Cezanne’s ‘Torments’

William Wilson’s condescending review of the Cezanne exhibition at the National Gallery (“Portrait of Artist as a Mixed-Up Man,” Feb. 11) leaves a bad taste.

Why does Mr. Wilson choose to distance himself by depreciating the artist as “a very strange duck indeed, racked with sexual torments, goaded by violent impulses, transported by poetic vapors”?

No doubt young Cezanne was unusually absorbed by his “animal” impulses, but we who come after Freud, mechanic or critic, know that we differ from this artist by nothing more than our diminished capacity for self-awareness.

The artist’s task is to plumb his--our--inner life and to expose it on canvas for all to see. In doing so, every conscientious artist risks this kind of assault, but the critic ought to stop himself as an act of respect for the artist’s courage.

Worse is Wilson’s cruel description of the portrait of painter Achille Emperaire, Cezanne’s friend. While conceding that it is a masterpiece of empathy, he pauses momentarily before the loathsome thing, repelled by “his oversize head, wizened legs and strange footgear that looks to us like the tennis shoes of a willful oddball.”

“Weirdly fascinating exhibition,” sniffs Wilson from his seat on Olympus. Rather like gazing at the freaks in a carnival sideshow.

LEON B. ROTH

Highland, Calif.