Paul Cézanne: Use

“Everything we look at disperses and vanishes. doesn't it? Nature is always the same, and yet its appearance is always changing... Painting must give us the flavour of nature’s eternity. Everything, you understand. So I join together nature's straying hands.... From all sides, here there and everywhere, I select colours, tones and shades; I set them down, I bring them together.... They make lines, they become objects – rocks, trees – without my thinking about them.... But if there is the slightest distraction, the slightest hitch, above all if I interpret too much one day, if I'm carried away today by a theory which contradicts yesterday's, if I think while I'm painting, if I meddle, then woosh!, everything goes to pieces.”

Paul Cézanne

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 148, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Understanding , Nature , Thinking , Tree

“You can't ask a man to talk sensibly about the art of painting if he simply doesn't know anything about it. But by God, how can he [ Zola was his youth friend, who used Cezanne as a model in Zola's novel 'L'Oeuvre'] dare to say that a painter is done because he has painted one bad picture? When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one.”

Paul Cézanne

Quote in a conversation with Vollard in Cezanne's studio in Aix - after the death of Zola in 1902; as quoted in Cézanne, Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 74
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

God , Youth , Art , Painting

“A builder. A rough and ready plasterer. A colour grinder. He Courbet is like a Roman bricklayer. And yet he's another true painter. There's no one in this century that surpasses him. Even though he rolls up his sleeves, plugs up his ears, demolishes columns, his workmanship is classical!... His view was always compositional. His vision remained traditional. Like his palette-knife, he used it only out of doors. He was sophisticated and brought his work to a high finish... His great contribution is the poetic introduction of nature - the smell of damp leaves, mossy forest cuttings - into nineteenth century painting; the murmur of rain, woodlands shadows, sunlight moving under trees. The sea. And snow, he painted snow like no one else!”

Paul Cézanne

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 198 in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre'

Nature , Tree , Painting , Sea

“But what an eye Monet has, the most prodigious eye since painting began! I raise my hat to him. As for Courbet, he already had the image in his eye, ready-made. Monet used to visit him, you know, in his early days... But a touch of green, believe me, is enough to give us a landscape, just as a flesh tone will translate a face for us..”

Paul Cézanne

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 164, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Painting

“The point to be made clear is that, whatever may be our temperament, or our power in the presence of nature, we have to render what we actually see, forgetting everything that appeared before our own time. Which, I think, should enable the artist to express his personality to the full, be it large or small. Now that I am an old man, about seventy, the sensations of colour which produce light give rise to abstractions that prevent me from covering my canvas, and from trying to define the outlines of objects when their points of contact are tenuous and delicate; with the result that my image or picture is incomplete. For another thing, the planes become confused, superimposed; hence Neo-Impressionism (initiated by Seurat and Paul Signac, ed., where everything is outlined in black, an error which must be uncompromisingly rejected. And nature, if consulted, shows us how to achieve this aim.”

Paul Cézanne

Quote from Cézanne's letter to Émile Bernard, 23 October 1905; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 180
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

Error , Nature , Thinking , Light

“I had the company of monsieur Gibert. Such people see clearly, but they have the teacher's eye. As the train was taking us past Alexis' place a staggering subject for a picture came into view towards the east: St-Victoire [later Cezanne made series of paintings of Mont St. Victoire and the crags above Beaurecueil]. I said, 'What a splendid subject'; he replied, 'The lines are too symmetrical'. Referring to 'L'Assommoir' [a novel of Emile Zola ] about which, incidentally, he was the first person to speak to me, he said some very sound things, and praised it, but always from the point of view of technique.”

Paul Cézanne

Quote in Cézanne's letter to his friend Emile Zola, Aix-en-Provence, 14 April 1878; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock"', Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 178-179
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1860s - 1870s

People , Teachers , Past , Painting

“That is why, perhaps, all of us derive Pissarro. He had the good luck to be born in the West Indies, where he learned how to draw without a teacher. He told me all about it. In 1865 he was already cutting out black, bitumen, raw sienna and the ocher's. That's a fact. Never paint with anything but the three primary colours and their derivatives, he used to say me. Yes, he was the first Impressionist.”

Paul Cézanne

Camille Pissarro was Cézanne's 'teacher' in impressionistic landscape painting; they frequently painted together in open air.
Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 164, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Learning , Teachers , Drawing , Painting

“I still work with difficulty, but I seem to get along. That is the important thing to me. Sensations form the foundation of my work, and they are imperishable, I think. Moreover, I am getting rid of that devil who, as you know, used to stand behind me and forced me at will to 'imitate'; he's not even dangerous any more.”

Paul Cézanne

one week later Cezanne died
Quote in Cezanne's last letter to his son Paul, Aix, 15 October 1906; as quoted in Cézanne, Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 112
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

Thinking

“Make others feel the same way about it. Without their realizing it! That's the meaning of art... Yes, what I'm aiming for is the logical development of what we see and feel when we observe nature; only then I'm concerned with the process, processes being for us no more than simple ways of getting the public to feel what we ourselves are feeling, and of making our point. The great artists we admire have done no more... Shall we have lunch?”

Paul Cézanne

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 160, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif

Art , Way , Feeling , Nature

“Allow me to repeat what I said when you were here: deal with nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, all placed in perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, a section of nature, or if you prefer, of the spectacle spread before our eyes by the 'Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus'. Lines perpendicular to that horizon give depth. But for us men, nature has more depth than surface, hence the need to introduce in our vibrations of light, represented by reds and yellows, enough blue tints to give a feeling of air.”

Paul Cézanne

Quote from Cézanne's letter to Émile Bernard, 15 April 1904; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 180
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

Men , Feeling , Nature , Light

“Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, the whole put into perspective so that each side of an object, or of a plane, leads towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, whether a sections of nature, or, if you prefer, of the spectacle which Pater omnipotens aeterne Deus unfolds before your eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth... Everything I am telling you [ Joachim Gasquet ] about - the sphere, the cone, cylinder, concave shadow – on mornings when I'm tired these notions of mine get me going, they stimulate me, I soon forget them once I start using my eyes.”

Paul Cézanne

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), pp. 163-164, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Nature , Forgetting

“This is what happens, unquestionably – I am positive: an optical sensation is produced in our visual organ, which leads us classify as light, half-tone or quarter-tone, the planes represented by sensations of color. [Thus the light does not exist for the painter]. As long as, inevitably, one proceeds from black to white, the former of these abstractions being a kind of point of rest both for eye and brain, we flounder about, we cannot achieve self-mastery, get possession of ourselves. During this period (I tend to repeat myself, inevitably) we turn to the admirable works [of the five great Venetian painters a. o. Titian and Tintoretto] handed down to us through the ages, in which we find comfort and support…”

Paul Cézanne

Quote from Cézanne's letter to Émile Bernard, 23 December 1904; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 184
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

Age , Color , Support , Light

“And art puts us, I believe, in a state of grace in which we experience a universal emotion in an, as it were, religious but in the same time perfectly natural way. General harmony, such as we find in colour, is located all around us.”

Paul Cézanne

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 151, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Art , Way , Nature , Universe

“Here you are, put this somewhere, on your work table. You must always have this before your eyes... It's a new order of painting. Our Renaissance starts here... There's a pictorial truth in things. This rose and this white lead us to it by a path hitherto unknown to our sensibility..”

Paul Cézanne

Cezanne is referring in this quote to a photo of the painting 'Olypmpia', painted by Manet
Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 71, in: 'What I know or have seen of his life'

Truth , Painting

“The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.”

Paul Cézanne