Top 44 Cezanne Quotes & Sayings

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

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.

Have not Manet and Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the solemn and ceremonious literary perfections of the eighteenth century? They have brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre; and the beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air. I do not expect these masters would particularly appreciate my defence, but I must avow an increasing attraction to their work.

I was shown a picture by Cézanne of a blank wall of a house, which he had made instinct with the most delicate lights and colours.

I've never really understood the term 'Post-Impressionism' as more than a label for Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh.

My work as a painter has always been tied to Modernism. I read everything I could find related to art, from Paul Cézanne through the 1950s.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Cézanne made a cylinder out of a bottle. I start from the cylinder to create a special kind of individual object. I make a bottle a particular bottle out of a cylinder.

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.

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.

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

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.

You can't teach colour from Cézanne, you can only teach it from something like this bubble-gum wrapper.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I seem initially to have followed Fauvism, and then to have followed in Cézanne's footsteps. Whatever - I do not mind... as long as first of all I remained Vlaminck.

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

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

Every painter must traverse for himself that distance from Paris to Aix (where Paul Cézanne worked a lot, fh) or from Venice to Toledo (where El Greco painted a lot, fh). Expression is for one knowing its own pivot. Every expressor relates solely to himself - that is the concern of the individualist.

Any critic of Cezanne who described him as a painter of country scenes would be moving in the wrong direction. You must begin with the question of style . . .

For - to say a few words on technique - whereas the curved line was used predominantly for reasons of beauty, (Phidias, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens) it has been used more and more economically for reasons of truth (Millet, Monet, Paul Cézanne) until it will end as the straight line for reasons of Love. This will enable the art of the future to create an international form; a form understandable to all and vital enough to the expression of a general feeling of love in a monumental way. Such is the future.

The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia.

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.

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.

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

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.

Cezanne had an enormous influence on everyone in that period; there was a change in attitudes to art. People found him disturbing because they didn't like their existing ideas being challenged and overturned. Cezanne was probably the key figure in my lifetime.

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.

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.

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

My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it...In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie...It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs...I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.