Paul Cézanne - Painting Quotes

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The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed [in a painting], will set off a revolution.

Paul Cézanne
.. 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
Monet's cliffs (Etretat) will survive as a prodigious series, as will a hundred others of his canvases... He'll be in the Louvre, for sure, alongside Constable and Turner. Damn it, he's even greater. He painted the iridescence of the earth. He's painted water. Remember those Rouen cathedrals [series of paintings of Monet]... But where everything slips away in these pictures of Monet's, nowadays we must insert a solidity, a framework..

Paul Cézanne
.. in my ideal of a good painting; there's unity. The drawing and the colour are no longer distinct; as soon as you paint you draw; the more the colours harmonize, the more precise the drawing becomes. I know that from experience. When the colour is at its richest, the form is at its fullest.

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
Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything... A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together.... but no program, no instruction in painting.... drawing is still alright, it doesn't count, but painting – the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting..

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
Everything we look at disperses and vanishes. doesn't it? Nature is always the same, and yet its appearance is always changing... Painting must give us the flavour of nature's eternity. Everything, you understand. So I join together nature's straying hands.... From all sides, here there and everywhere, I select colours, tones and shades; I set them down, I bring them together.... They make lines, they become objects – rocks, trees – without my thinking about them.... But if there is the slightest distraction, the slightest hitch, above all if I interpret too much one day, if I'm carried away today by a theory which contradicts yesterday's, if I think while I'm painting, if I meddle, then woosh!, everything goes to pieces.

Paul Cézanne
But what an eye Monet has, the most prodigious eye since painting began! I raise my hat to him. As for Courbet, he already had the image in his eye, ready-made. Monet used to visit him, you know, in his early days... But a touch of green, believe me, is enough to give us a landscape, just as a flesh tone will translate a face for us..

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
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..

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
On his painting 'The Bathers':
This will be my picture, the one I shall leave behind... But the center? Where is the center? I can't find the center... Tell me, what shall I group it all around? Ah, Poussin's arabesque! He knew all about that. In the London 'Bacchanal', in the Louvre 'Flora', where does the line of the figures and the landscape begin, where does it finish.... It's all one. There is no center. Personally I would like something like a hole, a ray of light, an invisible sun to keep an eye on my figures, to bathe them, care them, intensify them.... in the middle

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
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.

Paul Cézanne
Painting certainly means more to me than everything else in the world. I think my mind becomes clearer when I am in the presence of nature. Unfortunately, the realization of my sensations is always a very painful process with me. I can't seem to express the intensity which beats in upon my senses. I haven't at my command the magnificent richness of color which enlivens Nature... Look at that cloud; I should like to be able to paint that! Monet could. He had muscle.

Paul Cézanne
Painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realizing sensations.

Paul Cézanne