they change the rules is by asking the audience to do more than they have before, to take a more active role in the artistic experience, which is another reason why true genius is so often met with initial opposition if not anger. A great example of an artist who clearly intentionally strove to change the rules of painting was Paul Cezanne. I have to admit, to my shame, that I didn't truly grasp the power of Cezanne until I read Gombrich's The Story of Art. I know Gombrich gets a lot of grief, and certainly some of it is well-earned, by it's still a book I love, and one that I still require in Aesthetic Expression and one that I tell my students they must never, ever sell. One of the infamous early moments in the Core centered around me giving an impassioned plea to keep Gombrich as a required text, and being the only vote to keep it (obviously, as with most things, I'm about as successful in getting my way as Monkey is in invading heaven in Journey to the West). I still have the freedom to use it in Aesthetic Expression so I'll go ahead and count it as a win nonetheless. Gombrich points out the modern art begins, not with the Impressionists, but instead with Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin - and especially Cezanne. One time I had a particularly sluggish class who had not done the Gombrich reading and thus were not able to tell me his view on why modern art began with Cezanne. I made a theatrical show of locking the door, which, actually, I don't think you could do, projected one of Cezanne's paintings (I think it was of Mount Victoire), told the students to get out their copy of The Story of Art, and made it clear that none of them were getting out alive until they could tell me, specifically, why modern art had begun with that painting. Oddly, they ended up having a fantastic time, getting up out of their seats and standing in front of the screen, copies of Gombrich in hand, discussing Cezanne's brush strokes. It marked a turning point in my career because I started incorporating graded in-class analysis of art in my class routinely. Cezanne proposed that he wanted to paint as if no one had ever painted before, and thus there were no rules, which brings us back to our initial question of genius. Here are a few of my favorite Cezanne paintings.
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