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)]”
― Robert Hughes

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)”
― Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

“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.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“You don’t paint souls, you paint bodies, and the soul shines through.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“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.”
― Jean Michel Rene Souche, Knife Paintings: Lozengist Movement

“with an apple, i will astonish paris.”
― Paul Cézanne

“When Cocoanuts was about to leave town, I took my landscape to an art dealer and offered it for sale. The dealer looked at the painting and said, “Why?” I held it up to the light and showed him how the original nude still came through, through all the layers of purple. “Well,” said the dealer, “it is sort of a novelty,” and he gave me five bucks.
When I left the gallery, I made a recount and realized that the canvas and frame alone were worth twenty-seven fifty. But what the hell, I’d sold a painting! From what Neysa had told me, it had taken a lot longer for Rembrandt, Cezanne or Van Gogh to make their first sale.”
― Harpo Marx