Conversations with Cézanne

Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

by Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)

Michael Doran has gathered texts by contemporaries of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)―including artists, critics, and writers―that illuminate the influential painter's philosophy of art especially in his late years. The book includes historically important essays by a dozen different authors, including Emile Bernard, Joaquim Gasquet, Maurice Denis, and Ambroise Vollard, along with selections from Cézanne's own letters.

In addition to the material included in the original French edition of the book, which has also been published in German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, this edition contains an introduction written especially for it by noted Cézanne scholar Richard Shiff. The book closes with Lawrence Gowing's magisterial essay, "The Logic of Organized Sensations," first published in 1977 and long out of print.

Cézanne's work, and the thinking that lay behind it, have been of inestimable importance to the artists who followed him. This gathering of writings will be of enormous interest to artists, writers, art historians―indeed to all students of modern art.

Genres: Art

256 pages, Paperback

First published July 10, 2001

Reviews

[Peter Nawara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really inspiring. What an obsession this man had. Fantastic.

[Ignacio Rial-Schies · Rating 5 out of 5]

The main interest of this book, its biggest strenght, lies in a self-perceived lack in early modernist painting: Cezanne, even when he had several other painters as students who would go on to garner a reputation of their own (although evidently not as great as his), left behind no writings, not even an attempt to sum up his painterly knowledge. Everything that was left behind were his paintings, letters and the living memory of the conversations he had had with his students.
This book recovers from several different sources, among which the most important were publications by Émile Bernard, Maurice Denis and Joachim Gasquet shortly after their master's demise, Cezanne's living thought on his craft. Not only is their testimony on their teachers's knowledge and character riveting to anybody interested in modernism and painting, but the discussions the editor of the original tome, P.M. Doran, points at and frames up, contribute greatly to understanding what was at play when these artist-writers published their texts on their master: they were giving shape to the Cezanne we have come to know today. They were claiming the inheritance from their spiritual father, and in doing that, they started a discussion that painters have felt the need to respond again and again: What is painting today?