![]() 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. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, whether it is a section of nature or, if you prefer, of the show which the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads before our eyes. 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 toward a central point. The statement occurs in Cézanne’s letter to Emile Bernard of April 15, 1904: This is especially true of the most famous and controversial of all Cézanne’s statements-on treating nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone-which seems both to summarize the traditional basis of his thinking and to epitomize the radical aspect of his art. To recapture their original meaning, we must try to distinguish the personal significance of the artist’s theories from their sources in older pedagogical treatises, on the one hand, and their influence on later esthetic programs, on the other. Like his paintings, they stand at a major historical intersection, and the heavy mental traffic flowing by, both backward into tradition and forward into modernism, seems increasingly to blur their contours and to dull their colors. ![]() ![]() ![]() FEW GREAT ARTISTS’ THEORIES ARE more in need of explication than Cézanne’s. ![]()
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