Painters From France

"When I returned to Paris, in January 1882, the first visit I paid was to Manet. He was then painting 'The Bar at the Folies-Bergère' and the model, a pretty girl, was posing behind a table laden with food and bottles. He recognized me immediately, held out his hand and said: 'It's a most irritating, forgive me, I have to remain seated, I've got a bad foot. Do sit down. I took a chair behind him and watched him work. Although he painted his pictures from the model, Manet did not copy nature at all; I became aware of his magisterial simplifications; the head of his woman had a sense of depth, but the modelling was not obtained with the means that nature offered him. Everything was abridged; the tones were clearer, the colours more vivid, the values closer, the tones more varied.."

"The bright blue water continues to exasperate a number of people [in Manet's painting 'Boating', he painted in the Summer of 1874]... Manet has never, thank heavens, known those prejudices, stupidly maintained in the academies. He paints, by abbreviations, nature as it is and as he sees it. The woman, dressed in blue, seated in a boat, cut off by the frame as in certain Japanese prints, is well placed in broad daylight, and her figure energetically stands out against the oarsman dressed in white, against the vivid blue of the water. These are indeed pictures the like of which, alas, we shall rarely find in these tedious Salon."

"In the early 1860s... [Manet] was still battling traditional art by including it in his compositions—in order to undermine it. He was wrenching the past into the present not only by manipulating it, but also by disclosing the signs of his manipulation. This is true of '... of 1862. and Olympia... painted the same year as the Déjeuner (but not exhibited until 1865). His witty game required both past ideals and contemporary realities, each employed to mock the other. He committed himself to neither and, like Offenbach, he challenged authority with the instruments of irony and parady."

"..in his [Manet's] final major Salon piece 'The Bar at the Folies-Bergère', working-class women are represented in juxtoposition to bourgeois male customers.. ..the woman represented in 'The Bar at the Folies-Bergère' were employed not merely to serve and encourage the purchase of drinks, but were themselves objects of consumption as prostitutes. 'The Bar at the Folies-Bergère' is thus a representation of the potential consumption of femininity (the barmaid as prostitute) as well as being itself as [an?] object of visual consumption, activating desire in the viewer through the production of woman as spectacle."

"The leader, the hero of Realism, is now Manet. His partisans are frenzied and his detractors timid. It would seem that, if one refuses to accept Manet, one must fear being taken for a philistine, a bourgeois, a Joseph Prudhomme [JP, created by caricaturist Henri Monnier, was a personification of the vulgar self satisfied bourgeois who grew up under the July Monarchy], an idiot who cares for nothing but miniatures and painted porcelain[-]one examines oneself with a sort of horror[-] to discover whether one has become obese or bald, incapable of understanding the audacities of youth."

"In 1867 and 1868, [Manet] painted 'The Execution of Maximilian'.. .Its composition occupied him for many months. He first tried to discover the circumstances and details of the drama. This is why the three victims are painted so close to the execution squad, to accord with what actually occurred. When he was satisfied with the effect he intended, he began to paint his picture, with the help of the infantry platoon lent to him from a barracks, as models for the firing squad. He also asked two friends to pose for generals Mejía and Miramón, although he altered their heads. Only Maximilian's head was painted in the conventional way, from a photograph. When a first composition and even a second appeared not to match the detailed information he was finally able to obtain, he painted the work again, for the third time, in its final and definitive form [1868-69]."

"An artist is a deception.. ..an artist is only an artist at certain times, by an effort of will.. ..the study of nature is a cliché; isn't Manet the living proof? For although he prided himself on slavishly copying nature, he was the most inadequate painter in the world, not making a single brushstroke without reference to the old masters; for instance, he refrained from drawing fingernails because Frans Hals did not draw them."

"That Manet, as soon as I started painting dancers, he did them. [Degas' reaction later, after Manet said Degas: 'I was painting modern Paris while you were still painting Greek athletes'. [quoted by George Moore, circa 1879]."

"I put it [a still life painting of a pear, made by Manet] there on the wall, next to Ingres' Jupiter; for a pear like that would overthrow any god."

"Let's not eliminate nature. Too bad if we fail. You see, in his 'Dejeuner sur l'herbe', Manet ought to have added - I don't know what - a touch of this nobility (of the Renaissance painter Giorgione), whatever it is in this picture that conveys heaven to our every sense. Look at the golden flow of the tall woman, the other one's back.. .They are alive and they are divine, (quote after 1898)."

"Here you are, put this somewhere, on your work table. You must always have this before your eyes.. ..It's a new order of painting. Our Renaissance starts here.. ..There's a pictorial truth in things. This rose and this white [in the painting 'Olypmpia' of Manet] lead us to it by a path hitherto unknown to our sensibility, (quote after 1897)."

"He [Manet] hits of the tone.. ..but his work lacks unity and temperament too."

"M. Manet has never seen any Francisco Goya's, M. Manet has never seen any El Greco's.. ..that may seem unbelievable to you, but it's the truth. I myself have been filled with wonder and stupefaction at these mysterious coincidences.. ..He's heard so much about his 'pastiches' of Goya, that he is now trying to see some of Goya's paintings.. ..Every time you try to pay Manet a service, I'll be grateful.. ..quote my letter or at least several lines of it. What I'm telling you is the naked truth."

"We have reached that delightful moment when 'Impressionism' is about to be born, when its light (the formula for which has yet to be found) is still only a hint, a caress, in the silvery snows of Monet or in the pale skies of Pissarro. Ah, how one would like to prolong this moment of hesitation for ever, this moment of transition, when transparent blue shadows are putting black shadows to flight and bitumen disappears!"

"You must always remain master of the situation and do what you please. No school tasks, ah, no! no tasks!"

"In a face, look for the main light and the main shadow; the rest will come naturally — it's often not important. And then you must cultivate your memory, because Nature will only provide you with references. Nature is like a warden in a lunatic asylum. It stops you from becoming banal."

"I am influenced by everybody. [and Willem de Kooning admitted: 'every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there']."

"One must be of one's time and paint what one sees."

"In art, conciseness is both a necessity and a luxury; a concise man provokes thought, a wordy man provokes boredom; always move towards conciseness. In the figure, look for the main light and the main shadow, the rest will come of itself: often, it amounts to very little."

"I was painting modern Paris while you were still painting Greek athletes.."

"No one knows what it feels like to be constantly insulted [by art-critics in Paris]. It sickens and destroys you.. .The fools! They've never stopped telling me I'm inconsistent [in his painting style]; they couldn't have said anything more flattering."

"I beg you, if I die, don't let me go piecemeal into the public collections, my work would not be fairly judged. I want to get in complete or not at all.. .Please, please, promise me one thing, never let my things go into a museum piecemeal."

"Everything we look at disperses and vanishes. doesn't it? Nature is always the same, and yet its appearance is always changing.. .Painting must give us the flavour of nature’s eternity. Everything, you understand. So I join together nature's straying hands.. ..From all sides, here there and everywhere, I select colours, tones and shades; I set them down, I bring them together.. ..They make lines, they become objects – rocks, trees – without my thinking about them.. ..But if there is the slightest distraction, the slightest hitch, above all if I interpret too much one day, if I'm carried away today by a theory which contradicts yesterday's, if I think while I'm painting, if I meddle, then woosh!, everything goes to pieces."

"It used to be agreed that painting was a visual, music an auditory art. R. G. Collingwood, in his brilliant The Principles of Art, goes on to tell how Cézanne came then, and began to paint like a blind man. His rooms are full of volumes: these tables, the people in these chairs are bulks which have been felt with the hands. These trees are not what trees look like, they are what trees feel like."

"Cézanne paints solids, but we reach them beyond the canvas."

"[Matisse] worked his way through the different modes of vision employed in nineteenth-century avant-guard painting, starting with the impressionists and then moving on to Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin, and especially Cézanne, who was to remain the greatest and longest-lasting source of inspiration to him. As early as 1899, Matisse made great sacrifices in order to buy a small but powerful Cézanne, Three Bathers, and he was the first of the younger avant-guard artists to absorb the radically new kind of pictorial thought that Cézanne's painting embodied. Cézanne was... Matisse said, "a sort of god of painting.""

"Picasso is taking Cézanne's elements - the cone, cylinder and sphere - into Cubism. Matisse is taking Cézanne's interest in the wholeness and the clarity of figures. They're taking almost opposite interpretations of what they see in Cézanne: Picasso is understanding it as decomposition, and Matisse is understanding it as composition."

"Who we are and how we appear to the world is always filled with paradox. Being ourselves is like Cézanne painting a landscape — he who was always tentative, always questioning, never fully sure but always attempting to respond honestly to his 'little sensations' as he called them."

"When I want to speak about why I am doing the same thing now, which is squares, for – how long? – 19 years. Because there is no final solution in any visual formulation. Although this may be just a belief on my part, I have some assurances that that is not the most stupid thing to do, through Cezanne whom I consider as one of the greatest painters. From Cézanne we have, so the historians tell us – 250 paintings of 'Mont St. Victoire'. But we know that Cézanne has left in the fields often more than he took home because he was disappointed with his work. So we may conclude he did many more than 250 of the same problem."

"Artists have never worked with the model – just with the painting. What you [G. R. Swenson, the interviewer] are really saying is that an artist like Cézanne transforms what we think the painting ought to look like into something he thinks it ought to look like. He’s working with paint, not nature; he’s making a painting, he’s forming. I think my work is different from comic strips – but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don’t think that whatever is meant by it is important to art. What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I'm using the word; the comics have shapes but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified. The purpose is different, one intends to depict and I intend to unify."

"But I find, because of modern painting, that things which couldn't be seen in terms of painting, things you couldn't paint.. ..it is not that you paint them, bit is the connection. I imagine that Cézanne, when he painted a ginger pot with apples, must have been very grotesque in his day, because a still life was something set up of beautiful things. It may be very difficult, for instance, to put a Rheingold bottled beer on the table and a couple of glasses and a package of Lucky Strike [cigarets]. I mean, you know, there are certain things you cannot paint at a particular time, and it takes a certain attitude how to see those things, in terms of art."

"..the light suggests no particular time of day or night [in the paintings of Cézanne]; it is not appropriated from morning or afternoon, sunlight or shadow."

"The whole Renaissance tradition is antipathic 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; Paul Cézanne 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."

"Cézanne's painting is strictly painting, and its value is immense; but Van Gogh's painting has the Outsider's characteristic: it is a laboratory refuse of a man who treated his own life as an experiment in living; it faithfully records moods and developments of vision on the manner of a Bildungsroman."

"I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now naturally I am with Picasso."

"Push answers with pull and pull with push.. .At the end of his life and the height of his capacity Paul Cézanne understood color as a force of push and pull. In his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of colors."

"While he warned his friends to avoid the influence of Gauguin, van Gogh and the neo-impressionists, Cézanne liked to speak of his former comrades, praising Renoir and especially Monet, evoking with particular tenderness the "humble and colossal" Pissarro. When he was invited by a group of Aix artists to exhibit with them in 1902 and again in 1906, Cézanne—now over sixty and acclaimed by the new generation as their undisputed leader—piously affixed to his name: pupil of Pissarro. Pissarro never learned of this tribute..."

"..my favorite artist, when I first began to paint, was actually Cézanne. Later, between 1920 – 1930, I developed a great interest in Chardin [famous for his still-life], Vermeer and Corot, too.. ..that's why you have been able to detect in my works of between 1912 – 1916 some recognizable influences of the early Paris cubists and above all, of Cézanne."

"..[enabled] to touch the core, the essence of things. Even in as simple a subject, a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond. [1937, referring to a still life by Cézanne and a river-sight with sandbank by Monet ]"

"It is not what the artist does that counts. But what he is. Cézanne would never have interested me if he had lived and thought like Jaques-Emile Blanche, even if the apple he had painted had been ten times more beautiful. What interests us is the anxiety of Cézanne, the teaching of Cézanne, the anguish of Van Gogh, in short the inner drama of the man. The rest is false. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934]."

"No one will ever paint like Cezanne for example, because no one will ever have his peculiar visual gifts; or to put it less dogmatically, will anyone ever appear again with so peculiar and almost unbelievable a faculty for dividing color sensations and making logical realizations of them? Has anyone ever placed his color more reasonably with more of a sense of time and measure than he? I think not, and he furnished for the enthusiast of today new reasons for research into the realm of color for itself."

"Cézanne made a cylinder out of a bottle. I start from the cylinder to create a special kind of individual object. I make a bottle — a particular bottle — out of a cylinder."

"When Cézanne laid a canvas aside, it was almost always with the intention of taking it up again, in the hope of bringing it to perfection."

"[H]e was caught in a storm while working in the field. Only after having kept at it for two hours under a steady downpour did he start to make for home; but on the way he dropped exhausted. A passing laundry-wagon stopped, and the driver took him home. His old housekeeper came to the door. Seeing her master prostrate and almost lifeless, her first impulse was to run to him and give him every attention. But just as she was about to loosen his clothes, she stopped, seized with alarm. It must be explained that Cézanne could not endure the slightest physical contact. Even his son, whom he cherished above all... never dared to take his father's arm without saying, "Permit me, papa." And Cézanne, notwithstanding the affection he entertained for his son, could never resist shuddering. Finally, fearing lest he pass away if he did not have proper care, the good woman summoned all her courage and set about to chafe his arms and legs to restore circulation, with the result that he regained consciousness without making the slightest protest—which was indeed a bad sign. He was feverish all night long. On the following day he went down into the garden, intending to continue a study... In the midst of the sitting he fainted; the model called for help; they put him to bed, and he never left it again. He died a few days later, On October 22, 1906."

"Very few people ever had the opportunity to see Cézanne at work, because he could not endure being watched while at the easel. For one who has seen him paint, it is difficult to imagine how slow and painful his progress was on certain days. In my portrait there are two little spots of canvas on the hand which are not covered. I called Cézanne's attention to them. "If the copy I'm making in the Louvre turns out well," he replied, "perhaps I will be able tomorrow to find the exact tone to cover up those spots. Don't you see, Monsieur Vollard, that if I put something there by guesswork, I might have to paint the whole canvas over starting from that point?" The prospect made me tremble. During the period that Cézanne was working on my portrait, he was also occupied with a large composition of nudes, begun about 1895, on which he labored almost to the end of his life."

"[E]very year [he] sent two canvases to the Salon. They were constantly refused, until, in 1882... one of his entries, a portrait, had... been accepted! Of course he got into the Salon by the back door. His friend Guillemet, who was serving on the jury, and who tried in vain to get Cézanne's canvas accepted on the second vote, had put it through pour sa charité for at the time every member of the jury had the privelage of taking into the Salon a canvas by one of his pupils, without any conditions. ...Later, in the interests of equality, the Jury was deprived of this privelage... But the painter was again to have the satisfaction of being represented in... the Universal Exposition of 1889. ...[H]ere again he was accepted through favoritism, or... by means of a "deal." The committee had importuned Monsieur Choquet to send them a... precious piece of furniture... but he made the formal condition that a canvas of Cézanne's should be exhibited... [T]he picture was "skyed" so [high] that none but the owner and the painter noticed it. No matter; imagine Cézanne's joy at seeing a picture of his actually hung once more!"

"The Impressionists were the first [painters] to reject the absolute value of the subject and to consider its value to be merely relative.. .In Paul Cezanne's letters I notice ideas like these: 'Objects must turn, recede, and live. I wish to make something lasting from impressionism, like the art in the museums'.. .'For an impressionist, to paint after nature is not to paint the object, but to express sensations'.. .'After having looked at the old masters, one must take haste to leave them and to verify in one’s self the instincts, the sensations that dwell in us.'"

"It was because Cézanne could come at reality only through what he saw that he never invented purely abstract forms. Few great artists have depended more on the model. Every picture carried him a little further towards his goal—complete expression; and because it was not the making of pictures but the expression of his sense of the significance of form that he cared about, he lost interest in his work so soon as he had made it express as much as he had grasped. His own pictures were for Cézanne nothing but rungs in a ladder at the top of which would be complete expression. The whole of his later life was a climbing towards an ideal. For him every painting was a means, a step, a stick, a hold, a stepping-stone—something he was ready to discard as soon as it had served his purpose. He had no use for his own pictures. To him they were experiments. He tossed them into bushes, or left them in the open fields to be stumbling-blocks for a future race of luckless critics."

"How does he Cézanne do it? He cannot put two touches of colour on a canvas without its being very good."

"I hope that Cezanne will still be here and that he will join us, but he is so shy, so afraid of meeting new people, that I am afraid that he might let us down, even though he wants very much to meet you. How sad it is that this man hasn't had more patronage in his life! This is a true artist who has come to doubt himself far too much. He needs to be cheered up, so he was quite touched by your article."