4 ideas
In a letter to Émile Bernard dated 15 April 1904, Cézanne advised treating nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, with everything put in proper perspective. The letter gives this as geometric and perspective advice and does not lay out an order of work in which volumes are completed before detail is added.
Cézanne told visitors that form is built by modulating color from warm to cool and by setting adjacent planes of hue side by side. He preferred this to modeling with light and dark. Because form comes from the colored planes themselves, drawing and coloring become one operation: when the color reaches its fullness, the form reaches its fullness too.
Cézanne named the painter's aim as 'réaliser', to realize his sensations in front of the motif, and he tied this aim to close, exact study of nature. His visitors record him struggling to achieve it and doubting his own results. They record this as his ongoing effort, not as a doctrine that failure is inevitable.
Doran's collection documents two distortions. Joachim Gasquet reconstructed Cézanne's 'conversations' long after the fact as polished monologues, and Émile Bernard shaped Cézanne's remarks toward his own theories. Cézanne's letters approved much of Bernard's article and thanked him for it. Doran leaves the accounts side by side, contradictions included, so readers can weigh sources that painters relied on despite their unreliability.