Cezanne Quotes

• Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.

  Henri Matisse

  Painting, Masters

  Henri Matisse, Jack D. Flam (1995). “Matisse on Art”, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Believe, Artist, May

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• 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

  Finishing, Painting, Unfinished

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• 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

  Art, World, Giotto

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• 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

  Ideas, Painting, Hell

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• 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.

  Tradition, Form, Expressionism

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• 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

  Organization, Space, Work Out

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• 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

  Keys, Ideas, Doubt

  Robert Hughes (2013). “The Shock of the New”, p.30, Knopf

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• 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

  Children, Flower, Giving

  Robert Motherwell, Dore Ashton, Jack D. Flam, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1983). “Robert Motherwell”, Abbeville Pr

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• The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Apples, Awkward, Alertness

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• 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

  Art, Apples, Giving

  1936 'Letter to Byron', pt.3, stanza 20, collected in Poems, Essays, Dramatic Writings 1927-1939 (1977).

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• 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

  Thinking, People, Add

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• 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

  Light, Water Lily, Giving

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• The idea of selling a Cezanne to buy a Morisot seems explosively contentious.

  Michael Scott

  Ideas, Selling, Contentious

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• Cezanne was fated, as his passion was immense, to be immensely neglected, immensely misunderstood, and now, I think, immensely overrated.

  Walter Sickert

  Passion, Thinking, Misunderstood

  Walter Sickert, Anna Gruetzner Robins (2003). “Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art”, p.276, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward - neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

  Roy Lichtenstein

  Art, Thinking, Civilization

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• Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.

  Clive Bell

  Discovery, Columbus, Form

  Clive Bell (1958). “Art”, Perigee

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• 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

  Effort, Evolution, Painting

  "Art and Culture: Critical Essays". Book by Clement Greenberg, "On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting" (1949), p. 171, 1961.

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• 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

  Country, New York, Race

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• Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.

  Arthur Koestler

  Science, Discovery, Apples

  Arthur Koestler (1964). “The Act of Creation”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• If Picasso drips, I drip... For a long while I was with Cezanne, and now I am with Picasso.

  Arshile Gorky

  Long, Imitation, Ifs

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• There is no such thing as starting where Cezanne left off. You have to start where he started... at the beginning.

  Kimon Nicolaides

  Starting, Left

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• Painting is a visceral experience, one loaded with subtle information. Only Cezanne could get away with a system.

  Wolf Kahn

  Information, Painting, Subtle

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• 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 from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

  Georges Braque

  Art, Mistake, Taken

  Article by John Richardson, December 01, 1957.

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• 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

  Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

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