Best 16 quotes in «cezanne quotes» category

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." [Modernism's Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]

If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)