Skip to content

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.

— Paul Cézanne

Another quote →

Topics

Art

More quotes by Paul Cézanne

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.

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.

All Paul Cézanne quotes →

You may also like

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Paul Cézanne (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.