The cylinder, the sphere, the cone

This is the period of the most quoted sentence Cézanne ever wrote. In a letter dated 15 April 1904 to Émile Bernard (a younger painter who corresponded with Cézanne), he set down the instruction that the whole twentieth century would chew on. In one standard English translation it runs: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, with everything put in perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed toward a central point.

A word of caution on the wording: that is a translation of his French, and several English versions exist (some say “deal with” or “interpret” for “treat”). The idea is firmly his, the date and the letter are documented, and the original autograph survives in the Courtauld’s collection. But quote it as one translation among several, not as a fixed scripture.

What the line means is exactly what this canvas is doing. Cézanne is telling Bernard to see past the surface accidents of a thing to the simple solid geometry underneath, and to build a picture from those underlying volumes. Look back at the mountain: that is a landscape reduced toward its basic forms, assembled from color-blocks that stand for the architecture of a valley rather than its details. The sentence and the painting are the same thought, one in ink and one in oil. And in the hands of the young men who read it after his death, that instruction became one of the seeds of Cubism.