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Paul Cézanne’s posthumous retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 was a watershed event in the history of art. The immediate impact of this large presentation of his work on the young artists of Paris was profound. Its ramifications on successive generations down to the present are still in effect.
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Exhibition Minutes |
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Artists take from other great artists when they need to become more themselves...
Listen to or download Curator Joseph Rishel's 3-part Podcast.
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Ellsworth Kelly (American, born 1923)
"Cézanne tackled and conceptualized the three-dimensional
world in terms of its underlying structure and our uncertain
relationships to it."
Fernand Léger (French, 1881–1955)
"[Cézanne’s] influence was so strong that in order to free myself
I had to move all the way to abstraction."
Sherrie Levine (American, born 1947)
"I engage the idea of removing the artist completely from the
artwork, so that it becomes a kind of group project with audience
participation."
Brice Marden (American, born 1938)
"Cézanne, my hero."
Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)
"I thought: If Cézanne is right, I am right. Because I knew
Cézanne had made no mistake."
Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944)
"Beauty in art is created not by the objects of representation but
by the relationships of line and color (Cézanne)."
Giorgio Morandi (Italian, 1890–1964)
"We sat down around the big table and talked about art," John
Rewald recalled, "not so much about his [Morandi’s] as about the
masters he admired, above all Cézanne and Seurat."
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)
"[Cézanne] was my one and only master! Don’t
you think I looked at his pictures?"
Liubov Popova (Russian, 1889–1924)
"Cézanne no longer depicted the impression of the
object, but only its essence."
Jeff Wall (Canadian, born 1946)
"I have always admired Cézanne."
Francis Alÿs (Belgian, born 1959)
"I remember blaming Cézanne (or was it that I blessed him) for
having saved me from having to deal with the enigma of painting."
Max Beckmann (German, 1884–1950)
"Cézanne was my greatest love and still is when I think of French art."
Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963)
"To my way of thinking, there is no master equal to Cézanne."
Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906)
"In my thought one doesn’t replace the past, one only adds a new
link to it."
Charles Demuth (American, 1883–1935)
"John Marin and I drew our inspiration from the same source,
French modernism. He brought his up in buckets and spilt much
along the way. I dipped mine out with a teaspoon, but I never
spilled a drop."
Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901–1966)
"Cézanne did not … seek to be original. And yet there is no
painter so original as Cézanne."
Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia, 1904–1948)
"Cézanne is the greatest artist, shall I say, that has lived."
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877–1943)
"[Cézanne had] ideas that were to make the world of painting
over again."
Jasper Johns (American, born 1930)
"As for the Cézanne [Bather], it has a synesthetic quality that
gives it great sensuality—it makes looking equivalent to touching."