On Art
- Art is a harmony which runs parallel with nature -- what is one to think of those imbeciles who say that the artist is always inferior to nature?
On Being an Artist
- I will astonish Paris with an apple!
On Color
- Drawing and color are not distinct. . . . When color is richest, form is finest.
- Marrying a shade of green to a red, one can either sadden a cheek or make it smile.
- I, only I, know how to paint a real red.
On the Creative Process
- I can’t tear my eyes away, they’re so tightly glued to the point I am looking at that it seems to me they are going to bleed.
On Other Painters
- Every time I come away from Poussin, I know myself better. ... I wish to make Poussin live again, according to nature.
- Chardin understood that objects are in contact with each other through intimate reflected colors, just as we are through our speech and our eyesight.
- Monet! I would place him in the Louvre!
- Pissarro was like a father to me . . . almost like the good God.
- In the museum, the painter learns to think; before nature, he learns to see. It is absurd to imagine that we grow like mushrooms when we have all those generations behind us. Why not take advantage of all their work.
On Aging
- As for me, I painfully continue my painting studies. If I had been young, some dough would have come out of it. But old age is a great enemy of man.
- Now, being old, nearly seventy years, the sensations of color, which give light, are the reasons for the abstractions which prevent me from either covering my canvas or continuing the delimitation of objects when their points of contact are fine and delicate; from which it results that my image or picture is incomplete.
Sources
Becks-Malorny, Ulrike. Paul Cezanne, 1839-1906: Pioneer of Modernism.
Köln: Taschen, 2001.
Doran, Michael (ed.). Conversations with Cézanne.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001.
Loran, Erle. Cézanne's Composition: Analysis of His Form with
Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs, Third Edition.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1963.
Rewald, John. Paul Cezanne, A Biography.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948.
Robbins, Daniel. Cézanne and Structure in Modern Painting.
New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1963.
Rousseau, Jr., Theodore. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906).
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1953.
Sidlauskas, Susan. Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2009.