Cezanne's Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Cezanne's Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.— Paul Cezanne
Fortunately I had a great intern who did a lot of the research on Andy's prices, which of course are phenomenal, but getting them straight - you know, he's reached this $100million plateau that only a handful of other artists have reached, which puts him in the company of Cezanne, Klimt, Picasso, and such.— Bob Colacello
The strong experience of nature ... is the necessary basis for all conception of art on which rests the grandeur and beauty of all future work.— Paul Cezanne
There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones.— Paul Cezanne
Nature is more depth than surface, the colours are the expressions on the surface of this depth; they rise up from the roots of the world.— Paul Cezanne
See nature in terms of the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere.— Paul Cezanne
Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors.— Paul Cezanne
I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.— Paul Cezanne
What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious, it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations.— Paul Cezanne
Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.— Paul Cezanne
See how the light tenderly love the apricots, it takes them over completely, enters into their pulp, light them from all sides! But it is miserly with the peaches and light only one side of them.— Paul Cezanne
Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.— Willem De Kooning
The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.— Paul Cezanne
Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye!— Paul Cezanne
The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.— Paul Cezanne
Tell me, do you think I'm going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.— Paul Cezanne
I'd like to combine melancholy and sunshine ... There's a sadness in Provence which no one has expressed ... I'd like to put reason in the grass and tears in the sky, like Poussin ...— Paul Cezanne
I have nothing to hide in art. The initial force alone can bring anyone to the end he must attain.— Paul Cezanne
One of Cezanne's unfinished paintings ... appears to be a completed work even though only a few strokes of paint have been put down. My methods are similar ... I expect each of my paintings to appear whole in every stage.— Christopher Willard
Pure drawing is an abstraction.— Paul Cezanne
To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.— Paul Cezanne
You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well.— Paul Cezanne
Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.— Paul Cezanne
The clear French landscape is as pure as a verse of Racine.— Paul Cezanne
It is not about painting life, it is about making painting alive.— Paul Cezanne
Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world. I feel coloured by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos ...— Paul Cezanne
Studying the model and realizing it is sometimes very slow in coming for the artist.— Paul Cezanne
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.— Paul Cezanne
The contour eludes me.— Paul Cezanne
Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.— Henri Matisse
The people who do better and better work are people who are never satisfied. Cezanne would say, 'I think I've accomplished something,' but then he would immediately add, 'But it's not enough.— David Galenson
The non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miro and Moore are definitely in the ascendant. The formal tradition of Gauguin, Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of Cezanne and Cubism.— Alfred H. Barr Jr.
I've never really understood the term 'Post-Impressionism' as more than a label for Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh.— Nigel Hamilton
Sometimes I imagine colors as if they were living ideas, being of pure reason with which to communicate. Nature is not on the surface, it is deep down.— Paul Cezanne
My nervous system is enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me.— Paul Cezanne
One is neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature; but one is more or less master of one's model, and, above all, of the means of expression.— Paul Cezanne
Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?— Paul Cezanne
He wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in a painting. You have to do it from inside yourself ... You could do it if you wanted to fight for it. If you'd lived right with your eyes.— Ernest Hemingway,
It's not just about looking and copying, it's about feeling too— Paul Cezanne
I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.— Paul Cezanne
I must be more sensible and realize that at my age, illusions are hardly permitted and they will always destroy me.— Paul Cezanne
Cezanne was fated, as his passion was immense, to be immensely neglected, immensely misunderstood, and now, I think, immensely overrated.— Walter Sickert
The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.— Paul Cezanne
Everything is about to disappear. You've got to hurry up if you still want to see things.— Paul Cezanne
I should have wished to possess the intellectual equilibrium that characterizes you and permits you to achieve without fail the desired end ... Chance has not favoured me with an equal self-assurance, it is the only regret I have about things of this earth.— Paul Cezanne
We live in a rainbow of chaos.— Paul Cezanne
It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.— Jerry Saltz
The landscape becomes human, becomes a thinking, living being within me. I become one with my picture ... we merge in an iridescent chaos.— Paul Cezanne
Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.— Etel Adnan
It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture ...— Paul Cezanne
The idea of selling a Cezanne to buy a Morisot seems explosively contentious.— Michael Scott
All pictures painted inside in the studio will never be as good as the things done outside.— Paul Cezanne
Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate ... Give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.— Paul Cezanne
The day may come when, contemplating a world given back to the primeval forst, a human survivor will have no means of even guessing how much intelligence Man once imposed upon the forms of the earth, when he set up the stones of Florence in the billowing expanse of the Tuscan olive-groves. No trace will be left then of the palaces that saw Michelangelo pass by, nursing his grievances against Raphael; and nothing of the little Paris cafes where Renoir once sat beside Cezanne, Van Gogh beside Gauguin. Solitude, vicegerent of Eternity, vanquishes men's dreams no less than armies, and men have known this ever since they came into being and realized that they must die.— Andre Malraux
To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.— W. H. Auden
Design and color are not distinct and separate. As one paints, one draws. The more the colors harmonize, the more the design takes form. When color is at it's richest, form is at its fullest.— Paul Cezanne
Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.— Paul Cezanne
I ask you to pray for me, for once age has overtaken us, we find consolation only in religion.— Paul Cezanne
Anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cezanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them.— Janet Fitch
There is no model, there is only color.— Paul Cezanne
Cezanne is one of the most liberal artists I have ever seen ... he grants that everyone may be as honest and as true to nature from their convictions; he doesn't believe that everyone should see alike.— Mary Cassatt
Chatter about art is almost always useless.— Paul Cezanne
Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else - by color.— Paul Cezanne
I wished to copy nature. I could not. But I was satisfied when I discovered the sun, for instance, could not be reproduced, but only represented by something else.— Paul Cezanne
If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.— Paul Cezanne
Here, on the river's verge, I could be busy for months without changing my place, simply leaning a little more to right or left.— Paul Cezanne
Cezanne produced precarious little worlds that almost, almost, almost lose their balance but somehow hold themselves together, creating tension, beauty and danger all at once.— Robert Krulwich
The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.— Paul Cezanne
Right now a moment of time is passing by! ... We must become that moment.— Paul Cezanne
Pleasure must be found in study.— Paul Cezanne
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.— Jane Hirshfield
I paint as if I were Rothschild.— Paul Cezanne
If Picasso drips, I drip ... For a long while I was with Cezanne, and now I am with Picasso.— Arshile Gorky
What I so like about Poussin and Cezanne is their sense of organization. Ilike the way in which they develop space and shape in architecturalcontinuity - the rhythm across their paintings. When I paint a landscape, Iget the greatest pleasure out of composing it. As I paint, I try to work outa visual sonata form or a fugue, with realistic images.— Ian Hornak
People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.— Paul Cezanne
May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth ... lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.— Paul Cezanne
But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)— Malcolm Gladwell
Painting is a visceral experience, one loaded with subtle information. Only Cezanne could get away with a system.— Wolf Kahn
The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.— Clement Greenberg
A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I'm every inch a painter.— Paul Cezanne
The things I felt ... about certain painters of the past that ... inspired me, like Cezanne and Manet ... that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself ... felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface ... That's truly ... the act of creation.— Philip Guston
Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.— Robert Hughes
Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.— Paul Cezanne
Two sittings a day of my models and I'm totally exhausted.— Paul Cezanne
Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.— Paul Cezanne
Talks on art are almost useless. The work which goes to bring progress in one's own subject is sufficient compensation for the incomprehension of imbeciles.— Paul Cezanne
The nice thing about poetry is that you're always stretching the definitions of words. Lawyers and scientists and scholars of one sort or another try to restrict the definitions, hoping that they can prevent people from fooling each other. But that doesn't stop people from lying.— Pete Seeger
Cezanne painted a red barn by painting it ten shades of color: purple to yellow. And he got a red barn. Similarly, a poet will describe things many different ways, circling around it, to get to the truth.
My father also had a nice little simile. He said, "The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. And you can't lay your hand on it. All you do is circle around and point, and say, 'It's in there somewhere.
One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way; and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction.— Paul Cezanne
All my life I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could do good painting without attracting attention to one's private life. Certainly, an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the work.— Paul Cezanne
Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.— Arthur Koestler
I've come to the conclusion that it's not really possible to help others.— Paul Cezanne
It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.— Paul Cezanne
The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.— Paul Cezanne
One had to immerse oneself in one's surroundings and intensely study nature or one's subject to understand how to recreate it.— Paul Cezanne
With a painter's temperament, all that's needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.— Paul Cezanne
Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.— Paul Cezanne
Yes, a bunch of carrots, observed directly, painted simply in the personal way one sees it, worth more than the Ecole's everlasting slices of buttered bread, that tobacco-juice painting, slavishly done by the book? The day is coming when a single original carrot will give birth to a revolution.— Paul Cezanne
The approbation of others is a stimulus of which one must sometimes be wary. The feeling of one's own strength makes one modest.— Paul Cezanne
Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.— Paul Cezanne
The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.— Wendell Berry
