24 quotes
For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.
To my mind one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link.
Painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realizing sensations.
Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations (1897)
With a painter's temperament, all that's needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.
Everybody's going crazy over the Impressionists; what art needs is a Poussin made over according to nature. There you have it in a nutshell.
I was very pleased with myself when I discovered that sunlight could not be reproduced; it had to be represented by something else.. ..by colour.
As a painter I am beginning to see more clearly how to work from Nature.. .But I still can't do justice to the intensity unfolding before my eyes.
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.
Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations (1897)
I saw Monet and Renoir at about the end of December; they had been on holiday in Genoa, in Italy.
You positively paint like a madman.
Don't you think your Corot [to Guilemet the painter] is a little short on temperament? I'm painting a portrait of Vallabreque; the highlight on the nose is pure vermilion [remark of Cezanne ca. 1860]
He (the painter Manet) hits of the tone.. ..but his work lacks unity and temperament too. (ca. 1863)
You must forgive me for continually coming back to the same thing; but I believe in the logical development of everything we see and feel through the study of nature and turn my attention to technical questions later.
It's like Impressionism. They all do it at the Salons. Oh, very discreetly! I too was an Impressionist. I don't conceal the fact. Pissarro had an enormous influence on me. But I wanted to make out of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art of the museums.
Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations (1897)
I've ripped it to pieces; your portrait, you know. I tried to work on it this morning, but it went from bad to worse, so I destroyed it..
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.
Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations (1897)
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.
Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations (1897)
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, his childhood friend who characterized Cezanne in 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.
You wretch! [Cezanne is portraying the art dealer Vollard who changed his pose during the painter session] You've spoiled the pose. Do I have to tell you again you must sit like an apple? Does an apple move?
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..
Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations (1897)