Rubin, 1977
Braque concentrated on the problem of painting what he called the "visual space" that "separated
objects from each other." Thus, what Braque described as a "materialization of a new space… making
space as actual and as concrete and perceivable pictorially as objects themselves" was, in effect,
the explicit articulation and radicalization of a Cezanne idea.
Braque in Golding, 1968
What especially attracted me-and what was the main preoccupation of Cubism-was the materialization
of that new space which I sensed. There is in nature a tactile space, I might almost say a manual
space....This is the space that fascinated me so much because that is what early Cubist painting was,
a research into space.
Novotny, 1937
With few exceptions, no analogy to Cezanne's treatment of space can be found in earlier painting.
Space in his pictures is not illusionary space in the ordinary sense. Space does in his pictures...
a form of space of depth and intensity.
Meier-Graefe, 1927
Cezanne's masses go back into space uncannily and somehow make secure a third dimension.
Fry, 1927
The planes move freely in space...a kind of abstract system of plastic rhythms. p.28. The picture-
space recedes and every part has the vibration and movement of life. p.67. …and obtains the depth of
his pictorial space by other and quite original methods. P.26.
Barnes, 1939
There is in his mature work an abundance of movement but it is plastic activity...interplay of the
essential components of form. Cezanne's space is as notable for its depth as his volumes for their
weight and massiveness. p.35. Cezanne's ability to discard the irrelevant and lend solidity and
substance to masses in three dimensions.
Lhote, 1933
The planes which separate from one another, the darkest pushing the lightest forward somehow. The
systematic application of the phenomenon, rather than the use of classical perspective, has made
possible the suggestion of depth.... Each field pushing the other, the eye manuevered in front then
behind, is forced to realize a third dimension. This depth, perceived through feeling, is of a
different essence...
Loran, 1970
The control of planes is the essence of the Cezanne achievement. ...their rotation from static to
dynamic positions. The tensions, the space intervals between them. Their movement into depth and
their inevitable return to the picture plane...
Skrapits, Am.Art.
At some point...the illusion of depth is "refused", and the viewers eye rebounds back toward the
surface of his painting. His illusion of depth astonished...in their power to evoke the experience
of three dimensional space...a powerful illusion of depth.
Novotny, 1961
In Cezanne's pictures the objects appear to form themselves before our eyes, to grow out of the
surface of the picture and to dissolve themselves into it again.
Henderson, 1983
American criticism from 1913 on connected the fourth dimension with the formal qualities in
Cezanne's art.
Cheney, 1924
Form in his painting, if we take it to be that essential quality which is the magic of Cezanne, is
a 4-D attribute.
Weber in Henderson, 1983
In plastic art, I believe, there is a fourth dimension which may be described as the consciousness
of a great and overwhelming sense of space-magnitude in all directions at one time, and is brought
into existence through the three known measurements.
Cheney
Cezanne's painting clearly achieves expressive form in the four dimensional sense. Beyond the three
dimensions of length, breadth, and perspective depth, there is a rhythmic, voluminous movement, or a
poised spatial relationship that speaks emotionally to the spectator. In a great many of his canvases
one seems to detect a fluctuation of the volumes and planes a palpable feeling of emotional
organization.
Apollinaire
Regarded from the plastic point of view, the fourth dimension appears to spring from the three
known dimensions: it represents the immensity of space externalizing itself, the dimension of the
infinite: the fourth dimension endows objects with plasticity.
Gauss, 1949
The theory of Cezanne's let's "vision appear in its sensible purity." To Cezanne nature was so
diversified that the artist must have some principle by which he orders his sensations of it. This
principle was depth...
Gauss, 1949
The painter is concerned with depth, the plasticity of nature. Plastic organization cannot come
from a simple passive sense perception, but only from a reorganization of nature, treating it
according to certain hypothetical constants.
Loran, 1970
If there is one point of complete agreement among artists and critics, it pertains to the effect of
volume. Everyone agrees that Cezanne achieved it.
Hofmann in Hunter, 1964
An enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsation, expanding, contracting.
Novotny, 1937
One cannot investigate Cezanne without soon coming upon original phenomena, of which it is possible
to define the effects, but not the causes. His color has a' faculty of creating forms and space
this is greater than in all previous painting.
Reff, The Late Works
Bernard's neo-plastic interpretation according to which geometric forms are contained in everything
we see, they are the invisible scaffolding.
Itten, 1961
Whether Cezanne arrived at his proportions by measurement and construction, we do not know. In my
opinion, he did measure and construct.
Stockstadt, 1995
In the final analysis the exact source and meaning of the unresolved tension (between 2-D and 3-D)
that characterize Cezanne's entire mature output remains unknown.
