Cezanne Art Quotes & Sayings

All my life I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could do good painting without attracting attention to one's private life. Certainly, an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the work. — Paul Cezanne

I have nothing to hide in art. The initial force alone can bring anyone to the end he must attain. — Paul Cezanne

My age and health will never allow me to realize the dream of art I've been pursuing all my life. — Paul Cezanne

I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it. — Paul Cezanne

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself. — Paul Cezanne

One can do good things without being very much of a harmonist or a colourist. It is sufficient to have a sense of art - and this sense is doubtless the horror of the bourgeois. — Paul Cezanne

An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all. — Paul Cezanne

Talks on art are almost useless. The work which goes to bring progress in one's own subject is sufficient compensation for the incomprehension of imbeciles. — Paul Cezanne

Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the fictitious combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist. — Paul Cezanne

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art. — Paul Cezanne

Art is a harmony parallel with nature — Paul Cezanne

May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth ... lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air. — Paul Cezanne

Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think. — Paul Cezanne

You say a new era in art is preparing; you sensed it coming; continue your studies without weakening. God will do the rest. — Paul Cezanne

Design and color are not distinct and separate. As one paints, one draws. The more the colors harmonize, the more the design takes form. When color is at it's richest, form is at its fullest. — Paul Cezanne

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

With an apple I will astonish Paris. — Paul Cezanne

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

The strong experience of nature ... is the necessary basis for all conception of art on which rests the grandeur and beauty of all future work. — Paul Cezanne

Taste is the best judge. It is rare. Art only addresses itself to an excessively small number of individuals. — Paul Cezanne

Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly? — Paul Cezanne

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting. — Paul Cezanne

The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this ... Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away form the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should. — Georges Braque

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation. — Paul Cezanne

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

Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity. — Paul Cezanne

There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art. — Paul Cezanne

Chatter about art is almost always useless. — Paul Cezanne

If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul. — Paul Cezanne

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