When Lecomte evaluated Cézanne so intelligently in 1899, "abstraction" had not yet settled into its twentieth-century, formalist definition. Nor had images called "abstract" abandoned representational reference, as they would begin to do not long after Cézanne's passing. The meaning of
"abstraction," circa 1900, was fluid and confused, an amalgam of contested notions. Regardless of anything Cézanne said, it was his technique that caused many of his witnesses to link the autonomy of his form and the purity of its beauty to a process of abstraction. This turn in interpretation entailed a certain irony: "form" and "beauty" were conceptual entities suited to endless verbal philosophizing, precisely what Cézanne disliked in Bernard among others. To reconcile abstraction, itself an "abstract" notion with the very physical nature of Cézanne's painting, most of those familiar with him claimed that his abstraction developed from the senses, not the intellect—more intuitive harmony than science of color, more spontaneous rhythm than planned geometry. This variant of "abstraction" broke from the term's nineteenth-century connotation of intellectual excess (we still say that certain arguments are "too abstract," or that a mentally distracted person has an "abstract" look). Lecomte's perception that Cézanne's style satisfied antithetical demands coming from impressionist naturalism and symbolist idealism was ingenious and should have been adequate to the situation; but other commentators began to acknowledge somewhat different alignments, cognizant of competing notions of "abstraction." For Denis, the conflict between Monet's impressionism and Gauguin's symbolism amounted to a dispute between sensualist lovers of nature and rationalist devotees of abstract form. Reacting to attitudes that troubled him in others, Denis complicated matters by switching sides in the ongoing debate. First he praised, then he denigrated abstraction, lamenting Cézanne's inadvertent role in furthering it.
Why all this happened is crucial to the historical fortune of Cézanne's art. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Denis (like many others) observed that artists of his own age were being dehumanized by the leveling effects of modern urban life-mechanization, commodification, standardization, social regulation—all leading to impoverishment of both intellectual and spiritual experience. He argued that the remedy could be found in an "abstract ideal, the expression of inner [mental] life or a simple decoration for the pleasure of the eyes.", Under the circumstances, the representational arts would strive to mask out dull environmental realities, "evolving toward abstraction." However much this kind of "abstraction" might appeal to the intellect and imagination (subjective "inner life"), it would retain a distinct material component, located in a purified form and a straightforward procedure (the objective "beauty" of "a simple decoration"). Cézanne was exemplary because his marks appeared independent of any strict mimetic function and were also very physical, therefore representing a material (not conceptual) abstraction of the painting process. This was an aestheticized, humanized materialism, intense in both sensation and spirit; it seemed fit to counter the anesthetizing materialism of modern bourgeois existence.
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