Cezanne Quotes

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 paint as if I were Rothschild. ~ Paul Cezanne

In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie. ~ Bob Dylan

The idea of selling a Cezanne to buy a Morisot seems explosively contentious. ~ Michael Scott

Right now a moment of time is passing by! ... We must become that moment. ~ Paul Cezanne

If I think, everything is lost. ~ Paul Cezanne

The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this ... Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away form the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should. ~ Georges Braque

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest. ~ Paul Cezanne

Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly? ~ Paul Cezanne

I am a pupil of Pissarro. ~ Paul Cezanne

When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one! ~ Paul Cezanne

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front. ~ Paul Cezanne

I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing. ~ Paul Cezanne

If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees. ~ Robert Motherwell

Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't. ~ Paul Cezanne

My nervous system is enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me. ~ Paul Cezanne

A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I'm every inch a painter. ~ Paul Cezanne

I have to keep working, not to arrive at finish, which arouses the admiration of fools ... I must seek completion only for the pleasure of being truer and more knowing. ~ Paul Cezanne

You have to hurry up if you want to see something, everything disappears. ~ Paul Cezanne

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

The contour eludes me. ~ 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

You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well. ~ 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

Most artists, or at least most of the ones I know, deny having a philosophical outlook that they try to translate into their works. Some had thought of the work of Cezanne and others as being a 'painted epistemology.' But Cezanne himself denied this and Daniel-Henri Kahnwiler, the art critic and art dealer, insisted that none of the many painters he had known had a philosophical culture. ~ Semir Zeki

Cezanne said, 'I love to paint people who have grown old naturally in the country.' And I say I love to paint people who have been torn to shreds by the rat race in New York. ~ Alice Neel

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

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art. ~ Paul Cezanne

If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain. ~ Paul Cezanne

Movies I remember in impressions. No matter how many times I see a film, my memory of it is like a Monet painting...or a Cezanne, depending on the genre. Sometimes all I can muster is a Jackson Pollock. My memory of experience is usually the same: I carry with me only the sensations it gave me, the general outline of its content, the essential colors that strained my sensibility in the moments I took it in. I don't remember dialogue or specific action. Only shapes and impressions. ~ Kim Cope Tait

You have no idea how life-giving it is to find around one a youth that agrees not to bury one on the spot. ~ 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

Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see. ~ 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

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution. ~ Paul Cezanne

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality. ~ Paul Cezanne

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

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself. ~ Paul Cezanne

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation. ~ Paul Cezanne

The clear French landscape is as pure as a verse of Racine. ~ Paul Cezanne

To achieve progress nature alone counts, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric by looking and working. ~ Paul Cezanne

Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form. ~ Clive Bell

Surely, a single bunch of carrots painted naively, just as we personally see it, is worth all the endless banalities of the Schools, all those dreary pictures concocted out of tobacco juice according to time-honored formulas? ~ Paul Cezanne

The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it. ~ Paul Cezanne

The painter unfolds that which has not been seen. ~ Paul Cezanne

Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them. ~ 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

All the theories mess you up inside. ~ Paul Cezanne

Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem. ~ Arthur Koestler

Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival. ~ Paul Cezanne

There is no model, there is only color. ~ 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 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.

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. ~ Pete Seeger

With a painter's temperament, all that's needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public. ~ Paul Cezanne

Shadow is a colour as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones. ~ Paul Cezanne

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature. ~ Paul Cezanne

The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness. ~ Paul Cezanne

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations. ~ Paul Cezanne

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. ~ Paul Cezanne

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting. ~ Paul Cezanne

I ask you to pray for me, for once age has overtaken us, we find consolation only in religion. ~ Paul Cezanne

Time and reflection ... modify, little by little, our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us. ~ Paul Cezanne

See nature in terms of the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere. ~ Paul Cezanne

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

I wish to die painting. ~ Paul Cezanne

To be sure an artist wishes to raise his standard intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain in obscurity. Pleasure must be found in the studying. ~ Paul Cezanne

Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the fictitious combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist. ~ 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

I am the primitive of the method I have invented. ~ Paul Cezanne

All pictures painted inside in the studio will never be as good as the things done outside. ~ Paul Cezanne

Is it the factitious and the conventional that most surely succeed on earth and in the course of life? ~ Paul Cezanne

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else - by color. ~ Paul Cezanne

In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is turned through contact with her. ~ Paul Cezanne

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture ... ~ Paul Cezanne

The transposition that a painter makes with an original vision gives to the representation of nature a new interest. ~ Paul Cezanne

Where Cezanne captured and intensified shards of the eternal (every pear far more sharply defined than it could be in life), Monet portrayed the changeability and flux of every moment. 'The Water Lilies' give you a jittery, amorphous sense of a world seen at the speed of light. ~ Jerry Saltz

Keep good company - that is, go to the Louvre. ~ Paul Cezanne

Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head. ~ Paul Cezanne

Get to the heart of what is before you and continue to express yourself as logically as possible. ~ Paul Cezanne

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience. ~ Paul Cezanne

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

I am progressing very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms; and the progress needed is incessant. ~ Paul Cezanne

One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way; and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction. ~ Paul Cezanne

I advance all of my canvas at one time. ~ Paul Cezanne

Studying the model and realizing it is sometimes very slow in coming for the artist. ~ Paul Cezanne

I am beginning to consider myself stronger than all those around me, and you know that the good opinion I have of myself has only been reached after mature consideration. ~ Paul Cezanne

Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything ... A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together ... but no programme, no instruction in painting ... drawing is still alright, it doesn't count, but painting - the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting.. ~ 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

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

If I think, I am lost. ~ 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

And I see that his brown eye has a splash of green in it and the green one a splash of brown. Like Cezanne painted them. Impressionist eyes. ~ Jandy Nelson

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

Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting. ~ Etel Adnan

I'll always be grateful to the public of intelligent amateurs. ~ 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

It should either have passed away with my childhood, or my childhood should have flowed away from it later, leaving it behind, real among all the rest of reality, something to see and objectively tell, like a thing in Cezanne, incomprehensible for all I care, but tangible. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I have sworn to die painting. ~ Paul Cezanne

I want to die painting. ~ Paul Cezanne

Everything is about to disappear. You've got to hurry up if you still want to see things. ~ Paul Cezanne