Hanyu

“He was an artist determined to figure out how a painter could represent a subject with complete accuracy: not a fleeting moment like an Impressionist landscape, or the one-view-fits-all accuracy of a photograph, but accurate in the sense of it being a true reflection of a rigorously observed subject. It was an issue that tormented him. Asked what his greatest aspiration was, he replied with just one word, “Certainty.”
― Will Gompertz, What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art

“Cézanne, on the other hand, thought the Impressionists weren’t being sufficiently objective. He thought they lacked rigorousness in their pursuit of realism. His concerns were not dissimilar to those held by Degas and Seurat, who felt that the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Morisot and Pissarro were slightly flimsy; that they lacked structure and a sense of solidity. Seurat, we know, looked to science to help him resolve the issue: Cézanne turned to nature.”
― Will Gompertz, What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art

“But the cantankerous Post-Impressionist chose to complicate matters further by also worrying about how he saw. He realized around 130 years ago that seeing is not believing: it is to question. It was a philosophical insight that links the end of the Enlightenment’s Age of Reason with the twentieth century’s Age of Modernism.”
― Will Gompertz, What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art

“Not because one individual might be a more accomplished artist than another, but owing to the nature of humans: we can all look at the same view, but we don’t see quite the same thing. We bring our own unique mix of prejudices, experiences, tastes and knowledge to any given situation, informing how we interpret what is before us.”
― Will Gompertz, What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art