Paul Cézanne - Painter Quotes

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.. and wanting to force nature to say things, making trees twist and rocks frown, as Gustave Doré does, or even painting it like Leornardo da Vinci, that's literature too. There's logic of colour, damn it all! The painter owes allegiance to that alone. Never to the logic of the brain; if he abandons himself to that logic, he's lost... Painting is first and foremost an optical affair. The stuff of our art is there, in what our eyes are thinking... If you respect nature, it will always unravel its meaning for you.

Paul Cézanne
Until the war [between France and Germany] as you know, my life was a mess. I wasted it. It was only at l'Estaque, when (1870-1871) I thought things over, that I really understood Pissarro, a painter like myself... He was a determined man. I was overcome by a passion for work. It wasn't that I hadn't been working before, I was always working. But what I always missed, you know, was a comrade like you..

Paul Cézanne
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
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.

Paul Cézanne
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
He (the painter Manet) hits of the tone.... but his work lacks unity and temperament too.

Paul Cézanne
There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.

Paul Cézanne
I have never wanted and never will accept the lack of modeling or gradation: it's an absurdity. Gauguin was not a painter; he only made Chinese pictures.

Paul Cézanne
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.

Paul Cézanne
He (Delacroix) turns David [Frwnch painter] upside down. His painting is iridescent. Seeing one Constable [famous English landscape painter, admired by French painters, then] is enough to make him understand all the possibilities of landscape, and he too sets up his easel by the sea... And he has a sense of human being, of life in movement, of warmth. Everything moves, every glistens. The light!... There is more warm light in this interior [probably: 'Woman of Algiers'] of his than in all of Corot's landscapes..

Paul Cézanne
The Night-watch [large and famous painting of Dutch 17th century painter Rembrandt]... the grandiose - I don't say it in bad part - grows tiresome after a while. There are mountains like that; when you stand before them you shout Nom de Dieu, but for every day a simple little hill does well enough. Listen Monsieur Vollard, if the 'Raft of the Medusa' hung in my bedroom, it would make me sick.

Paul Cézanne
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 his 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
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?

Paul Cézanne
Degas isn't enough of a painter; he doesn't have enough of that! With a little bit of temperament one can manage to be a painter, It's enough to have a sense of art, and that sense is no doubt what the bourgeoisie fear most... For a painter, sensation is at the bottom of everything. I will go on repeating it forever. Procedures are not what I advocate.

Paul Cézanne
At Aix (Aix en Provence) I am not free; whenever I want to return to Paris, I always have to put up a fight, and, although your (his father) opposition may not be absolute, I am always deeply affected by the resistance that I encounter from you. I sincerely want my liberty unfettered.... it would give me great pleasure to work in the Midi, some aspects of which offer many resources to the painter; there I would be able to attack some of the problems that I wish to solve.

Paul Cézanne
Objects enter into each other... Chardin [French classical still-life painter] was the first to have glimpsed that and rendered the atmosphere of objects... Notice how a light transversal plane straddling the bridge of your nose makes the values more evident to the eye... Well, he noticed that before we did... He neglected nothing. He also perceived that whole encounter in the atmosphere of the tiniest particles, the fine dust of emotion that surrounds objects..

Paul Cézanne
Yes, yes, a formula that's a straitjacket.... not for me! All the same, he tries in vain, does Jean-Dominique [Ingres], to wring your heart with his glossy finish! I said this to Vollard, to shock him, he is very powerful! Nevertheless he [Jean-Dominique Ingres, French classicist painter] is a damned good man... The most modern of the moderns. Do you know why I take my hat off to him? Because he forced his fantastic draughtsmanship down the throats of the idiots who now claim to understand it. But here there are only two: Delacroix and Courbet. The rest are scoundrels.

Paul Cézanne