Cezanne quotes:

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Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting. -- Henri Matisse
Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem. -- Arthur Koestler
The idea of selling a Cezanne to buy a Morisot seems explosively contentious. -- Michael Scott
In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie. -- Bob Dylan
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us. -- Jane Hirshfield
Painting is a visceral experience, one loaded with subtle information. Only Cezanne could get away with a system. -- Wolf Kahn
If Picasso drips, I drip... For a long while I was with Cezanne, and now I am with Picasso. -- Arshile Gorky
There is no such thing as starting where Cezanne left off. You have to start where he started... at the beginning. -- Kimon Nicolaides
Any critic of Cezanne who described him as a painter of country scenes would be moving in the wrong direction. You must begin with the question of style . . . -- Charles Tomlinson
To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier. -- W. H. Auden
The people who do better and better work are people who are never satisfied. Cezanne would say, 'I think I've accomplished something,' but then he would immediately add, 'But it's not enough. -- David Galenson
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. -- Clement Greenberg
Cezanne said, 'I love to paint people who have grown old naturally in the country.' And I say I love to paint people who have been torn to shreds by the rat race in New York. -- Alice Neel
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. -- Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
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. -- Willem de Kooning
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. -- Robert Hughes
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. -- Christopher Willard
Where Cezanne captured and intensified shards of the eternal (every pear far more sharply defined than it could be in life), Monet portrayed the changeability and flux of every moment. 'The Water Lilies' give you a jittery, amorphous sense of a world seen at the speed of light. -- Jerry Saltz
Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form. -- Clive Bell
Cezanne was fated, as his passion was immense, to be immensely neglected, immensely misunderstood, and now, I think, immensely overrated. -- Walter Sickert
Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting. -- Etel Adnan
Cezanne produced precarious little worlds that almost, almost, almost lose their balance but somehow hold themselves together, creating tension, beauty and danger all at once. -- Robert Krulwich
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. -- Jerry Saltz
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. -- Mary Cassatt
If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees. -- Robert Motherwell
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. -- Wendell Berry
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. -- Philip Guston
What I so like about Poussin and Cezanne is their sense of organization. Ilike the way in which they develop space and shape in architecturalcontinuity - the rhythm across their paintings. When I paint a landscape, Iget the greatest pleasure out of composing it. As I paint, I try to work outa visual sonata form or a fugue, with realistic images. -- Ian Hornak
Most artists, or at least most of the ones I know, deny having a philosophical outlook that they try to translate into their works. Some had thought of the work of Cezanne and others as being a 'painted epistemology.' But Cezanne himself denied this and Daniel-Henri Kahnwiler, the art critic and art dealer, insisted that none of the many painters he had known had a philosophical culture. -- Semir Zeki

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