Cezanne Quotes

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)]

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Art is a harmony parallel with nature

the painter, Cezanne, would leave blank spaces on his canvas when he couldn’t account for the brush strokes, or the color”--- “How much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes; I am all random”.

Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.

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.

I am a consciousness. The landscape thinks itself through me.

He wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in a painting. You have to do it from inside yourself... You could do it if you wanted to fight for it. If you'd lived right with your eyes.

If you see a red tree, paint it bright red.

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution. Paul Cezanne

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. —Willem de Kooning

Whatever the mind can conceive it can achieve; I can CREATE whatever I can IMAGINE!

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

And I see that his brown eye has a splash of green in it and the green one a splash of brown. Like Cezanne painted them. Impressionist eyes.

Anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cezanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them.

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

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.

The nice thing about poetry is that you’re always stretching the definitions of words. Lawyers and scientists and scholars of one sort or another try to restrict the definitions, hoping that they can prevent people from fooling each other. But that doesn’t stop people from lying. Cezanne painted a red barn by painting it ten shades of color: purple to yellow. And he got a red barn. Similarly, a poet will describe things many different ways, circling around it, to get to the truth. My father also had a nice little simile. He said, “The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. And you can’t lay your hand on it. All you do is circle around and point, and say, ‘It’s in there somewhere.

The day may come when, contemplating a world given back to the primeval forst, a human survivor will have no means of even guessing how much intelligence Man once imposed upon the forms of the earth, when he set up the stones of Florence in the billowing expanse of the Tuscan olive-groves. No trace will be left then of the palaces that saw Michelangelo pass by, nursing his grievances against Raphael; and nothing of the little Paris cafes where Renoir once sat beside Cezanne, Van Gogh beside Gauguin. Solitude, vicegerent of Eternity, vanquishes men's dreams no less than armies, and men have known this ever since they came into being and realized that they must die.

It should either have passed away with my childhood, or my childhood should have flowed away from it later, leaving it behind, real among all the rest of reality, something to see and objectively tell, like a thing in Cezanne, incomprehensible for all I care, but tangible.

The double-helix has solved all three of the major challenges of genetic physiology using ingenious variations on the same theme. Mirror-image chemicals are used to generate mirror-image chemicals, reflections used to reconstruct the orginal. Pairs used to maintain the fidelity and fixity of information. "Monet is but an eye," Cezanne once said of his friend, "but, God, what an eye." DNA, by the same logic, is but a chemical-but, God, what a chemical.

The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he’s alive forever, this instant, and may be.

Look at that magic. Light mattered to Monet, to Cezanne, to Manet, and now Matisse is moving into almost flat color, and everyone is following. And Picasso? He doesn't care about light at all. But you can't have beauty without light, and beauty is the only worthwhile quest. Don't lose your way trying to become popular.

boulevard,

You don’t paint souls, you paint bodies, and the soul shines through.

Movies I remember in impressions. No matter how many times I see a film, my memory of it is like a Monet painting...or a Cezanne, depending on the genre. Sometimes all I can muster is a Jackson Pollock. My memory of experience is usually the same: I carry with me only the sensations it gave me, the general outline of its content, the essential colors that strained my sensibility in the moments I took it in. I don't remember dialogue or specific action. Only shapes and impressions.

...it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence. Thus, to say that action has to be lived in its truth, that is, in the consciousness of the antinomies which it involves, does not mean that one has to renounce it. In Plutarch Lied Pierrefeu rightly says that in war there is no victory which can not be regarded as unsuccessful, for the objective which one aims at is the total annihilation of the enemy and this result is never attained; yet there are wars which are won and wars which are lost. So is it with any activity; failure and success are two aspects of reality which at the start are not perceptible. That is what makes criticism so easy and art so difficult: the critic is always in a good position to show the limits that every artist gives himself in choosing himself; painting is not given completely either in Giotto or Titian or Cezanne; it is sought through the centuries and is never finished; a painting in which all pictorial problems are resolved is really inconceivable; painting itself is this movement toward its own reality; it is not the vain displacement of a millstone turning in the void; it concretizes itself on each canvas as an absolute existence. Art and science do not establish themselves despite failure but through it; which does not prevent there being truths and errors, masterpieces and lemons, depending upon whether the discovery or the painting has or has not known how to win the adherence of human consciousnesses; this amounts to saying that failure, always ineluctable, is in certain cases spared and in others not.

Valéry held up Cézanne as ‘the example of the dedicated life’. Alex Danchev, in his new biography1, calls him ‘the exemplary artist-creator of the modern age’. An example more powerful than that of the artist who throws it all up (Gauguin found the voluptuous consolations of Tahiti in work and play; Rimbaud made good money as an arms trader), or the artist who goes mad and/or kills himself. More powerful because continuing to live can require more heroism than suicide: the constant work, constant striving, the frequent destruction of unsatisfactory work, and the need, as Cézanne saw it, for an incorruptibility in the life, on which incorruptibility of the work depended.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, France enjoyed an upsurge of artistic flourishing that became known as La Belle Epoque. It was a time of change that heralded both art nouveau and post impressionism, when painters as diverse as Monet, Cezanne and Toulouse Lautrec worked. It was an age of extremes, when Proust and Anatole France were fashionable along with the notorious Monsieur Willy, Colette's husband. On the decorative arts, Mucha, Gallé and Lalique were enjoying success; and the theatre Lugné-Poe was introducing the grave works of Ibsen at the same time as Parisians were enjoying the spectacle of the can-can of Hortense Schneider. Paris was the crossroads of a new and many-faceted culture, a culture that was predominately feminine in form, for, above all, la belle Epoque was the age of women. Women dominated the cultural scene. On the one hand, there was Comtesse Greffulhe, the patron of Proust and Maeterlinck, who introduced greyhound racing into France; Winaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, for whom Stravinsky wrote Renard; Misia Sert, the discoverer of Chanel and Diaghilev's closest friend. On the other were the great dancers of the Moulin Rouge, immortalised by Toulouse lautrec — Jane Avril, Yvette Guilbert, la Goulue; as well as such celebrated dramatic actresses as the great Sarah Bernhardt. It would not be possible to speak of La belle Epoque without the great courtesans who, in many ways, perfectly symbolized the era, chief of which were Liane de Pougy, Émilienne d'Alençon, Cléo de Mérode and La Belle Otero.

ჩემს ყოველ ნახატში ჩემი სისხლის წვეთია, რომელიც შერეულია თქვენი მამის სისხლის წვეთთან, წარმოიქმნება უჩვეულო კავშირი, რომელზეც თქვენ ვერც კი ხვდებით, იგი აერთიანებს ჩემს თვალებს თქვენს სულთან, თავიდან გქმნით, რომ შეიცნოთ საკუთარი თავი... ყველა ჩვენთაგანი უნდა მივიდეთ ჰარმონიასთან - ჩემი ნახატი, ჩემი კონსტრუქცია, ჩემი საღებავები და თვითონაც, - რომ ერთად განვიცადოთ ეს მგრძნობიარე წუთები

anwswered.

Now aged 32, here I am a single mum with two young sons. I have no man, no job and no savings.        What I do have though, is a dream.

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.

In some quarters, the parallel worlds of artists and neuroscientists have made it fashionable to claim that artists, whether Proust or Cezanne, are really neuroscientists.

er [paul cezanne] zieht die grenze nicht zwischen den "sinnen" und dem "verstand", sondern zwischen der spontanen ordnung der wahrgenommenen dinge und der menschlichen ordnung des lebens und wissenschaften

with an apple, i will astonish paris.

He was sure, billions of of lire in art works : The Cezanne that stood to the left of the door opposite him might be worth that just by itself.

Cézanne disait un jour à Charles Camoin, en se frappant le front : "La peinture, c'est là-dedans !" Il avait raison, ce bougon de génie. La Peinture n'a pas besoin de modèle... Tout est dans la tête.

For hours and days he sought out ways to make unintelligible the obvious, and to find for things easily understood an inexplicable basis. --Thoughts on Cezanne

In Aix we take pride in cultivating our minds, it’s our desire and tradition to do so’, claimed Maurice Gontard. He pointed out that the great Provençal poet, Frederic Mistral, had originally found Aix rather cold, but had finally declared that there was a ‘certain charm to the place’. Music had always played an important role in Aix and there were many active musical societies. The theatre was well frequented, there was a university and various local heritage and language societies to keep the past alive, to show that Aix had its own cultural identity.

Lonesomeness. Morandi, Cezanne, it's all about lonesomeness. And Rothko. Especially Rothko.

His story was almost word for word the same as Caroline Sack's, and hearing it a second time made it plain how remarkable the achievement of the Impressionists really was. They were artistic geniuses. But they were also possessed of a rare wisdom about the world. They were capable of looking at what the rest of us thought of as a great advantage, and seeing it for what it really was. Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, and Pissarro would have gone to their second choice.