Two of the more haunting quotations in Wallace Stevens' essay, "Relations between Poetry and Painting," (delivered at the Museum of Modern Art, 1951) are attributed to Cezanne:

"I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall."

"Planes in color. . . . The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight."

(The essay is in The Necessary Angel, and in the Frank Kermode Library of America collection, inter alia.)

These lines came back during a visit to the wonderful Cezanne show at the National Gallery in Washington. (It's free! and not very crowded, a nice contrast to the big Philly show some years ago. On the other hand, they're not selling Cezanne baseballs.)

Where did Cezanne make these wonderful remarks? None of the editions of Stevens I have tell us. They could be from the letters, which I've not yet checked. But looking around, I came across this essay by the art historian Kathryn Tuma, based on a recent Ph.D. dissertation:

"Ce´zanne and Lucretius at the Red Rock" Kathryn A Tuma Representations, Spring 2002, Vol. 78, No. 1, Pages 56-85

Tuma has written some related pieces as well. Her dissertation concerned Cezanne, Lucretius, and the Late 19th Century Crisis in Science. In the Representations essay, which I've not worked through with care, she focuses on a late Cezanne painting of rocks at the Bibemus quarry near Aix, not quoting the lines I began with (though hinting that they may be in his comments to Emile Bernard), but mentioning that "There are no lines in nature" for Cezanne, while "color" has mass. She also mentions the possible importance of Lucretian atomism for Cezanne, which is the pretext for writing to this list. It turns out that he was in fact an accomplished Latinist. Here is a summary of Tuma's summary of her Representations essay, perhaps of some use to others:

"IMAGINE THAT THE HISTORY OF the world dates from the day when two atoms collided, when two whirling eddies, two chemical dances combined. These great rainbows, these cosmic prisms, the dawn of man over the void -- I see these things rising. In reading Lucretius, I saturate myself by them." This is Paul Cézanne sometime during the late 1890s according to Joachim Gasquet.… Cézanne aligns his conception of landscape painting with a speculative physics, and a curious natural history. "To paint a landscape well," as Cézanne explains, "I must first discover its geological foundations."… Cézanne asks us to imagine landscape painting in overtly mythopoetic terms-terms that involve the origins not only of nature and mankind but also of time and history. At its deepest core, this mythic geohistory also depicts the very origins of formalization itself, for what this passage ultimately describes is an allegory of the origins of picturing, one figured around some imaginary, primordial moment when nature's invisible elements spin and dance, and collide to constitute a world of phenomenal color.

Gasquet is an unreliable source but Emile Bernard also reports on conversations he had with Cézanne during later years, and he likewise refers to Cézanne's appreciation of Lucretius. Reminiscing about his youth spent with Emile Zola on the banks of the Arc River in recitation and composition of verse in French and Latin, Cézanne complains to Bernard about modern education's neglect of the classics and turns to recite lengthy passages from Horace, Virgil, and Lucretius to round off his point. He had a remarkable memory for verse, and his proficiency in Latin was also high.

There is one more reason to pause before dismissing the passage from Gasquet’s memoir entirely: Not only is the language not originally Cézanne’s, it is not even authentically Gasquet’s. It derives, rather, from the young Zola, whose early essay of 1865, ‘‘La géologie et l’histoire,’’ begins with the line: ‘‘The history of the world dates from the day when two atoms collided.’’6 By the time in the late 1890s when Gasquet’s Cézanne ventriloquizes it, in other words, this proposition about the atomic origins of the world is already three decades old. Whether we should surmise from this that Gasquet turned to Zola’s critical juvenilia or that Cézanne kept his friend’s notion in mind for so long remains open to question. Both possibilities suggest, however, that a certain version of materialism mattered in some way to Cézanne during the last decade of his life, and quite possibly had mattered for some time.