Curator, Romy Silver-Kohn: Bliss started collecting Cézanne around 1912, and in the end, she owned more than twenty paintings and works on paper by the artist.
Curator, Ann Temkin: The Bather by Cézanne was one of Bliss's favorite paintings. We see this figure who's very reflective. He's looking down. You have this feeling of a tentative first step, a sense of the beginnings that Cézanne represents for modern art.
Bliss’s Niece, Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson Cobb: I don't know why this particular kind of modern art was so shocking in those days, except that it was a break from the past. My Aunt Lillie had eleven Cézanne paintings. Her mother didn't approve of modern art, but she was allowed for some reason to hang the Cézannes. And she couldn't have a nude, of course. But for some reason, her mother didn't object to nude men.
Romy Silver-Kohn: I can't help but see parallels between Bliss and Cézanne in the way that they are breaking away from conventions while still remaining within a traditional structure. The choice of subject matter is not particularly revolutionary, but he wanted to represent the artist's experiences of the world.
Ann Temkin: His loyalty was not to a photographic reproduction of the world as he saw it, but a way of making a painting into an emotionally, intellectually, powerful object that set whole new terms for both his peers and the people who came after him.