Printmakers

"Telephone, pedal washbasin, white refrigerators gleaming with Ripolin [French paint], bidet, small phonograph.. ..objects of authentic and pure poetry (MPC p. 11).. ..The Parthenon was not built as a ruin. It was built on a new surface without patina, like our automobiles. / we will not always bear on our shoulders the weight of our father's corpse."

"Just now I'm painting a beautiful woman, smiling, burnt to a crisp, with feathers of all colors, held up by a small die of burning marble; the die is in turn held up by a little puff of smoke, churned and quite; in the sky there are asses with parrot-heads, grasses and beach sand, all about to explode, all clean, incredible objective.."

"The more I looked at his face [of Saint Sebastian] the more curious it seemed. That said, I seemed to have always known it and the aseptic morning light revealed its smallest details which such clarity, such purity, that I was impossible moved.. .In the upper part of the heliometer was St. Sebastian's magnifying glass.. .I put my eye to the magnifying glass, product of a slow distillation, at once numerical and intuitive. Each drop of water a number. Each drop of blood a geometry."

"One morning with Ripolin [French paint] I painted a new-born that I then left to dry on the tennis-court. After two days I found it bristling with ants that made it move to the anesthetized, silent rhythm of sea-urchins. However I at once realized that this newborn child was none other than the pink breast of my girlfriend, being frenetically eaten by the shining, metallic thickness of the phonograph. But it wasn't her breast either: it was little pieces of my cigarette paper nervously grouped around the magnetic topaz of my fiancees ring."

"So, André Breton, if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail."

"One might think that through ecstasy we would have access to a world as far from reality as that of the dream. – The repugnant can become desirable, affection cruelty, the ugly beautiful, faults qualities, qualities black miseries."

"The Italian metaphysical movement [initiated by De Chirico ] started from the spiritual reality, a consequence of the physical miracle and it aspects grouped on an immaterial plane; all this formed a new spectral reality, in order to attain maximal, almost erotic creativity in touch. The Cubists, on the other hand, starting from this sensual-idealistic touch, found a pure, new form of spirituality. Lorca is one of those who have reached this new form of miracle by following the paths of the greatest incredulity. He does not even believe in his own hands, unless it be to turn one-legged physiological and abstract tables."

"It is under such cultural circumstances that our contemporaries, systematically cretinised by the mechanicism and the architecture of auto-punition, by psychological bureaucratic congratulations, by ideological disorder and imaginative fasting, by affective paternal hungers of all kinds, seek in vain - to bite into the doting and triumphal sweetness of the plump, atavistic, tender, militarist and territorial hack of some hitlerian nurse, in order at last to be able, no matter how, to communicate with the totemic consecrated host that has just been elevated in front of their own noses and which, as is known and understood, was nothing else than the spiritual and symbolic nourishment that catholicism offered during the centuries to appease the cannibal frenzy of moral and irrational hungers."

"It seems to me perfectly obvious when my enemies, my friends and the public in general pretend not to understand the meaning of the images that arise arid that I transcribe in my pictures, How can you expect then to understand them when I myself, who am their "maker", understand them as little?"

"The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition. To describe my pictures in everyday language, to explain them, it is necessary to submit them to special analyses and preferably with the most ambitiously objective scientific rigour possible. Then all explanation arises a posteriori; once the picture already exists as phenomenon."

"My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialise the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision. - In order that the world of the imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident.. ..as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality. - The important thing is what one wishes to communicate: the concrete irrational subject. - The means of pictorial expression are placed at the service of this subject."

"In the degree that the images of concrete irrationality approach phenomenal reality, the corresponding means of expression approach those of the great realist painters - Velasquez and Vermeer of Delft - to paint realistically according to irrational thought, according to the unknown imagination."

"Surrealism in its first period offered specific methods for approaching the images of concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusively passive and receptive role of the surrealist subject, are now [1935] in liquidation and giving place to new surrealist methods of systematic exploration of the irrational."

"The essays in simulation of [Paul] Eluard and [Andre] Breton, Breton's recent poem-objects, the latest images of Rene Magritte, the "method" of the latest sculpture of Picasso and the theoretic and pictorial activity of Salvador Dali prove this need of concrete materialisation in current reality, of giving objective value on the real plane to the delirious unknown world of our irrational experiences. Against the remembrance of dreams and the virtual and impossible images of purely receptive states, "that can only be recounted", there are the physical facts of "objective" irrationality, with which one can already actually wound oneself."

"It was in 1929 that Salvador Dali [Dali is writing about himself] brought his attention to hear upon the internal mechanism of paranoiac phenomena and envisaged the possibility of an experimental method based on the sudden power of the systematic associations proper to paranoia; this method afterwards became the delirio-critical synthesis which hears the name of "paranoiac-critical activity". Paranoia: delirium of interpretive association bearing a systematic structure. Paranoiac-critical activity: spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena."

"It is a question of the systematic and interpretive organization of the sensational, scattered and narcissist surrealist experimental material, - that is to say, of everyday surrealist events:,br>nocturnal pollution, false recollection, dream, diurnal fantasy, the concrete transformation of nocturnal phosphene into a hypnagogic image or of "waking phosphene" into an objective image, - the nutritive caprice, - inter-uterine claims, - anamorphic hysteria, - the voluntary retention of the urine, - the involuntary retention of insomnia - the fortuitous image of exclusively exhibitionist tendency, -the incomplete action, - the frantic manner, - the regional sneeze, the anal wheelbarrow, the minimal mistake, the liliputian malaise, the super-normal physiological state, - the picture one leaves off painting, that which one paints, the territorial ringing of the telephone, "the deranging image", etc., etc., all these things, I say, and a thousand other instantaneous or successive sollicitations, revealing a minimum of irrational intentionalety or, on the contrary, a minimum of suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of paranoiac-critical activity, in an indestructible delirious-interpretive system of political problems, paralytic images, more or less mammiferous questions, playing the role of the obsessing idea."

"Paranoiac-critical activity is an organizing and productive force of objective chance. Paranoiac-critical activity no longer considers surrealist phenomena and images by themselves but, on the contrary, as a coherent whole of systematic and significant relations."

"We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter – the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst form it life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction."

"Having reached the surface [in the Paris' Metro] I remained crazed for a long time, gathering my spirits. I had the impression that I had been vomited by a monstrous anus after being tumultuously brewed by an intestine. I did not know where I was; as though spat out on to unknown land, a pointless little excrement.. .And, a miracle!.. .This shock was a beneficial revelation. One must at every opportunity use the subterranean paths of action and thought, erase the traces, appear suddenly and irrelevantly, endless conquer oneself, never hesitate to sodomize one's soul so that it will be reborn purer and stronger than ever."

"From the moment I arrived in Cadaqués [Summer of 1929] I was assailed by a resurgence of my childhood period. The six years of secondary school, the three years in Madrid and the trip I had just made to Paris, all totally faded into the background, while all the fantasies and representations of my childhood period came back to take victorious possession of my mind."

"In that privileged place, reality and the sublime dimension almost come together. My mystical paradise begins in the plains of the Empordà, is surrounded by the Alberes hills, and reaches plenitude in the bay of Cadaqués. This land is my permanent inspiration. The only place in the world, too, where I feel loved. When I painted that rock that I entitled 'The Great Masturbator', I did nothing more than render homage to one of the promontories of my kingdom, and my painting was a hymn to one of the jewels of my crown."

"It ['The Great Masturbator', 1929] represented a large head, yellow like wax, with very red cheeks, long eyelashes and an imposing nose compressed against the ground. This face had no mouth, and in place of the mouth an enormous lobster was hooked. The lobster's belly was decomposing and full of ants. Some of these ants were scurrying through the space that would have been occupied by the non-existent mouth of the great anguished face, whose head ended in 1900-style architecture and ornamentation. The title of the painting was The Great Masturbator."

"What is an elegant woman? An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and who has no hair under her arms."

"Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system.. .Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college [= collage]."

"Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject 19 years ago 'Basket of Bread, 1929'. By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism."

"Myself at the age of six, when I believed I was a little girl, raising with a very great care the skin of the sea in order to observe a dog sleeping in the shadow of the water."

"In the first place, in 1950, I had a 'cosmic dream' in which I saw this image in colour and which in my dream represented the 'nucleus of the atom.' This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it 'the very unity of the universe,' the Christ!"

"In 1951 the two most subversive things that could happen to an ex-surrealist were: firstly, to become a mystic and secondly, to know how to draw. These two models of rigour happened to me at the same time."

"The H-bomb is coming out of my intuitive and inspirationic command, for my spirit speaketh and speaketh psychologically, intuitively, and inspirationally and guides the destinies of the nations of the earth.. .My Assumption is the opposite of the atomic bomb. Instead of disintegration of matter, we have the integration, the reconstitution of the real and glorious body of the Virgin in the heavens."

"Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí."

"[I]f you want to ensure for yourself a prominent place in Society you must [...] give it a violent kick in the right leg."

"In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg."

"When I have at last become like a statue through the exacerbation of my ego which has led me to this ultimate sclerosis.. .Then and only then will I at last be able to set this statue up and come out of myself into the crowd to go and see the world. No one will notice anything because they will all be looking at the statue and I will be able to go about, free at last.. .It's then that I shall realize my eternal dream: to become a newspaper reporter!"

"Popularity, even at its most mediocre, delights me.. .I behave nicely with the public, out of the same concern for prudence that makes me generous in cases of epidemics or other collective calamities.. .Beware, I tell myself, because you may be judged at the end of the time, if there is an end of time and a judge.. .Beware of the day when no one ask you for anything anymore, be nice with the cratinization of advertising.. .Any reflection of my existence in others clams my worries about the feeble degree of reality of things, the world and myself. It's from all these eyes, in which I see myself seen, that I take my substance.. ..but where is substance? If it is not in nature it can't be in God.. .In a reality that endlessly disperses before the eye, fades away between our fingers, the only really material matter, the only really substantial substance, would be God."

"Let us watch this de Kooning [leading Abstract-Expressionist painter in New York] with his prematurely white hair making his great sleepwalker's movements, as though he was waiting in a dream to open bays of Biscay, to explode islands like pieces of orange or Parma violets, to tear continents from a cerulean blue split by oceans of Naples yellow.. ..if by good or by ill fortune, in the middle of this Dionysian demiurg the image of The Eternal Feminine should appear.. the least that might have happened to her would be that she should emerge (from all this chaos) wearing nothing but a little make-up."

"Let us illuminate my political positions. I have always been against any affiliation.. .I am the only Surrealist who always refused to be part of any organization whatsoever. I was never a Stalinist, nor fooled by any association. Illustrious members of the Falange [Spanish ultra-right wing] I never got involved.. .If I accepted the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic from Franco's [Spanish fascist dictator] hands, it is because in Soviet Russia I was not awarded the Lenin Prize."

"Men who fuck easily, and can give themselves without difficulty, have only a very diminished creative potency.. .Look at Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Napoleon, they all left their mark on their times, and they were more or less impotent."

"Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic."

"Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael."

"Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later.. ..when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies."

"I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry."

"I categorically refused to consider the surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world'. I was going to become the Nietzsche of the irrational. I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the 'conquest of the irrational'. In the meantime my friends would let themselves be overwhelmed by the irrational, succumbing, like so many others, Nietzsche included, to that romantic weakness."

"This book ['Diary of a Genius', by Dali] will prove that that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind."

"It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself."

"Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision.."

"Surrealism in its early period offered specific methods to bring images closer to concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusive passive and receptive role of the 'surrealist subject', are bankrupt and are giving way to new surrealist methods for the systematic exploration of the irrational.. .The new delirious images of concrete irrationality suggest their physical, real 'possibility'; they go beyond the domain of psycho-analysable fantasies and 'virtual' representations.. .Against the dream memory and impossible, virtual images of purely receptive states that one can only recount, the physical facts of 'objective' irrationality with which one can already hurt oneself."

"Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them."

"The anagram 'Avida Dollars' was a talisman for me [referring to 'Divine Dali', so called by André Breton ]. It rendered the rain of dollars fluid, sweet and monotonous. Someday I shall tell the whole truth about the way in which this blessed disorder of Danae was garnered. It will be a chapter of a new book, probably my masterpiece: On the Life of Salvador Dali, considered as a Work of Art [never written]."

"Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid."

"Don't be afraid of perfection. You will never attain it!"

"July 1952/the 27th/This morning an exceptional defecation: two small turds in the shape of a rhinoceros horns. Such a scanty stool worries me. I would have thought the champagne, so alien to my routine, would have had a laxative effect. (DG p. 59)"

"- the 29th/Because of a very long fart, really a very long, and let us be frank, melodious fart, that I produced when I woke up, I was reminded of Michel de Montaigne. (DG p. 60)"

"- September 1952/the2nd/Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional, smooth and odourless."

"And man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject. Indeed, I am dumbfounded at how little philosophical and metaphysical importance the human mind has attached to the vital subject of excrement."

"I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work."

"If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius."

"Begin by drawing and painting like the old masters. After that do as you see fit - you will always be respected."

"Sleeping is a way of dying or at least of dying to reality, better still it is the death of reality, but reality dies in love as in dreams. The life of man is entirely occupied by the bloody osmosis of dreams and love."

"It is with Millet's 'Angelus' that I associate all the pre-twilight and twilight memories of my childhood, regarding them as the most delirious, in other words (commonly speaking) poetic.. .Most frequently, at the end of summer days, I would leave the streets of the town and go to the fields to listen to the sounds of insects and plunge into infinite reveries."

"'Up there!'. Wonderful words! All my life has been dominated by these antagonisms: high and low. In my childhood I tried desperately to be high up."

"- There was nothing left between me and the void. I must have spent several minutes lying on my stomach with my eyes closed to resist its almost invincible attraction."

"- Most of my readers will have felt the sensation of suddenly falling into the void, just at the point when sleep is going to take them over completely. Waking up with a start, your heart convulsively trembling, you don't always realize that this sensation of vertigo is a reminiscence of the expulsion of being born.. .All those who throw themselves into the void have at bottom only one desire, to be reborn at any price."

"Where is the real? All appearance are deceitful, the visible surface is deceptive. I look at my hand.. .It is nerves, muscles, bones. Let us go deeper: it is molecules and acids. Further still: it is an impalpable waltz of electrons and neutrons. Further still: an immaterial nebula. Who can prove that my hand exists?"

"It is difficult to hold the world's interest for more than half an hour at a time.. .I have been successful for twenty years, to the extent that papers publish the most incomprehensible new items of our time, sent by teletype: PARIS. Dali gave lecture at Sorbonne on Vermeer's paintings 'lacemaker' and the rhinoceros.. ..NEW YORK. Dali landed in New York dressed in a golden space-suit."

"Surrounded by countless people who murmur my name and call me 'maître', I am about to inaugurate the exhibition of my one hundred illustrations of the Divine Comedy at the Galliera Museum."

"Le Surréalisme, c'est moi."

"Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad."

"Every time I lose a little sperm I'm convinced I've wasted it. I always feel guilty afterwards.. .To start with, I'm not as impotent as all that."

"The pleasure of the flesh can be fulfilled only if a particular dimension is created, a kind of stereoscopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as real as reality.. .I need all these suddenly present images of my past that forms the fabric of my entire life."

"My supreme game is to imagine myself dead, devoured by worms. I close my eyes and, with incredible details of absolute, scatological precision, I see myself being slowly eaten and digested by an infernal swarm of large greenish maggots gorging themselves on my flesh."

"But I very early realized, instinctively, my life formula: to get others to accept as natural the excesses of one's personality an thus to relieve oneself of his own anxieties by creating a sort of collective participation."

"Death is the thing I am most afraid of, and the resurrection of the flesh, a great Spanish theme, is the one that it is hardest for me to accept, from the point of view of.. ..life."

"..the paint marks [in Impressionist paintings] placed apparently without order and which suddenly became magnificently ordered if one knew how to make the right distance.. ..to communicate a deep, sun-drenched image of a stream, landscape or face.. ..My eyes were popping out of my head."

"Shit scared them [the Surrealists]. Shit and arseholes. Yet, what was more human and more needful of transcending! From that moment, I know I would keep on obsessing them with what they most dreaded. And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the [Surrealist] group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contradictions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear."

"I am capable of projecting myself into my little inner cinema.. .I free myself through a secret exit from the attempts to encircle my soul."

"In the subconscious you fuck ugly people, never beautiful, because the libido always desires something repulsive."

"I like it, murder, because this is courage. It is anti-bourgeois. Murder is closer to heaven, because after becoming 'remords de conscience', one prays, one opens the sky, and the angels say, 'Good morning'!"

"You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dalí spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theater, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!"

"Ah, UNESCO is the most garbage. Any kind of organization for the good will of the people is impossible. It is necessary for the contrary. Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something, you know? If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ig-no-min-i-ously!"

"I don't do drugs. I am drugs."

"The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."

"I can say without fear of falling into the slightest exaggeration that each outline of a rock, / and / of the beaches of Cadaques [in North-Spain, where Dali spent his childhood], each of the geological anomalies of its landscape and its unique light I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance / of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of my erotic-emotional life."

"When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are necessary for the progress of humanity.."

"The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant."

"Dali has endowed Surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular the paranoiaccritical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist objects, to fashion, to sculpture, to the history of art and even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis."

"What a wonderful thing it is for an artist [Dali] to find exactly the right wife [Gala] for him. This must only happen once in a hundred times only. It has happened to Dali and I think it is going to make the entire difference to his career - in fact all the difference between him remaining an interesting phenomenon of a distorted decade or in him becoming one of the two or three leading figures of the coming age."

"I have been inclined to regard the Surrealists as complete fools, but that young Spaniard with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate."

"The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents. Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours."

"Divine Dali!"

"Surprisingly, Dalí said that his soft watches [in his painting 'The Persistence of Memory', 1931 were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun. The painter insisted on this explanation in his reply letter to Prigogine, who took it as Dalí's reaction to Einstein's coldly mathematical theory."

"Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more."

"The true method of knowledge is experiment."

"There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness."

"If a thing loves, it is infinite."

"Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole? Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl?"

"How sweet I roamed from field to field, And tasted all the summer's pride, Till I the prince of love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide!"

"He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty."

"My silks and fine array, My smiles and languished air, By love are driv'n away; And mournful lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: Such end true lovers have."

"Like a fiend in a cloud, With howling woe, After night I do crowd, And with night will go; I turn my back to the east, From whence comforts have increased; For light doth seize my brain With frantic pain."

"How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoyed in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forced, the notes are few!"

"Damn sneerers!"

"True superstition is ignorant honesty & this is beloved of god and man."

"Forgiveness of enemies can only come upon their repentance."

"Active Evil is better than Passive Good."

"They suppose that Woman's Love is Sin; in consequence all the Loves & Graces with them are Sin."

"Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: "Pipe a song about a Lamb." So I piped with merry cheer; "Piper, pipe that song again." So I piped; he wept to hear."

"And I made a rural pen, And I stained the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear."

"Sing louder around To the bells' cheerful sound, While our sports shall be seen On the ecchoing green."

"Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life and bid thee feed By the stream and o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing, woolly bright."

"My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child, But I am black as if bereaved of light."

"And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love, And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove."

"I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear To lean in joy upon our Father's knee; And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him and he will then love me."

"When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!'weep! So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep."

"To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love All pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness.For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is God, our father dear, And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is Man, his child and care.For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress."

"Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. And all must love the human form, In heathen, Turk, or Jew; Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell There God is dwelling too."

"The moon like a flower In heaven's high bower, With silent delight, Sits and smiles on the night."

"And there the lion's ruddy eyes Shall flow with tears of gold, And pitying the tender cries, And walking round the fold, Saying: "Wrath by his meekness, And by his health, sickness, Is driven away From our immortal day.""

"For washed in life's river, My bright mane forever Shall shine like the gold As Iguard o'er the fold."

"When the voices of children are heard on the green And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast And everything else is still."

"Can I see another's woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, And not seek for kind relief?"

"Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public RECORDS to be True."

"That the Jews assumed a right Exclusively to the benefits of God. will be a lasting witness against them. & the same will it be against Christians"

"In my Brain are studies & Chambers fill'd with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life;"

"I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what Ought to be Told: That I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily & Nightly;"

"And now let me finish with assuring you that, Tho I have been very unhappy, I am so no longer. I am again. Emerged into the light of day; I still & shall to Eternity Embrace Christianity and Adore him who is the Express image of God; but I have travel'd thro' Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion. I have Conquer'd, and shall still Go on Conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my Course among the Stars of God & in the Abysses of the Accuser. My Enthusiasm is still what it was, only Enlarged and conform'd."

"I have labour'd hard indeed, & have been borne on angel's wings. Till we meet I beg of God our Saviour to be with you & me, & yours & mine. Pray give my & my wife's love to Mrs Butts & Family, & believe me to remain."

"Degrade first the arts if you'd mankind degrade, Hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade."

"To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit — General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess."

"The Foundation of Empire is Art & Science Remove them or Degrade them & the Empire is No More — Empire follows Art & Not Vice Versa as Englishmen suppose."

"Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden'd air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep."

"Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence."

"The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devils' party without knowing it."

"Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling."

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite."

"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."

"Opposition is true Friendship."

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

"He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence."

"A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. He whose face gives no light shall never become a star."

"Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

"The busy bee has no time for sorrow."

"The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure."

"All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap."

"No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings."

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."

"Prisons are built with stones of law; brothels with bricks of religion."

"The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God."

"The cistern contains: the fountain overflows."

"One thought fills immensity."

"Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you."

"The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow."

"Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night."

"The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."

"The weak in courage is strong in cunning."

"When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!"

"Exuberance is Beauty."

"Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."

"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."

"Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed."

"Enough! or too much."

"The ancient poets animated all objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast."

"Never seek to tell thy love Love that never told can be; For the gentle wind does move Silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart; Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears— Ah, she doth depart. Soon as she was gone from me A traveler came by Silently, invisibly— Oh, was no deny."

"I asked a thief to steal me a peach: He turned up his eyes. I asked a lithe lady to lie her down: Holy and meek, she cries. As soon as I went An angel came. He winked at the thief And smiled at the dame— And without one word said Had a peach from the tree, And still as a maid Enjoyed the lady."

"Sleep, sleep, beauty bright, Dreaming o'er the joys of night. Sleep, sleep: in thy sleep Little sorrows sit and weep."

"Why art thou silent and invisible, Father of Jealousy?"

"Love to faults is always blind, Always is to joys inclined, Lawless, winged, and unconfined, And breaks all chains from every mind."

"The sword sung on the barren heath, The sickle in the fruitful field; The sword he sung a song of death, But could not make the sickle yield."

"Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs and flaming hair, But desire gratified Plants fruits of life and beauty there."

"If you trap the moment before it's ripe, The tears of repentance you'll certainly wipe; But if once you let the ripe moment go You can never wipe off the tears of woe."

"Then old Nobodaddy aloft Farted and belched and coughed, And said, "I love hanging and drawing and quartering Every bit as well as war and slaughtering.""

"He who binds to himself a joy Does the wingèd life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sunrise."

"The look of love alarms Because 'tis filled with fire; But the look of soft deceit Shall win the lover's hire."

"What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of gratified desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of gratified desire."

"You'll quite remove the ancient curse."

"Hear the voice of the Bard, Who present, past, and future, sees; Whose ears have heard The Holy Word That walked among the ancient trees."

"Turn away no more; Why wilt thou turn away? The starry floor, The watery shore Is given thee till the break of day."

"Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

"Love seeketh only Self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven's despite."

"O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm:Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy."

"Little Fly, Thy summer's play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away. Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance, And drink, and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing."

"The modest Rose puts forth a thorn, The humble sheep a threat'ning horn: While the Lily white shall in love delight, Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright."

"In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear."

"But most, thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot's curse Blasts the new born Infant's tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse."

"Pity would be no more If we did not make somebody Poor; And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we."

"My mother groan'd! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud: Like a fiend hid in a cloud."

"I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow."

"In the morning glad I see My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree."

"Children of the future Age Reading this indignant page, Know that in a former time Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime."

"Cruelty has a human heart, And Jealousy a human face; Terror the human form divine, And Secrecy the human dress."

"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright in the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

"In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?"

"When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"

"What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the idiot is not worth my care."

"But Want of Money & the Distress of A Thief can never be alleged as the Cause of his Thieving, for many honest people endure greater hard ships with Fortitude. We must therefore seek the Cause else where than in want of Money for that is the Misers passion, not the Thiefs."

"Fun I love, but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsom. Mirth is better than Fun & Happiness is better than Mirth."

"To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers.."

"When a Man has Married a Wife He finds out whether Her Knees & elbows are only glued together."

"When nations grow old, the Arts grow cold, And Commerce settles on every tree: And the poor and the old Can live upon gold, For all are born poor. Aged sixty-three."

"Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll'd Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc."

"Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading."

"Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed."

"Art is the tree of life. SCIENCE is the Tree of DEATH ART is the Tree of LIFEGOD is JESUS"

"Jesus & his apostles & disciples were all artists"

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour."

"A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all Heaven in a rage."

"A dog starved at his master's gate Predicts the ruin of the state."

"He who shall hurt the little wren Shall never be beloved by men."

"A truth that's told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent."

"Man was made for joy and woe, And when this we rightly know Through the world we safely go. Joy and woe are woven fine, A clothing for the soul divine."

"Every tear from every eye Becomes a babe in eternity."

"He who shall teach the child to doubt The rotting grave shall ne'er get out."

"The strongest poison ever known Came from Caesar's laurel crown."

"He who doubts from what he sees Will ne'er believe, do what you please. If the sun and moon should doubt They'd immediately go out."

"The harlot's cry from street to street Shall weave old England's winding sheet."

"Every night, and every morn, Some to misery are born. Every morn, and every night, Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless night."

"God appears and god is light To those poor souls who dwell in night But does a human form display To those who dwell in realms of day"

"My specter around me night and day Like a wild beast guards my way, My emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my sin."

"And throughout all eternity I forgive you, you forgive me."

"Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau. Mock on, mock on — 'tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again."

"Terror in the house does roar, But Pity stands before the door."

"There is a smile of love, And there is a smile of deceit, And there is a smile of smiles In which these two smiles meet."

"This cabinet is formed of gold And pearl and crystal shining bright, And within it opens into a world And a little lovely moony night."

"For a tear is an intellectual thing, And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King, And the bitter groan of the martyr's woe Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow."

"The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible"

"Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War."

"And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold, Bring me my Arrows of desire, Bring me my Spear — O clouds, unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire! I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green & pleasant land."

"Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment."

"Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street."

"If you have formed a circle to go into, Go into it yourself and see how you would do."

"The Angel that presided o'er my birth Said, "Little creature, formed of joy and mirth, Go love without the help of any thing on earth.""

"Grown old in love from seven till seven times seven, I oft have wished for Hell for ease from Heaven."

"Half Friendship is the bitterest Enmity..."

"Every Thing has its Vermin O Spectre of the Sleeping Dead!"

"Poetry Fetter'd. Fetters the Human Race. Nations are Destroy'd, or Flourish, in proportion as Their Poetry, Painting, and Music are Destroy'd or Flourish!"

"I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend; Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me: Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!"

"Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish'd at me. Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination"

"O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love: Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life! Guide thou my hand which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages"

"They have divided themselves by Wrath. they must be united by Pity<...>"

"Pity must join together those whom wrath has torn in sunder"

"I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's; I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create."

"Ever Weeping Paddington..."

"For every thing exists & not one sigh nor smile nor tear, One hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away."

"I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep, And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre & its cruel Shadow. I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!"

"SUCH VISIONS HAVE APPEARD TO ME AS I MY ORDERD RACE HAVE RUN JERUSALEM IS NAMED LIBERTY AMONG THE SONS OF ALBION"

"The fields from Islington to Marybone, To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood: Were builded over with pillars of gold, And there Jerusalems pillars stood."

"Pancrass & Kentish-town repose Among her golden pillars high: Among her golden arches which Shine upon the starry sky."

"He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars; General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer: For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars."

"What is a Wife & what is a Harlot? What is a Church & What Is a Theatre? are they Two & not One? can they Exist Separate? Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood is Religion O Demonstrations of Reason Dividing Families in Cruelty & Pride!"

"England! awake! awake! awake! Jerusalem thy sister calls! Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death And close her from thy ancient walls?"

"It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend."

"Commerce is so far from being beneficial to Arts or to Empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their History shows, for the above Reason of Individual Merit being its Great Hatred. Empires flourish till they become Commercial & then they are scattered abroad to the four winds"

"When I tell any Truth it is not for the sake of Convincing those who do not know it but for the sake of defending those who Do"

"Every Harlot was a Virgin once"

"It is not because Angels are Holier than Men or Devils that makes them Angels but because they do not Expect Holiness from one another but from God only"

"Thinking as I do that the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being & being a Worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: "the Son, O how unlike the Father!" First God Almighty comes with a Thump on the Head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it."

"This world of imagination is the world of eternity."

"You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue & you cannot have Moral Virtue without the Slavery of that half of the Human Race who hate what you call Moral Virtue"

"I assert, for myself, that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. "What !" it will be questioned, "when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea !" Oh ! no, no ! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty !" I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it."

"...some say that Happiness is not Good for Mortals & they ought to be answerd that Sorrow is not fit for Immortals & is utterly useless to any one a blight never does good to a tree & if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight."

"The Goddess Fortune is the devils servant ready to Kiss any ones Arse."

"The Old & New Testaments are / the Great Code of Art."

"The vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision's greatest enemy. Thine has a great hook nose like thine; Mine has a snub nose like to mine. Thine is the Friend of all Mankind; Mine speaks in parables to the blind. Thine loves the same world that mine hates; Thy heaven doors are my hell gates."

"If He had been Antichrist, Creeping Jesus, He'd have done anything to please us; Gone sneaking into synagogues, And not us'd the Elders and Priests like dogs; But humble as a lamb or ass Obey'd Himself to Caiaphas."

"God wants not man to humble himself: That is the trick of the Ancient Elf. This is the race that Jesus ran: Humble to God, haughty to man, Cursing the Rulers before the people Even to the Temple's highest steeple, And when He humbled Himself to God Then descended the cruel rod. ‘If Thou Humblest Thyself, Thou humblest Me. Thou also dwell’st in Eternity."

"This life's dim windows of the soul Distorts the heavens from pole to pole And leads you to believe a lie When you see with, not through, the eye."

"Seeing this False Christ, in fury and passion I made my voice heard all over the nation. … I am sure this Jesus will not do Either for Englishman or Jew."

"I die, I die!" the Mother said, "My children die for lack of Bread."

"My Brother starv'd between two Walls, His Children's Cry my Soul appalls;"

"The iron hand crush'd the Tyrant's head And became a Tyrant in his stead."

"When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend."

"[T]he man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."

"I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me."

"What is most needed today is a fundamental theological thinking, one centered upon the Godhead itself, and centered upon that which is most challenging or most offensive in the Godhead, one which has truly been veiled in the modern world, except by our most revolutionary thinkers and visionaries. If we allow Blake and Nietzsche to be paradigmatic of those revolutionaries, nowhere else does such a centering upon God or the Godhead occur, although a full parallel to this occurs in Spinoza and Hegel; but the language of Hegel and Spinoza is not actually offensive, or not in its immediate impact, whereas the language of Nietzsche and Blake is the most purely offensive language which has ever been inscribed. Above all this is true of the theological language of Blake and Nietzsche, but here a theological language is a truly universal language, one occurring in every domain, and occurring as that absolute No which is the origin of every repression and every darkness, and a darkness which is finally the darkness of God, or the darkness of that Godhead which is beyond “God.” Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy."

"And again to quote Blake: “It is better to murder an infant in the cradle than to nurse an ungratified desire.”"

"..I saw William Blake (in his dream), noble emanation of English genius... ...’Have confidence in your objects,’ he said, 'do not let yourself be intimidated by the horror of the world. Everything is ordered and correct and must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection. Seek this path'.. ..I awoke and found myself in Holland in the midst of boundless world turmoil. But my belief in the final release and absolution of all things, whether they please or torment, was newly strengthened."

"To me, it seems best to read Blake in company with his truest peers, Shakespeare and Milton, and with his greatest contemporaries, Wordsworth and Shelley. He was a visionary, rather than a mystic, and, like D. H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud, he hoped to encourage us to exalt our human potential. Perhaps Blake can be best termed an apocalyptic humanist, who urges us never to forget that all deities reside in the human breast."

""Blake was among the first of European idealists to link his own traditions of thought" with the Indian classic..."

"I also liked the Romantic poets. Wordsworth, Keats, Burns and Blake were some of my favourites. There was something about their rebellious spirit against the evils of industrialization that moved me. Of course now, some of their pessimism, mysticism and limited critical realist visions make me quite uncomfortable."

"I learned this bit of wisdom from a principle of William Blake's which I discovered early and followed far too assiduously the first half of my aesthetic life, and from which I have happily released myself and this axiom was: "Put off intellect and put on imagination; the imagination is the man." From this doctrinal assertion evolved the theoretical axiom that you don't see a thing until you look away from it which was an excellent truism as long as the principles of the imaginative life were believed in and followed. I no longer believe in the imagination."

"There is no century in which Blake would not have seen angels."

"It is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as "revolutionary" — and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down — as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like "I wander through each charter'd street" than in three-quarters of Socialist literature."

"I think it was Blake's "The Tyger." I was given poems to copy, that was how my father taught me to do handwriting. "The Tyger" was one of them and it was so musical and mysterious. The wonderful image sank very deep very early. ("Do you remember the first poem that touched you deeply, that awakened you somehow?")"

""I was angry with my friend,/I told my wrath, my wrath did end./I was angry with my foe,/I told it not, my wrath did grow." As an angry child, often urged to "curb my temper," I used to ponder those words of William Blake, but they slid first into my memory through their repetitions of sound, their ominous rhythms."

"In the modern world, the Romantics were the last major cultural movement to assert the "truth of the imagination," defending art as a way of knowing the world that equalled or surpassed scientific reason. In their resistance to what Blake called "Satan's Mathematik Holiness," their goal was not to reject science but to enlarge it. ...the Romantics sought to understand by augmentation."

"Blake deeply admired science; he never failed to portray it heroically. But he was concerned that science saw the universe from an odd angle that hid as much as it revealed. Science screened the value of things, the beauty of things, the sacredness of things as if these qualities might not really be there. Blake called this Single Vision, and contrasted it with his ideal Fourfold vision: an understanding that included the poetic, the sensuous, and the visionary along with the rational. ...he fervently prayed for our culture to be saved from the scientist's severe abbreviation of reality: "God us keep from Single Vision and Newton's Sleep.""

"Freud was frank to admit that Romantic artists like Blake had discovered the unconscious before he had. But... he could hardly adopt Blake's unsettling view of the scientific psyche."

"Re-claiming, contextualizing, and interpreting their memories remain the historians' tasks. I am reminded of a line in William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence"-"To see a world in a grain of sand.""

"think: poems fixed this landscape: Blake, Donne, Keats"

"Most scientists would make very hard work of explaining how the concept of soul fits into the material universe, where there is nothing but "atoms and the void." Was this what Blake meant when he said that science was a tree of death? The death of religion? Of imagination? Both have been frequently suggested. ...Science is certainly our prime weapon against superstition and irrationalism, but in a world in which science flourishes—with or without God—love and fear remain, as do pleasure and regret, poetry and humor, art and music. The arts are not lessened by the sciences. Blake was mistaken: man's ineradicable gift, his questing curiosity, the divine discontent, is the common source of the arts and sciences."

"It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion."

"My Dear Mr. Pissarro; - I accept with pleasure the invitation that you and Mr. Degas were kind enough to extend to me. And naturally in that case I shall abide by all the rules that govern your Societe. Based on this decision, I also have the membership dues available. I will probably see you at Miss Latouche's and we will talk about this."

"Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will."

"This Cézanne [a 'Still life with Compotier, Fruit and Glass', Cézanne made c. 1879-1882!!], that you ask me for is a pearl of exceptional quality and I already have refused three hundred francs for it; it is one of my most treasured possessions, and except in absolute necessity, I would give up my last shirt before the picture."

"How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible."

"With this painting, I tried to make everything breathe faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style and great nature with its scream."

"freely and madly; you will make progress.. .Above all, don't sweat over a painting; a great sentiment can be rendered immediately.."

"Don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amide nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result."

"A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it."

"I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines."

"I love Brittany; I find wildness and primitiveness there. When my wooden shoes ring on this granite, I hear the muffled, dull, and powerful tone which I try to achieve in painting."

"In my figures [of his famous painting 'Vision After the Sermon'] I have achieved a great simplicity, which is both rustic and superstitious... ..In this picture the landscape and the struggle [between Jacob wrestling with the angel ] exist only in the imagination of the people whom the sermon has moved to prayer. That's why there is a contrast between the people, depicted naturally, and the struggle in its unnatural and dis-proportioned landscape."

"Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means."

"Life at Papeete soon became a burden.It was Europe, the Europe which I had thought to shake off — and that under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization.Was I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I had fled?"

"'Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?'"

"Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?"

"If we observe the totality of Camille Pissarro's works, we find there, despite the fluctuations, not only an extreme artistic will which never lies, but what is more, an essentially intuitive pure-bred art.. .He looked at everybody, you say! Why not? Everyone looked at him, too, but denied him. He was one of my masters and I do not deny him."

"Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming."

"With what is he concerned? Drawing was at its lowest ebb; it had to be restored. Looking at these nudes, I exclaim, 'Drawing has come back again!' As a man and painter he sets an example. 'Degas' is one of those rare masters who could have had anything he wanted, yet he scorned decorations, honors, fortune, without bitterness, without jealousy."

"[In] painting...all sensations are condensed, everyone...with a single glance [has] his soul invaded by the most profound recollections...everything is summed up in one instant. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses: harmonious colors correspond to the harmonies of sound."

"I have lingered among the nymphs of Corot, dancing in the sacred wood of Ville-d'Avray."

"I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior."

"I do not paint by copying nature. Everything I do springs from my wild imagination."

"I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I want only to do simple, very simple art, and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true."

"I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue — which is what many people think I am, for that matter. Oh well, what difference does it make. What upsets me the most is not so much the poverty as the things that perpetually get in the way of my art, which I cannot carry out the way I feel and which I would carry out if it weren't for the poverty that is like a straitjacket. You tell me I am wrong to stay away from the artist[ic] center. No, I am right; I've known for a long time what I am doing and why I am doing it. My artistic center is in my brain and nowhere else, and I am strong because I am never thrown off-course by other people and because I do what is in me."

"A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man."

"Your Nordic blue eyes looked attentively at the paintings hanging on the walls. I felt stirrings of rebellion: a whole clash between your civilization and my barbarism. Civilization from which you suffer. Barbarism which for me is a rejuvenation."

"In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?"

"Copying nature — what is that supposed to mean? Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!"

"In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind."

"A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up."

"The critic asks me: 'So you are a Symbolist? I mean well and I would like to learn; why don't you explain Symbolism to me'.. I answer.. .'Well, my paintings probably speak Hebrew, which you do not understand, so there is no point in continuing the conversation."

"As I wanted to suggest a luxuriant and untamed type of nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it, I was obliged to give my figures a suitable setting.It is indeed the outdoor life — yet intimate at the same time, in the thickets and the shady streams, these women whispering in an immense palace decorated by nature itself, with all the riches that Tahiti has to offer. This is the reason behind all these fabulous colors, this subdued and silent glow."But none of this exists!""Oh yes it does, as an equivalent of the grandeur, the depth, the mystery of Tahiti, when you have to express it on a canvas measuring only one square meter."Very subtle, very knowing in her naïveté is the Tahitian Eve. The riddle hiding in the depth of her childlike eyes is still incommunicable to me."

"At an exhibition in London, one sagacious critic wrote: 'Monsieur Degas seems a good pupil of Nittis!' Doesn't this reflect that mania which men of letters have for squabbling in court over who had a given idea first? And the mania spreads to painters who take great care of their originality."

"..so before I died I wanted to paint a large canvas that I had worked out in my head, and all month long I worked [on Tahiti] day and night at fever pitch.. .It's all done without a model."

"My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me."

"I was so bent on putting all my energy in its 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going' before dying [suffering from syphilis, Gauguin decided to commit suicide at the end], such painful passion amid terrible circumstances, and such a clear vision without corrections that the hastiness of it disappears and life bursts from it. It does not stink of models, professionalism, and the so-called rules that I have always disregarded."

"No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's — peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!"

"You have long known what I have tried to establish: the right to dare everything; yet the difficulty I have had finding enough money to live on has been too great, and my capacities have not produced a very big result but the mechanism has got underway nevertheless. The public does not owe me anything because the pictorial work I have done is only relatively good, but the painters who benefit from that freedom today do owe me something."

"..color being enigmatic in itself.. ..then to be logical we cannot use it any other way than enigmatically.."

"At the age of ten, twenty, a hundred, very young, a little older, and very old, an artist is always an artist. Isn't he better at some times, some moments, than at others? Never impeccable, since he is a living, human being?"

"In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?"

"My dear Lucien, Yesterday Gauguin came to spend the holidays and make some studies. He told me that he was working on a project which may materialize some time, the project is to make models for impressionist tapestries. He asked me to try my hand at this, and do something revolutionary. Naturally I accepted, mostly with the idea of opening up a field for you [Lucien]. Evidently this is an easily exploited field of industrial art, only one must draw, and draw often. When something develops I shall let you know."

"Yesterday I received a letter from Gauguin, who probably had heard from Durand that I did some good work here. He is going to look me up and study the place's possibilities from the point of view of art and practicality. He is naive enough to think that since the people in Rouen are very wealthy, they can easily be induced to buy some paintings.. .Gauguin disturbs me very much, he is so deeply commercial, at least he gives that impression. I haven't the heart to point out to him how false and unpromising is his attitude.. ..his needs are great, his family being used to luxury, just the same his attitude can only hurt him."

"Gauguin has become intimate with Degas once more, and goes to see him all the time - isn't this seesaw of interests strange? Forgotten are the difficulties of last year at the seashore, forgotten the sarcasms the Master hurled at the sectarian [= Gauguin], forgotten all that he [Gauguin] told me about the egotism and common side of Guillaumin. I was naive, I defended him [Gauguin] to the limit, and I argued against everybody. It is all so human and so sad. - They are angry with us [the Neo-Impressionists,] and will not pardon me for being sincere enough to want to be faithful to my deepest convictions."

"Gauguin is gone.. ..completely disappeared.. ..but I did hear that this summer at the sea shore [at Pont-Aven ] he laid down the law to a group of young disciples, who hung on the words of the master, that austere sectarian. At any rate it must be admitted that he has finally acquired great influence. This comes of course from years of hard and meritorious work - as a sectarian!"

"Bracquemond told me [Pissarro] that he took some of Gauguin's pictures with him, hoping to sell them; he considered them good paintings but.. ..strange.. .A little confused, but after all interesting.. .Alas! All those to whom he showed the pictures became literally angry, conceiving that they were being taken in.. .He told me that he strongly urged Gauguin not to show his paintings to the [Paris'] dealer in question."

"[..according to Gauguin] the impression of nature must be wedded to the aesthetic sentiment which chooses, arranges, simplifies and synthesizes. The painter ought not to rest until he has given birth to the child of his imagination.. ..begotten in a union of his mind with reality. Gauguin insisted on a logical construction of composition, on a harmonious apportionment of light and dark colors, the simplification of forms and proportions, so as to endow the outline's of forms with a powerful and eloquent expression.. ..He also insisted upon luminous and pure colors."

"Gauguin interests me very much as a man — very much. For a long time now it has seemed to me that in our nasty profession of painting we are most sorely in need of men with the hands and the stomachs of workmen. More natural tastes — more loving and more charitable temperaments — than the decadent dandies of the Parisian boulevards have. Well, here we are without the slightest doubt in the presence of a virgin creature with savage instincts. With Gauguin blood and sex prevail over ambition."

"Gauguin, if he'll accept it, you [Theo] shall give him a version of the [painting] 'Berceuse' (see:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Berceuse.jpg that wasn't mounted on a stretching frame, and to Bernard too, as a token of friendship. But if Gauguin wants sunflowers it's only absolutely fair that he gives you something that you like as much in exchange. Gauguin himself above all liked the sunflowers later, when he had seen them for a long time."

"Paul Gauguin, that curious artist, that alien whose mien and the look in whose eyes vaguely remind one of Rembrandt's 'Portrait of a Man' in the Galerie Lacaze — this friend of mine likes to make one feel that 'a good picture is equivalent to a good deed'; not that he says so, but it is difficult to be on intimate terms with him without being aware of a certain moral responsibility. A few days before we parted, when illness forced me to enter an asylum, I tried to paint 'his empty place'. It is a study of his armchair of dark, red-brown wood, the seat of greenish straw, and in the absent person's place a lighted candlestick and some modern novels."

"Brother Nabi, ..first of all, forgive the incoherence of my last letter. I am feeling remorsed about what I told you about Paul Gauguin. There is no humbug about him, not, at any rate, with respect to those he knows are capable of understanding him. I have lived with him for the past fifteen days in the closest association [in [[w:Pont-Aven|Pont-Aven]. We share a room. I have told him what I dislike about his work; what I said can be regarded as a sally against the ingrained habits of contemporary painting."

"His art is strangely cerebral and passionate, uneven still, but poignant and superb in its very unevenness. A sorrowful work, for to understand it, to feel the shock of it, we ourselves must know sorrow and the irony of sorrow, which is the threshold of mystery. It sometimes rises to the height of the mystical act of faith; sometimes it obliterates itself and grimaces in the gloom of doubt. It always emanates the bitter and violent aroma of the poisons of the flesh. There is a dazzling and savory mixture of barbaric splendor, Catholic liturgy, Hindu reverie, Gothic imagery, and obscure and subtle symbolism; there are harsh realities and distraught flights into poetry, through which M. Gauguin creates an altogether new and personal art — the art of a painter and poet, of an apostle and demon, an art which instills anguish."

"The Japanese practised this art as did the Chinese, and their symbols are wonderfully natural, but then they were not Catholics, and Gauguin is a Catholic. - I do not criticize Gauguin for having painted a rose background nor do I object to the two struggling fighters and the Breton peasants in the foreground. What I dislike is that he copied these elements from the Japanese, the Byzantine painters and others. I criticize him for not applying his synthesis to our modern philosophy which is absolutely social, anti-authoritarian and anti-mystical. - There is where the problem becomes serious. This is a step backwards; Gauguin is not a seer, he is a schemer.. .The symbolists also take this line! What do you think? They must be fought like the pest!"

"It is extraordinary that anyone could put so much mystery into so much brightness."

"What is he, then? He is Gauguin, the savage who hates the burden of our civilization, a sort of Titan who, jealous of the creator, makes his own little world in his spare time, a child who takes toys apart in order to build others from the pieces, one who denies and defies, who prefers to see the sky red rather than blue like the rest of us."

"I have never wanted and never will accept the lack of modeling or gradation: it's an absurdity. Gauguin was not a painter; he only made Chinese pictures."

"I advised him [Gauguin] to go to New Orleans [where Degas stayed for a few months and painted there], but he decided it was too civilized. He had to have people around him with flowers on their heads and rings in their noses before he could feel at home."

"Paul Gauguin, then [March 1885] still a Parisian stockbroker, had entered art as a collector of impressionist paintings and thus came in contact with Camille Pissarro. When Gauguin began to paint, it was Pissarro who got his works admitted to the exhibitions of the impressionist group. During his stay at Osny in 1883 [with old Pissarro] Gauguin painted the entrance to the village at Pissarro's side."

"Gauguin's work is symbolic, and he himself is a myth. He rejected the values of bourgeois society and of a machine civilization. His gesture had its sordid side, but retrospectively it seems to have been appropriate, coming at a time when the world was preparing for annihilating wars. It was not a useful example: we cannot all go and live on South Sea islands, and, as I have said before in this connection, modern man carries his civilization like a pack on his back, and cannot cast if off. But he can nevertheless protest against the burden, and state the real values of life. So Gauguin did, in paintings that are symbols of eternal truths, images of great beauty and serenity."

"The last thing that Bonnard and Vuillard and Matisse [artists of Nabis wanted to do was paint portentous allegories about the destiny of mankind, as Gauguin did."

"The popular fancy that Gauguin 'discovered himself' as a painter in Tahiti is quite wrong. All the components of his work — the flat patterns of colour, the wreathing outlines, the desire to make symbolic statements about fate and emotion, the interest in 'primitive' art, and the thought that color could function as a language - were assembled in France before 1891."

"One may wonder if any painter in the last century put more meaning into his sense of color than Gauguin."

"Gauguin was a great writer and I just read Noa, Noa, and Van Gogh wrote the most amazing autobiography."

"That state is a state of Slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please himself. ¶ That state is a state of Freedom in which a man does what he likes to do in his working time and in his spare time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please God."

"Of patience there is this to be said. To be patient is to suffer. By their fruits men know one another, but by their sufferings they are what they are. And suffering is not merely the endurance of physical or mental anguish, but of joy also. A rabbit caught in a trap may be supposed to suffer physical anguish : but it suffers nothing else. The man crucified may be supposed to suffer physical & mental anguish, but he suffers also intense happiness and joy. The industrialist workman is often simply as a rabbit in a trap ; the artist is often as a man nailed to a cross. In patience souls are possessed. No lower view of the matter will suffice."

"I tell you that I have nothing more to wish for. They were extremely pleased with my pictures, and expressed great satisfaction not only the King, but the Prince as well. Neither I nor my works deserve such recognition."

"But now? well now, now I have no fear of Witches, goblins, ghosts, thugs, Giants, ghouls, scallywags, etc, nor any sort of body."

"As I am working for the public, I must continue to amuse them."

"I have had luck with my St. Bernardino, not only with the experts, but with the public as well. Without any reservation, everyone is on my side. The King expressed his satisfaction before the whole Court."

"Beloved soulmate.. ..you'll kiss my ass at least seven times if I manage to convince you from the crazy happiness I got from living here [Madrid].. ..the various insects with their deadly weapons, made of needles and penknives, which, if you don't look out and even if you do, will tear away your flesh and your hair as well.. ..and you can't find a spot far enough away from them to escape their cruelty. This infection is general in every town.."

"I am now Painter to the King with fifteen thousand reales [a year].. ..the King sent out an order to Bayeu and Maella to search out the best two painters that could be found, to paint the cartoons for tapestries. Bayeu proposed his brother, and Maella proposed me. Their advice was put before the king, and the favor was done, and I had no idea of what was happening to me."

"I have now established an enviable way of living, and if anyone wants anything from me they must come to me."

"I haven't heard them [n.d.r. he's talking about some Spanish popular folk songs] and probably never shall because I no longer go to the places where one could hear them, for I have got into my head that I should maintain a certain presence and air for dignity.. ..that a man should have, and you can imagine that I'm not very happy about it."

"I had established an enviable scheme of life. I refused to dance attendance in the ante-chambers of the great. If anyone wanted something from me he had to ask. I was much run after, but if the person was not of rank, or a friend, I worked [painted] for nobody."

"My position is entirely different from what the majority of the public imagine.. .I want a great deal, firstly because my position entails expenditure, and secondly because I like it. Being a very well-known man I cannot reduce my expenses as other people do. I was about to ask for an increase of salary, but the conditions are so unfavorable that I must set the idea aside."

"[that] the highly praised handsomeness of my little son had disappeared and in its place was a monstrosity completely covered with pox blisters. Can you imagine how I felt?"

"[T]here are no rules in painting and.. ..the oppression, or servile obligation, of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the Young who profess this very difficult art that approaches the divine more than any other."

"What a scandal to hear nature deprecated in comparison to Greek statues by one who knows neither one nor the other without acknowledging that the smallest part of Nature confounds and amazes those who know most. What statue or cast of it might there be that is not copied from divine nature?"

"My dear soul, I can stand on my own feet, but so poorly that I don't know if my head is on my shoulders. I have no appetite or desire to do anything at all. Only your letters cheer me up – only yours. I don't know what will become of me now that I have lost sight of you; I who idolize you have given up hope that you'll ever glance at these blurred lines and get consolation from them."

"To occupy my imagination, which has been depressed by dwelling on my misfortunes, and to compensate at least in part for some of the considerable expenses I have incurred, I set myself to painting a series of cabinet pictures.. ..they depict themes that cannot usually be dealt with in commissioned works, where 'capricho' [whim] and invention do not have much of a role to play. I thought of sending them to the academy.."

"[the painting 'Yard with Lunatics' shows] ..a yard with lunatics, and two of them fighting completely naked while their warder beats them, and others in sacks; (it is a scene I witnessed at first hand in Zaragoza)."

"My health has not improved. Often I get so excited that I cannot bear with myself. Then again I become calm, as I am at this present moment of writing, although I am already fatigued. Next Monday, if God permit, I will go to a bull-fight, and I wish you were able to accompany me."

"The group of sorcerers who form the support for our elegant lady are more for ornament than real use. Some heads are so charged with inflammable gas that they have no need for balloons or sorcerers in order to fly away."

"The sleep of reason produces monsters."

"El sueño de la razón produce monstruos."

"Imagination without reason produces impossible monsters; with reason, it becomes the mother of the arts, and the source of its marvels."

"No recognition / Nadie se conoce' [Goya wrote on this plate no. 6:] The world is a masquerade, faces, costumes, voices, everything a lie. Each person wishes to appear what he is not. The whole world deceives itself, and no one recognizes himself."

"A bride-to-be, Discreet and penitent, she presents herself to her parents in this guise."

"'One to the other / Unos á otros' - Thus goes the world. We mock at and deceive each other. He who, yesterday, was the ball, is to-day the horseman in the ring. Fortune directs the feast, and distributes the parts according to the inconstancy of its caprice."

"The author [Goya] is convinced that it is as proper for painting to criticize human error and vice as for poetry and prose to do so, although criticism is usually taken to be exclusively the business of literature."

"He [Goya] has selected from amongst the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual.."

"Since most of the subjects depicted in this work are not real, it is not unreasonable to hope that connoisseurs will readily overlook their defects."

"The author had not followed the precedents of any other artist, nor has he been able to copy Nature itself.. ..He who departs from Nature will surely merits high esteem, since he has to put before thee yes of the public forms and poses which have existed previously in the darkness and confusion of an irrational mind.."

"Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together in a single imaginery being circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons."

"..[to capture] the magic of the ambiance. - [in the fresco which Goya made c. 1798 of Saint Anthony of Padua ]"

"I can hardly describe the discord produced by the comparison of the retouched part of the painting and the part left untouched, the former having lost entirely the immediacy and brio of the brushwork and the latter the mastery of sensitive and discerning touches.. .For it is true that the more one retouches under the pretext of restoration, the more harm one does, and even the artists themselves, were they able to return, would not able to retouch their painting perfectly on account of the necessary change in the hue of pigments over time... No painting by Titian should be relined, nor any paintings by a number of other painters.. ..and, even when it is possible, the operation is more likely to result in deterioration than in improvement of the painting."

"Your Excellency, I am in receipt of His Majesty's royal order, which your excellency communicated to me on the 6th inst., accepting the offer of my work, the 'Caprichos' on eighty copper plate engraved with aqua-fortis by my hand, which I will hand to the Royal Calografia with the lot of prints which I had printed by way of precaution, amounting to two hundred and forty copies of eighty prints, in order not to defraud His Majesty in the least, and for my own satisfaction as to my mode of procedure. I am very grateful for the pension of twelve thousand reals which His Majesty has been pleased to grant to my son [Xavier Goya], for which I offer my best thanks to His Majesty, and to your excellency.. ..I only desire your excellency's orders, and that you may keep well. May God preserve your excellency's valuable life for many years.. .Your excellency's obedient and grateful servant, Franco de Goya."

"Always lines, never forms. Where do they find these lines in Nature? Personally I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not, planes that advance and planes that recede, relief and depth. My eye never sees outlines or particular features or details... ...My brush should not see better than I do. [Goya, in a recall of an overheard conversation]"

"His Excellency Don José Palafox [famous Spanish general, who recaptured Zaragoza from the French army) called me to go to Zaragoza this week in order to see and examine the ruins of that city, with the intention that I should paint the glories of its inhabitants, something from which I cannot be excused because the glory of my native land [Goya was born in Zaragoza] interests me so much."

"'Fatal consequences of the bloody war against Bonaparte in Spain. And other emphatic caprices'"

"'Fatales consequensias de la sangrienta guerra en Espanã con Buonaparte. Y otros caprichos enfáticos'"

"Goya in gratitude to his friend Arrieta for the skill and great care with which he saved his [Goya's] life in his acute and dangerous illness, suffered at the end of 1819, at the age of seventy-tree years. He painted this in 1820."

"I sent you a lithographic proof that shows a fight of young bulls.. ..and if you found it worthy of distribution, I could send whatever you wish.. .I once again ask your advice, for I have three others made, of the same size and bullfight subjects."

"..As a matter of fact, last winter I was painting on ivory; I've already got a collection of forty studies, but these are original miniatures, of a kind I've never seen before, entirely done with the point of a brush, with details that are closer to the brushwork of Velásquez than to that of Mengs."

"letter to Joaquín Ferrer, 20 December 1825; as quoted by Robert Hughes, in: Goya. Borzoi Book - Alfred Knopf, New York, 2003, p. 393"

"Everything you tell me in your last letter, which is to say that to spend more time with me they will give up going to Paris, fills me with the greatest pleasure.. .I find myself much better, and I hope to be back where I was before.. .I am happy to be better to receive my most beloved travelers. This improvement I owe to Molina."

"The first prize for painting has been accorded to the canvas with the device Monies fregit aceto, by Monsieur Paul Borroni. The second prize for painting has been taken by Mr. Francois Goya, Roman, pupil of Mr. Bajeu, painter to the King of Spain. The Academy has noted in the second picture [of Goya] the beautiful management of the brush, and the depth of expression in the face of Hannibal, as well as the individuality and grandeur in the attitude of this general. If Mr. Goya had not been so slight in the composition of the subject, and if his coloring had been more truthful, he would have divided the votes for the first prize."

"The noises in his head and deafness aren't improving, yet his vision is much better and he is back in control of his balance."

"Goya finds it absolutely impossible to paint, as a result of serious illness."

"The young woman left home as a little girl. She did her apprenticeship in Cádiz, and then came to Madrid where she had a stroke of good luck ('la cayó de lotería' / 'she won the lottery'). She went down to the paseo del Prado where she heard a dirty broken-down old women begging for alms. She sent the old woman away."

"His Majesty wishing to reward your distinguished merit and to give in person a testimony that may serve as a stimulus to all professors, of how much he appreciates your talent and knowledge of the noble art of painting, has been pleased to appoint you his chief painter of the Chamber, at a yearly salary of fifty thousand reals, which you will receive from this date free of rights, and also five ducats a year for a carriage. And it is also his pleasure that you occupy the house now inhabited by Don Mariano Maella, should he die first."

"All sorts of ugly birds, soldiers, commoners and monks, fly around a lady who is half-hen; they all fall, and the woman hold them down by the wings, make them throw up and pull out their guts."

"[Goya sought to record] the hatred that he felt for the enemy; which, being his natural way of feeling, was increased on the [French] invasion of the kingdom of Aragón, his native land, whose immense horror he wished to perpetuate with his brushes."

"[General] Palafox was insulted by the French and cruelly treated; they removed the surgeon who attended him, and placed a Frenchman in his place. In his room there were several drawings done by the celebrated Goya, who had gone from Madrid on purpose to see the ruins of Zaragoza; these drawings and one of the famous heroine, also by Goya, the French officers cut and destroyed with their sables at the moment too when Palafox was dying in his bed."

"[Goya is] in absolute penury [and wants] assistance [of public funds], to perpetuate with his brush the most notable and heroic actions or scenes of our glorious insurrection against the tyrant of Europe [= France]."

"Having to proceed against painters in accordance with rule 11 of the expurgation procedure, and given that Don Francisco de Goya is the author of two of the works [ 'La maja desnuda' and the 'La maja vestida' ].. ..one of them representing a naked woman on a bed.. ..and the other a women dressed as a 'maja' on a bed.. ..the said Goya [should] be ordered to appear before this tribunal so as to identify them and state whether they are his work, for what reasons he did them, at whose request and what intention guided him."

"At the moment I am trying to instill in Goya the requisite decorum, humility and devotion, together with a suitable respectable subject, simple yet appropriate composition and proper religious ideas.. ..the tender postures and virtuous expressions of the saints must move people to worship them and pray to them.. ..You know Goya, and [you] will realize the efforts I have had to make, to instill ideas into him which are so obviously against his grain. I gave him written instructions on how to paint the picture, and made him prepare three or four preliminary sketches. Now at least he is roughing out the full-size painting itself [309 x 177 cm], and I trust it will turn out as I want."

"[Goya arrived] deaf, old, awkward and weak, and without knowing a word of French, [but] he was anxious and happy to see the world."

"..the artist [Goya] has worked for a long time and with the utmost care, taste, and intelligence on the numerous commissions he has been given; his artistic merit is so unsurpassable that other artists and the general public all extol his work."

"Goya is fine [in Bordaux]. He keeps busy with his sketches, he walks, eats, takes his siestas; it seems that right now peace reigns over his heart."

"The artist worked at his lithographs [on stone!] on the easel, the stone placed like a canvas. He manipulated his crayons like brushes and never sharpened them. He remained standing, walking backwards and forwards every other minute to judge his effects. Usually he covered the whole stone with a uniform gray tone and then removed with a scraper those parts which were to appear light: here a head, a figure; there a horse, a bull. Next, the crayon was again employed to strengthen the shadows, the accents, or to indicate the figures and give them movement.."

"..never was there a less harmonious genius, never a Spanish artist more local [than Goya]."

"During morning visits to his friends, he (Goya) would take the sandbox from the inkstand, and strewing the contents on the table, amuse them with caricatures traced in an instant by his ready finger. The great subject, repeated with ever new variations in these sand studies, was Godoy, to whom he cherished an especial antipathy, and whose face he was never weary of depicting with every ludicrous exaggeration of its peculiarities that quick wit and ill-will could supply."

"Queen Maria Luisa's attention to the deaf artist [Goya] was equally gracious, and far more delicate in its flattery. She gave [c. 1800] Goya a little painting by Velazquez, the only picture by another artist that we definitely know he possessed."

"if you are an angel go and flatter a person named Moreau, picture dealer, Rue Lafitte, Hotel Lafitte.. ..and try to obtain from this man permission to take a photograph of the [painting] 'Duchess of Alba' (absolutely Goya and absolutely authentic). The replicas (life-size) are in Spain, where Gautier has seen them. In one frame the Duchess is represented in national costume, in the other she is nude, in the same position, on her back. The triviality of the pose adds to the charm of the pictures. If I ever used your slang I might say that the Duchess is a bizarre woman with a wicked look.. .If you were a very wealthy angel I would advise you to buy these pictures, for the occasion will not repeat itself. Imagine a Bonington, or a gallant and ferocious Deveria. The man who owns them is asking 2,400 francs.. .He admitted to me that he bought them from Goya's son [Xavier Goya], who had become extraordinarily embarrassed."

"The first edition [of Los Capricos ] is usually said to have been issued in 1797, but this is an error based upon the discovery of a sketch for the title-page dated in that year. Isolated proofs were to be seen in 1796, but the whole work was not ready until 1798 or 1799. Goya was slowly printing the two hundred copies in an attic workroom he had specially engaged for the purpose at the corner of the Calle de San Bernardino, but for some while the job was completely set aside. He drew up a draft prospectus which was never published.. .This draft belonged to Valentin Carderera."

"M. Manet has never seen any Goya's, M. Manet has never seen any El Greco's.. ..that may seem unbelievable to you, but it's the truth. I myself have been filled with wonder and stupefaction at these mysterious coincidences.. .He's heard so much about his 'pastiches' of Goya, that he is now trying to see some of Goya's paintings.. .Every time you try to pay Manet a service, I'll be grateful.. ..quote my letter or at least several lines of it. What I'm telling you is the naked truth."

"It is the work of a colourist of temperament who sees the tones of nature in all their richness, and who knows how to paint them in their true affinity. Never has a French artist placed in such harmonious relation the three national colours. Goya has thrown the hat with the tricoloured plumes on to a yellow table, against the tricoloured scarf of a person seated on a yellow chair, and clothed entirely in blue. These dissonances mingle in a brilliant concerto which sounds softly to the ear. We forget to notice that the head takes the aspect of a piece of red stained glass by reason of over-reflection. The colours live as if shown through transparent water, or touched by the capricious play of light."

"[how Goya's mind] grovelled in a hideous Inferno of its own a disgusting region, horrible without sublimity, shapeless as chaos, foul in colour and 'forlorn of light,' peopled by the vilest abortions that ever came from the brain of a sinner. He surrounded himself, I say, with these abominations, finding in them I know not what devilish satisfaction, and rejoicing, in a manner altogether incomprehensible to us, in the audacity of an art in perfect keeping with its revolting subjects. It is the sober truth to say that, in the whole series of these decorations for his house, Goya appears to have aimed at ugliness as Raphael aimed at beauty.. .Enough has been said to show that Goya had made himself a den of foulness and abomination, and dwelt therein, with satisfaction to his mind, like a hyena amidst carcasses."

"Of all the men he had known in Italy till c. 1771, Goya spoke in his old age chiefly of the [French] painter David. For a short while they were in close intimacy."

"But where Goya shows the most exquisite sensibility and profound psychology is in these two portraits of one person, in which he incorporates the whole story of a dreamer swayed in life and death by the highest ideals, a woman of a race of poets and artists, Dona Antonia de Zarate. Though in the first portrait he represented her smiling and in perfect health, in the second [painted in 1810-11 by Goya] he knew her existence was undermined by a treacherous disease which was to cause her death. Never have we felt more deeply the impression of pathos than before this presentment of a soul rather than a person, before this face enveloped in transparent veils, with life showing in the eyes, and in that life a melancholy realization of approaching death."

"Goya, ever ready for an artistic experiment, tried his hand at the comparatively new invention of aquatint. Several of the plates of are in pure aquatint (No. 32 is a fine example and how cleverly he succeeded is proved in 'A rough night' [= 'A Bad Night' [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=A+bad+Night+Goya&title=Special:Search&profile=default&fulltext=1&searchToken=dmndd6r6hf4vh49tura06ygnr ]. A recent historian of this method writes: "Goya raised the combination of etching with aquatint to a position of surpassing merit.. .He will always remain the master of mixed aquatint engraving, and his work should be carefully studied by all interested in the legitimate scope of aquatint engraving."

"Goya was closely studying the Velazquez's portraits [in the Spanish royal palace ], and he decided to etch them. In 1778 he completed eleven large etching plates. During the same year he delivered fourteen of the tapestry cartoons for the royal tapestry factory in Madrid, so that his energy must have been terrific. They show no sign of haste, and must have been undertaken as a pleasure. Goya may have received some vague promise of state support. The multiplication of these masterpieces was a patriotic duty, and Godoy did well to buy the plates. But this purchase did not take place until 1793, so that Goya's labour must have had little financial result in 1778."

"As a painter Goya's reputation was slow in crossing the Pyrenees, and then was chiefly based upon the testimony of the few strangers who had visited Madrid. But when the volumes of 'Los Caprichos' reached Paris, the unchallenged center of European art, these extraordinary works attracted unstinting appreciation, and awoke general curiosity with respect to the personality of the almost unknown Spaniard. Officers attached to the English army quartered in the Peninsula sent copies of 'Los Caprichos' home to London. Later still the book penetrated into Germany. These etchings thus formed the foundation of Goya's cosmopolitan celebrity. 'Los Caprichos' consists of seventy-two plates, which are usually dated 1796-1797."

"Eugene Delacroix copied over fifty of the plates in 'Los Caprichos', with a care and patience, says Charles Yriarte, of which few would consider him capable. The etchings appealed to many of the artists of the French Romantic movement, and some, like Louis Boulanger, borrowed freely from them. Daumier was strongly influenced by their power. Our own banker-poet, Samuel Rogers, added the set to his library. Theophile Gautier was no mediocre critic, and several of the most brilliant pages in his 'Tro los Montes' endeavor to describe the fantastic invention lavished on the plates of 'Los Caprichos', in his 'Voyage en Espagne' [= Tro los Montes]. Paris, 1845. pp. 129-134."

"With Goya we do not think of the studio or even of the artist at work. We think only of the event. Does this imply that 'The Third of May' is a kind of superior journalism, the record of an incident in which depth of focus is sacrificed to an immediate effect? I am ashamed to say that I once thought so; but the longer I look at this extraordinary picture and at Goya's other works, the more clearly I recognize that I was mistaken."

"Mengs [the official royal painter of the Spanish court] gave Goya official help and encouragement. Tiepolo [famous mural painter then] however, directly influenced his [Goya's] art. It was an odd juxtaposition.. ..at the end of the eighteenth century, two artists more unlike one another fostering the career of a third [young Goya].. ..What Goya recognized in Tiepolo was his abundant appetite for fantasy and caprice."

"..and much of his works consists of portraits that, fairly seen, are not in the least derogatory of those who commissioned them. The idea of Goya as an artist naturally 'against' the system is pretty much a modern myth. But it is based on a fundamental truth of his character; he was a man of great and by times heroic independence.."

"He [Goya] once declared that his real masters were Vélasquez, Rembrandt and Nature. Vélasquez of course he knew intimately being surrounded in Madrid.. .He would have known Rembrandt only through prints, since so little work of the Dutch master's painted work has made its way to Spain."

"[because Goya was] the stepping stone between the Old Masters and the Great Moderns like Cézanne."

"The unknown mountain nests in the inhospitable interior of southern Calabria are usually connected only by a mule track with the railway that runs close to the coast: whoever wants to go there has to walk on foot if he has no donkey at his disposal. I think back to that warm afternoon in the month of May when we the four of us, after a long, tiring ride in the harsh sun, packed with the heavy burden of our backpacks, sweat-dripping and a little gasping, entered the city gate of Palizzi.."

"Now, I should like to say something else to you about the connection with music, primarily that of Bach, i.e. the Fugue or, put more simply, the canon.. .It has a great deal in common with my own motifs, which I make turn on various axes too. Nowadays I have such a powerful sense of relationship, of affinity, that when I am listening to Bach I frequently get inspired and feel an overwhelming instinct for his insistent rhythm, a cadence seeking something of the infinite. In the Fugue everything is based on a single motif, often consisting of just a few notes. In my work, too, everything revolves around a single closed contour.."

"But to get back to the point: did you ever imagine that your dad, who lives so far away from the bustle and intrigue of the world, working on his prints day after day like a hermit, would some day be drawn into the sickening scene of vain officialdom, despite himself?.. .But what on earth can I do about it? Luckily I can swear by God and all his angels that I never moved a finger to get the decoration or licked the boots of any bigwigs."

"In mathematical quarters, the regular division of the plane has been considered theoretically.. .Does this mean that it is an exclusively mathematical question? In my opinion, it does not. [Mathematicians] have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered this domain themselves. By their very nature they are more interested in the way in which the gate is opened than in the garden lying behind it."

"After the first proof [of 'Sphere Spirals'] my high expectations were, as always, greatly disappointed. I am now struggling on - with some feeling of despair - so that I at least achieve a passable result."

"As long as there have been men.. ..upon this globe.. ..we have held firmly to the notion of.. ..all of which must continue to be everlasting in time and infinite in space."

"The ideas that are basic to [my work] often bear witness to my amazement and wonder at the laws of nature which operate in the world around us. He who wonders discovers that this is in itself a wonder. By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics."

"The fact that, from 1938 onwards, I concentrated more on the interpretation of personal ideas was primarily the result of my departure from Italy. In Switzerland, Belgium, and Holland where I successively established myself, I found the outward appearance of landscapes and architecture to be less striking than those which are particularly to be seen in the southern part of Italy. Thus I felt compelled to withdraw from the more or less direct and true-to-life illustrating of my surroundings."

"It is human nature to want to exchange ideas, and I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the world what he has to say. I have sometimes heard painters say that they paint 'for themselves': but I think they would soon have painted their fill if they lived on a desert island. The primary purpose of all art forms, whether it's music, literature, or the visual arts, is to say something to the outside world; in other words, to make a personal thought, a striking idea, an inner emotion perceptible to other people’s senses in such a way that there is no uncertainty about the maker's intentions."

"The result of the struggle between the thought and the ability to express it, between dream and reality, is seldom more than a compromise or an approximation. Thus there is little chance that we will succeed in getting through to a large audience, and on the whole we are quite satisfied if we are understood and appreciated by a small number of sensitive, receptive people."

"It may seem paradoxical to say that there are similarities between a poetical and a commercial mind, but it is a fact that both a poet and a businessman are constantly dealing with problems that are directly related to people and for which sensitivity is of prime importance. The business-like mind is sometimes described as being cold, sober, calculating, hard; but perhaps these are simply qualities that are necessary for dealing with people if one wants to achieve anything. One is always concerned with the mysterious, incalculable, dark, hidden aspects for which there is no easy formula, but which form essentially the same human element as that which inspires the poet."

"When someone forgets himself, this by no means makes him altruistic; when a thinking person forgets himself, he immediately also forgets his fellowman, he loses himself and his humanity by becoming engrossed in his subject. Thus he is in a sense more contemplative than a feeling person."

"As far as I know, there is no proof whatever of the existence of an objective reality apart from our senses, and I do not see why we should accept the outside world as such solely by virtue of our senses. These reality enthusiasts are possibly playing at hide-and-seek; at any rate they like to hide themselves, though they are not usually aware of it. They simply do it because they happen to have been born with a sense of reality, that is, with a great interest in so-called reality, and because man likes to forget himself."

"I do indeed believe that there is a certain contrast between, say, people in scientific professions and people working in the arts. Often there is even mutual suspicion and irritation, and in some cases one group greatly undervalues the other. Fortunately there is no one who actually has only feeling or only thinking properties. They intermingle like the colors of the rainbow and cannot be sharply divided. Perhaps there is even a transitional group, like the green between the yellow and the blue of the rainbow. This transitional group does not have a particular preference for thinking or feeling, but believes that one cannot do without either the one or the other. At any rate, it is unprejudiced enough to wish for a better understanding between the two parties... It is clear that feeling and understanding are not necessarily opposites but that they complement each other."

"In my prints I try to show that we live in a beautiful and orderly world and not in a chaos without norms, as we sometimes seem to. My subjects are also often playful. I cannot help mocking all our unwavering certainties. It is, for example, great fun deliberately to confuse two and three dimensions, the plane and space, or to poke fun at gravity. Are you sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling? Are you absolutely certain that you go up when you walk up a staircase? Can you be definite that it is impossible to eat your cake and have it?"

"It's pleasing to realize that quite a few people enjoy this sort of playfulness and that they are not afraid to look at the relative nature of rock-hard reality."

"To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed about the concept of "art]. What one person considers to be "art" is often not "art" to another. "Beautiful" and "ugly" are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only "kitsch" is not art — we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is "kitsch"? If only I knew!"

"lf l am not mistaken, the words "art" and "artist" did not exist during the Renaissance and before: there were simply architects, sculptors, and painters, practicing a trade."

"I am a graphic artist heart and soul, though I find the term "artist" rather embarrassing."

"My work has nothing to do with people, nothing to do with psychology. I am much more cerebral than Willink. I do not wish to be deep at all. I know that I don't hide anything at all in this work. When Carel Willink paints a naked lady in a street, I think: what is that lady doing there?. ..the house facades give me a lugubrious impression. So it is a lugubrious street. My work is not lugubrious. If you ask Willink: 'Why are those naked mistresses there', you do not receive an answer. With me you always get an answer when you ask: why.."

"..and to think now that great mathematicians find my work interesting because I am able to illustrate their theories. They can not imagine that I was such a bad pupil in mathematics. I don't understand it myself neither. I never could understand why it was necessary to prove something that everyone already sees. I saw it, I knew it, so it is how it is… But yes, you had to prove it. I did overcome it when I realized I can make something else - I thought I was a good-for-nothing. In my family there were no other artists to find.. .I was just a weird duck, right?"

"I first made this one [open spiral in which eyes, mouth and forehead of a woman are recognizable) but I cannot stand it that something is cut off. I thought, why is that human cut off here? Then I made two of them, who have together an [interconnected] endlessness. It is also meant as a reaction against sculptors. I see them as a little inferior - no, that is not well-expressed – but sculptors are too limited. They see sculpturing as something superior, but everybody can do modeling. Drawing is much more difficult, much more immaterial."

"At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important."

"I am always wandering around in enigmas. There are young people who constantly come to tell me: you, too, are making Op Art. I haven't the slightest idea what that is, Op Art. I've been doing this work for thirty years now."

"I believe that producing pictures, as I do, is almost solely a question of wanting so very much to do it well."

"I could fill an entire second life with working on my prints."

"I don't grow up. In me is the small child of my early days."

"So let us then try to climb the mountain, not by stepping on what is below us, but to pull us up at what is above us, for my part at the stars; amen."

"The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure."

"To have peace with this peculiar life; to accept what we do not understand; to wait calmly for what awaits us, you have to be wiser than I am."

"My work is a game, a very serious game."

"(1) What are the possible shapes for a tile that can produce a regular division of the plane, that is, a tile that can fill the plane with its congruent images such that every tile is surrounded in the same manner?"

"(2) Moreover, in what ways are the edges of such a tile related to each other by isometries?"

"It is a neat depiction of one of Escher's enduring fascinations: the contrast between the two-dimensional flatness of a sheet of paper and the illusion of three-dimensional volume that can be created with certain marks. In 'Drawing Hands', space and the flat plane coexist, each born from and returning to the other, the black magic of the artistic illusion made creepily manifest."

"I am busy on a portrait of my self and my aunt and my two cousins, I will show it to you when you get back. I am doing it as if I were doing a picture. I've got to do it well, because I want to leave it as a memento.... The older one is really a lovely thing, the younger one has the devil in her as well as the kindness of an angel. I am doing them with their black dresses and little white pinafores which suit them delightfully. I have ideas for the picture's background running through my head. I would like a certain gracefulness with a nobleness of feeling that I don't know how to describe."

"Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature."

"It seems to me that today, if the artist wishes to be serious — to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality — he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment."

"Make portraits of people in familiar and typical positions, above all give their faces the same choice of expression one gives their bodies. Thus if laughter is typical for a person, make him laugh – there are, naturally, feelings that one cannot render…"

"villas with columns in different styles [in Louisiana, America] painted white, in gardens of magnolias, orange trees, banana trees, negroes in old clothes like characters from La Belle Jardiniere.. ..rosy white children in black [negro] arms.. ..a brilliant light which streams my eyes.. ..the Negresses of all shades, holding in their arms little white babies, so white, against white houses with columns of fluted wood and in gardens of orange trees. [quote on his journey through America during 1872]"

"ladies in muslin draped on porches at the fronts of their little houses.. ..shops bursting with fruit, and the contrast between the lively hum and the bustle of the offices with the immense black animal force.. .The black world I have not the time to explore; there are some real gifts of colour and drawing in these forests of ebony. It will seem amazing to live among white people when I get back to Paris. I love silhouettes so much, and these silhouettes walk. [quote on his journey through America during 1872]"

"We also consider that Miss Berthe Morisot's [woman painter in French Impressionism who got later married with a brother of Eduard Manet] name and talent are too important to us to do without. [Degas is referring to her participation in the first Impressionist's show he was preparing, then; he was in strong opposition to Eduard Manet who wanted to exclude Berthe Morisot)"

"J'ai vraiment, un vrai bagage dans la tête. S'il y avait pour cela, comme il y a partout ici, des compagnies d'assurance, voilà un ballot je ferais assurer de suite."

"In the office there are about fifteen people whose attention is directed toward a table covered with the costly fabric [raw cotton]; one man is bent over the table and another is sort of seating on it – the buyer and the broker are discussing a sample. A painting of a vernacular subject, if there is such a thing, and I think by a better hand than most others (a size 40 canvas, I think). I'm planning another less complicated and more surprising yet, better art, in which everyone is in summer dress, the walls white, and a sea of cotton on the tables. (translation based on M. Kay's, in M. Gérin [ed.] and M. Kay, transl. 'Degas letters', Oxford, 1947, pp. 29-30, no. 2"

"I put it [a still life of a pear, made by Manet there [on the wall, next to Ingres' painting 'Jupiter'], for a pear like that would overthrow any god."

"Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money."

"He [ Corot ] is always the strongest, he has foreseen everything."

"It is all well and good to copy what one sees, but it is much better to draw only what remains in one's memory. This is a transformation in which imagination and memory collaborate."

"I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour."

"Apart from my heart, I feel everything grows old in me. Even my heart has something artificial. It has been sewn by the dancers in a soft, pink satin purse like their shoes."

"I believe Corot painted a tree better that any of us, but still I find him superior in his figures."

"An artist is a deception.. ..an artist is only an artist at certain times, by an effort of will.. ..the study of nature is a cliché; isn't Manet the living proof? For although he prided himself on slavishly copying nature, he was the most inadequate painter in the world, not making a single brushstroke without reference to the old masters; for instance, he refrained from drawing fingernails because Frans Hals did not draw them."

"À vous il faut la vie naturelle, à moi la vie factice."

"I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament — temperament is the word — I know nothing."

"Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience; but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition. Here is another; she is washing her feet. It is as if you looked through a key-hole."

"What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming."

"You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time."

"Comme nous avons mal fait de nous laisser appeler Impressionistes."

"Certainly, Vollard, but listen: will you have a special dish without butter prepared for me? Mind you, no flowers on the table, and you must have dinner at half past seven sharp. I know you won't have your cat around and please don't allow anybody to bring a dog. And if there are to be any women I hope they won't come reeking of perfume. How horrible all those odors are when there are so many things that really smell good, like toast - or even manure! Ah - (a short hesitation), and very few lights. My eyes, you know, my poor eyes!"

"Vollard, please do not say anything against fashions. Have you ever asked yourself what would happen if there were no fashions? How would women spent their time? What would they have to talk about? Life would become unbearable for us men. Why, if women were to break away from the rules of fashion - fortunately there is no danger - the government would have to step in and take a hand."

"I remember a story my father used to tell. As he was coming home one day, he ran across a group of men who were firing on the troops from an ambush. During the excitement a daring onlooker went up to one of the snipers who seemed to be a poor marksman. He took the man's gun and brought down a soldier, then handed it back to its owner who motioned as if to say, 'No, go on. You're a better shot than I am.' But the stranger said, 'No, I'm not interested in politics.'"

"I have been singularly hard with myself. I have had to be. You must realize that this is so, since you have, at times, reproached me for it, and were astonished because I had so little confidence in myself. I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself. I ask your pardon, then, if, with this damned art as an excuse, I have wounded your noble and intelligent spirit; perhaps even your heart.."

"Visitor: Monsieur Degas, were there any of Monet's pictures at the Durand-Ruel exhibition? Degas: Why, I met Monet himself there, and I said to him, 'Let me get out of here. Those reflections in the water hurt my eyes!' His pictures were always too draughty for me. If it had been any worse I should have had to turn up my coat collar."

"Another Visitor: How did you manage, Monsieur Degas, when you painted that plein air called 'Le Plage', the one Monsieur Rouart has? Degas: It was quite simple. I spread my flannel vest on the floor of the studio, and had the model sit on it. You see, the air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors."

"Poor Gauguin, 'way off there on his island! I'll wager he spends most of his time thinking of Rue Lafitte. I advised him to go to New Orleans, but he decided it was too civilized. He had to have people around him with flowers on their heads and rings in their noses before he could feel at home. Now if I should leave my house for more than two days..."

"If I were the government I would have a special brigade of gendarmes to keep an eye on artists who paint landscapes from nature. Oh, I don't mean to kill anyone; just a little dose of bird-shot now and then as a warning."

"I, marry? Oh, I could never bring myself to do it. I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, "That's a pretty little thing," after I had finished a picture."

"I'm glad to say I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death."

"People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes."

"Il faut avoir une haute idée, non pas de ce qu'on fait, mais de ce qu'on pourra faire un jour; sans quoi ce n'est pas la peine de travailler."

"Le dessin n'est pas la forme, il est la manière de voir la forme."

"A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody."

"The study of nature is of no significance, for painting is a conventional art, and it is infinitely more worthwhile to learn to draw after w:Holbein."

"The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation."

"A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth."

"Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it."

"Even working from nature you have to compose."

"Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see."

"Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again."

"You must do over the same subject ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must appear accidental, even a movement."

"Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting."

"Painting is not very difficult when you don't know how; but when you know, oh! then, it's another matter."

"It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle."

"Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty."

"Je n'admets pas qu'une femme puisse dessiner comme ca."

"A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people."

"In our beginnings, Fantin, Whistler and I were all on the same road, the road from Holland [Dutch 17th century painters]"

"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things."

"There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic."

"Une peinture, c'est d'abord un produit de l'imagination de l'artiste, ce ne doit jamais être une copie. Si, ensuite, on peut y ajouter deux ou trois accents de nature, evidemment ca ne fait pas de mal."

"C'est très bien de copier ce qu'on voit, c'est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l'on ne voit plus que dans son mémoire. C'est une transformation pendant laquelle l'ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c'est-à-dire le nécessaire."

"Je voudrais être illustre et inconnu."

"Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry."

"Oh! Women can never forgive me. They hate me, they can feel that I ‘m disarming them. I show them without their coquetry, in the states of animals cleaning themselves... ...I'm sure of it; they see me as the enemy. Fortunately, since if they did like me, that would be the end of me."

"pinkish and bluish draperies on neutral grey grounds and black cypresses... ...The red of Jeptha's dress... ...some reddish brown, some slightly pinkish... ...Graduated blue sky... ...the ground at the front a grey violet shadow... Look for some turquoise in the blue.(Degas' working note about choosing colors for his future painting 'The Daughter of Jeptha')"

"..women... ...their way of observing, combining, sensing the way they dress. They compare a thousand of more visible things with one another than a man does."

"Anyone would think paintings were made like speculations on the stock market, out of the frictions of ambitious young people... ...it sharpens the mind, but clouds your judgement."

"Draw all kind of everyday object placed, in such a way that they have in them the life of the man or woman – corsets that have just been removed, for example, and which retain the form of the body. Do a series in aquatint on mourning, different blacks – black veils of deep mourning floating on the face – black gloves – mourning carriages, undertaker’s vehicles – carriages like Venetian gondolas. On smoke – smoker’s smoke, pipes, cigarettes, cigars – smoke from locomotives, from tall factory chimneys, from steam boats, etc. On evening – infinite variety of subjects in cafes, different tones of glass robes reflected in the mirrors. On bakery, bread. Series of baker's boys, seen in the cellar itself or through the basement windows from the street – backs the colour of the pink flour – beautiful curves of dough – still-life's of different breads, large, oval, long, round, etc. Studies in color of the yellows, pinks, grays, whites of bread... ...Neither monuments nor houses have ever been done from below, close up as they appear when you walk down the street. [a working note in which Degas planned series of views of modern Paris, the same time when he sketched the backstreet brothels, making graphic unflinching and even his realistic 'pornographic' sketches he called his 'glimpses through the keyhole', in which he also experimented with perspectives]"

"[make drawings of] series of instruments and players; their shapes, twisting of the hands, arms and neck of the violinist; for example, puffing out and hollowing of the cheeks of bassoonists, oboists, etc.."

"We were created to look at one another, weren't we."

"I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead."

"A strange fellow, this Degas — sickly, a bundle of nerves, with such weak eyes that he is afraid of going blind, yet for these very reasons extremely sensitive to the character of things. He is more skillful in capturing the essence of modern life than anyone I know."

"..while speaking to us [Degas, to the brothers Goncourt] with their language and explaining technically the stroke of the iron for pressing and the circular stroke, etc.. .And it is really very humorous to see him [Degas], up on his toes, and with his arms curved, blending the aesthetics of the dance master with the aesthetics of the painter."

"The best thing he [Degas] does are his sketches. As soon as he gets to polish a picture, his drawing [in the picture] grows weak and pitiable. The drawing in pictures like his 'Portraits in an office' [in New Orleans], results in something between a marine painting and an engraving for an illustrated newspaper."

"I was painting modern Paris while you were still painting Greek athletes [Manet to his friend Edgar Degas, [quoted by George Moore c. 1879]. [Later Degas reacted: 'That Manet, as soon as I started painting dancers, he did them.'"

"A painter of modern life had been born, moreover, a painter who derived from and resembled no other, who brought with him a totally new artistic flavor, as well as totally new skills."

"The ones [compliments] I value most came from Edgar Degas who said he was happy to see my work becoming more and more pure."

"Degas' comment, after having seen Pissarro's painting-show at Durand-Ruel 's gallery in Paris, May 1883"

"You [Lucien Pissarro] will also be very pleased to find in reading the book [L'Art Moderne of Huysmans ] that you are not alone in your enthusiasm for Edgar Degas, who is without a doubt the greatest artist of the period."

"As I admired it [a red pencil and chalk drawing by Degas of a young mother, nursing her child] he showed me a whole series done from the same model and with the same sort of rhythm. He is a draughtsman of the first order; it would be interesting to show all these preparatory studies for a painting to the public, which generally imagines that the impressionists work in a very casual way. I do not think it possible to go further in the rendering of form."

"Degas is a hundred times more loyal [than other impressionist artists, then]. - I told Degas that Seurat's painting was very interesting. [Degas:] 'I would have noted that myself, Pissarro, except that the painting is so big!' Very well - if Degas sees nothing in it so much the worse for him. This simply means there is something precious that escapes him. We shall see."

"I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his [Degas'] art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it."

"With what is he [Degas] concerned? Drawing was at its lowest ebb; it had to be restored. Looking at these nudes, I exclaim, "Drawing has come back again!"As a man and painter he sets an example. Degas is one of those rare masters who could have had anything he wanted, yet he scorned decorations, honors, fortune, without bitterness, without jealousy."

"It isn't ideas I'm short of.. .I've got too many [on discussing poetry with Mallarmé, who replied]: Degas, you can't make a poem with ideas - you make it with words'."

"I have often heard Degas say that in painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false."

"because of the many tracings that Degas did of his drawings, the public accused him of repeating himself. But his passion for perfection was responsible for this continual research."

"I would ask him to give me his definition of drawing. 'You don't know a thing about it,' he would always end up saying. And without fail he would go on to this apologue: that the Muses do their work on their own, each apart from the others, and that they never talk shop. The day's work over, there are no discussions, no comparisons of their respective labors. 'They just dance,' he [Degas] would shout."

"Forain s'était construit un hôtel, et fil installer le téléphone presque nouveau. Il voulut d'abord "épater" Degas. Il l'invite à dîner, previent un compere, qui, pendant le dîner, appelle Forain à l'appareil. Quelque mots échangé, Forain revient. Degas lui dit: "C'est ça le téléphone? On vous sonne et vous y allez.""

"Indeed, Degas, immured in his Paris studio, was so little of this world that he became almost a legend. He was pictured as a sort of monster whose misanthropic furies against those who tried to force his friendship were unbounded. In the latter years of his life, there was a story current that an old friend, having obtained permission from Degas to visit his studio, was met by a bearded demon at the door and thrown bodily down the stairs."

"When Gervex was at work on his [painting] 'Lesson in Anatomy' Degas said to him: 'Did you ever see a student taking notes while the professor is lecturing?.. ..He ought to be rolling a cigarette.' And it was this bit of advice which made the picture [because Gervex followed Degas's advice]. However, when Gervex was doing his 'Rolla' (c. 1878), Degas happened to see the picture, and again made recommendations: 'You must make it plain that the woman is not a model. Where is the dress she has taken off. Put a pair of corsets on the floor near by." The canvas was refused by the Salon on grounds of indecency. 'You see', said Degas afterwards, 'nude models are all right at the Salon, but a woman undressing - never!'"

"[Degas compared] to a writer striving to attain the utmost precision of form, drafting and redrafting, canceling, advancing by endless recapitulation, never admitting that his work has reached its final stage: from sheet to sheet, copy to copy, he continually revises his drawing, deepening, tightening, closing it up."

"I am convinced that Degas felt a work could never be called finished, and that he could not conceive how an artist could look at one of his pictures after a time and not feel the need to retouch it."

"Severely self-critical, he would take a certain pleasure in repeating what a critic had said about him in a review of an exhibition: Continually uncertain about proportions. Nothing, he [Degas] claimed, could better describe his state of mind while he was toiling and struggling over a work."

"Whenever Degas came upon some more or less early work of his own, he always wanted to get it back on the easel and rework it. Thus, after seeing again and again at our house [of the art-buyer w:Henri Rouart ] a delightful pastel my father had bought and was very fond of, Degas.. ..would not let the matter alone, and in the end my father, from sheer weariness, let him take it away. It was never seen again.. ..in the end he had to confess his crime: the work entrusted to him for a few retouches had been completely destroyed.. ..It was then that Degas, to make it up to him for his loss, sent him one day the famous 'Danseuses a la barre'.."

"Degas isn't enough of a painter; he doesn't have enough of that! With a little bit of temperament one can manage to be a painter, It's enough to have a sense of art, and that sense is no doubt what the bourgeoisie fear most.. .For a painter, sensation is at the bottom of everything. I will go on repeating it forever. Procedures are not what I advocate."

"All Paris knew him as a fighter, a recluse, guarding his privacy with cruel, crushing words. The habitués of the Paris boulevards defended themselves against his scorn by accusing him of insincerity. "Degas," they said, "would like to see his reflection in a boulevard window in order to give himself the satisfaction of breaking the plate-glass with his cane.""

"To anyone who is not an artist it must seem rather strange that Degas who could do anything — for whom setting down what he saw presented no difficulties at all — should have continued to draw the same poses year after year — often, it would seem, with increasing difficulty. Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs, it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers. He was continually struggling to achieve an idea of perfect form, but this did not prevent him looking for the truth in what might seem an artificial situation."

"Lautrec was greatly influenced by the techniques, style and subject matter of Degas, who was a close neighbor between 1887 and 1891. ...Like Degas, Lautrec experimented with painting with which was called peinture à l'essence. In Degas' method, oil was drawn out of his colours by placing them on blotting paper. Then the chalky paint was diluted with turpentine and applied like a wash to his support. Because the turpentine spirit evaporated quickly, the colours dried rapidly, so that the paint surface could be reworked and built up without enormous delays. Unlike paint applied thinly in glazes, with this technique the colour dries mat, and has a chalky surface only thinly and sparely coloured."

"He [Degas] was an avid collector of both old and new art; in his sixties he purchased two Gauguins, and when pushing eighty he remarked with some admiration of Cubism that: 'it seems even more difficult than painting.'"

"I see with horror that the 'Salon Automne' is looming, for I haven't got, and shan't have, all I meant to be able to show there, the big stillife ['Harmony in Red'] has taken up so much of my time; but since I am content with the outcome, I tell myself one can't hope to be fast as well as good."

"Rules have no existence outside of individuals: otherwise a good professor would be as great a genius as Racine."

"Expression for me does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive; the place occupied by my figures, the empty space around them, the proportions, everything has its share. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter's command to express his feelings. In a picture every part will be visible and will play its appointed role, whether it be principal or secondary. Everything that is not useful in the picture is, it follows, harmful. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety: any superfluous detail would replace some other essential detail in the mind of the spectator."

"Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation."

"For me all is in the conception. I must therefore have a clear vision of the whole from the beginning."

"I simply try to put down colours which render my sensation."

"There is an impelling proportion of tones that may lead me to change the shape of a figure or to transform my composition. Until I have achieved this proportion in all the parts of a composition I strive towards it and keep on working. Then a moment comes when all the parts have found their definite relationships, and from then on it would be impossible for me to add a stroke to my picture without having to repaint it entirely."

"What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue."

"The simplest means are those which best enable an artist to express himself. His means of expression must derive almost all of necessity from his temperament."

"Suppose I want to paint a woman's body: first of all I imbue it with grace and charm, but I know that I must give something more. I will condense the meaning of this body by seeking its essential lines. The charm will be less apparent at first glance, but it must eventually emerge from the new image which will have a broader meaning, one more fully human."

"What I am after, above all, is expression. Sometimes it has been conceded that I have a certain technical ability but that, my ambition being limited, I am unable to proceed beyond a purely visual satisfaction such as can be procured from the mere sight of a picture. But the purpose of a painter must not be conceived as separate from his pictorial means, and these pictorial means must be the more complete (I do not mean complicated) the deeper is his thought. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it."

"Expression, to my way of thinking, does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions – everything plays a part. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter’s disposal for the expression of his feelings"

"In a picture every part will be visible and will play the role conferred upon it, be it principal or secondary. All that is not useful in the picture is detrimental."

"Composition, the aim of which is expression, alters itself according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of given dimensions I will jot down a drawing which will have a necessary relation to its format – I would not repeat this drawing on another sheet of different dimensions, for instance on a rectangular sheet.. ..a drawing must have a power of expansion which can bring to life the space which surrounds it."

"I want to reach the state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture. Perhaps I might be satisfied momentarily with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.."

"I try to condense the meaning of this body [of a woman] by drawing its essential lines. The charm will then become less apparent at first glance, but in the long run it will begin emanate from the new image. This image at the same time will be enriched by a wider meaning, a more comprehensively human one, while the charm, being less apparent, will not be its only characteristic. It will be merely one element in the general conception of the figure."

"If upon a white canvas I jot down some sensations of blue, of green, of red – every new brush stroke diminishes the importance of the preceding ones. Suppose I set out to paint an interior.. .If I paint a green near the red, if I paint in a yellow floor, there must still be between this green, this yellow, and the white of the canvas a relation that will be satisfactory to me. But these several tones mutually weaken one another. It is necessary, therefore, that the various elements that I use be so balanced that they do not destroy one another.."

"I am forced to transpose until finally my picture may seem completely changed when, after successive modifications, the red has succeeded the green as the dominant color. I cannot copy nature in a servile way, I must interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture – when I have found the relationship of all the tones the result must be a living harmony of tones, a harmony not unlike that of a musical composition"

"The chief aim of color should be to serve expression as well as possible. I put down my colors without a preconceived plan. If at the first step and perhaps without my being conscious of it one tone has particularly pleased me, more often then not when the picture is finished, I will notice that I have respected this tone while I have progressively altered and transformed the others. I discover the quality of colors in a purely instinctive way."

"To paint an autumn landscape I will not try to remember what colors suit this season, I will only be inspired by the sensation that the season gives me; the icy clearness of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the tonalities of the leaves. My sensation itself may vary, the autumn may be soft and warm like a protracted summer or quite cool with a cold sky and lemon yellow trees that give a chilly impression and announce winter."

"My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the very nature of each experience. I.. ..merely try to find a color that will fit my sensation. There is an impelling proportion of tones that can induce me to change the shape of a figure or to transform my composition. Until I have achieved this proportion in all the parts of the composition I strive towards it and keep on working. Then a moment comes when every part has found its definite relationship, and from then on it would be impossible for me to add a stroke to my picture without having to paint it all over again."

"What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. I do not insist upon the details of the face. I do not care to repeat them with anatomical exactness. Though I happen to have an Italian model whose appearance at first suggests nothing but a purely animal existence, yet I succeed in picking out among the lines of his face those which suggest that deep gravity which persists in every human being."

"A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter. When I see the Giotto frescoes at Padua I do not trouble to recognize which scene of the life of Christ I have before me, but I perceive instantly the sentiment which radiates from it and which is instinct in the composition in every line and color."

""I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me." After a pause full of intense thought on my part, I asked: "But if one hasn't always emotion. What then?" "Do not paint," he quickly answered. "When I came in here to work this morning I had no emotion, so I took a horseback ride. When I returned I felt like painting, and had all the emotion I wanted."

"I know that Seurat is completely the opposite of a romantic, which I am, but with a good portion of the scientific, of the rationalist, which creates the struggle from which I sometimes emerge the victor, but exhausted."

"Delacroix's composition is more entirely created, while that of Seurat employs matter organized scientifically, reproducing, presenting t our eyes objects constructed by scientific means rather than by signs, coming from our feeling. As result there is in his works a positivism, a slightly inert stability, coming from his composition, which is not the result of a creation of the mind, but of a juxtaposition of the objects. It is necessary to cross this barrier to re-feel light, colored and soft, and pure, the noblest pleasure"

"The work of Renoir, after that of Cézanne whose great influence had been manifested among artists, save us from whatever drying effect there is in pure abstraction. The rules that one might deduce in considering the work of these two masters appear to be more difficult to discover in the work of Renoir, who hides his efforts better. Whereas the continuous tension of the mind of Cézanne, his lack of self-confidence, prevent him from giving himself to us entirely even though he shows the evidence of his corrections, from which are easily (too easily) deduced rules that have a mathematical precision. [critical quote on Cubism ]."

"A little while ago I took a nap under an olive tree, and the color harmonies I saw were so touching. It's like a paradise you have no right to analyze, but you are a painter, for God's sake! Nice is so beautiful! Alight so soft and tender, despite its brilliance."

"Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say."

"I will repeat what I once said to Guillaume Apollinaire: "For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.""

"At each stage I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next sitting, if I find that there is a weakness in the whole, I make my way back into the picture by means of the weakness — I re-enter through the breach — and I reconceive the whole. Thus everything becomes fluid again."

"I don't paint things. I only paint the differences between things."

"Tomorrow, Sunday, at 4 o'clock, visit from Picasso. As I'm expecting to see him tomorrow, my mind is at work. I'm doing this propaganda show [at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, 1945] with him. I can imagine the room with my pictures on one side, and his on the other. It's as if I were going to cohabit with an epileptic."

"An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythms, by effort that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language."

"The future painter must feel what is useful for his development – drawing or even sculpture everything that will let him become one with Nature, identify himself with her, by entering into the things – which is what I call Nature – that arouse his feelings. I believe study by means of drawing is most essential. If drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses, you must draw first, to cultivate the spirit and to be able to lead color into spiritual paths."

"Drawing with scissors: To cut to the quick in color reminds me of the direct cutting of sculptors."

"The vertical is in my spirit. It helps me to define precisely the direction of lines, and in quick sketches I never indicate a curve, that of a branch in landscape for example, without being aware of its relationship to the vertical. My curves are not mad."

"A musician once said: In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed. It is therefore necessary to present oneself with the greatest humility: white, pure and candid with a mind as if empty, in a spiritual state analogous to that of a communicant approaching the Lord's Table. Obviously it is necessary to have all of one's experience behind one, but to preserve the freshness of one's instincts."

"Do I believe in God? Yes, when I am working. When I am submissive and modest, I feel myself to be greatly helped by someone who causes me to do things that exceed my capabilities. However, I cannot acknowledge him because it is as if I were to find myself before a conjuror whose sleight of hand eludes me."

"There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them"

"You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover."

"There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted."

"We are born with the sensibility of a period of civilization. We are not masters of our production; it is imposed upon us."

"A picture must possess a real power to generate light.. ..for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light."

"Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul."

"[I wouldn't mind turning into] a vermilion goldfish."

"Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence."

"It is only after years of preparation that the young [artist] should touch color — not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression."

"I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.."

"I have been no more than a medium, as it were."

"The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage."

"My verse forms are relatively traditional (traditions alter). In general they have moved away from strict classical patterns in the direction of greater freedom — as is usual with most artists learning a trade. It takes courage, however, to leave all props behind, to cast oneself, like Matisse, upon pure space. I still await that confidence."

"We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable."

"Matisse once said, "In order to paint a rose you have to forget every painting of a rose that's ever been painted in order to paint it anew.""

"I have seen Matisse's that were more 'unfinished' and yet more 'finished' than any American painters. Matisse was obviously in a terrific emotion at the time and he was more ’unfinished’ than 'finished'."

"For Matisse in particular it often served to separate areas of contrasting colour, assisting in the vibrant activation of such juxtaposed blocks. While the Impressionist use of colour contrasts had concentrated mainly on the complementary yellow and violet-blue pair, because these most aptly imitated the effects of sunlight and shadow in nature, Matisse shifted to the red-green complementaries. This pair creates the greatest optical vibration when juxtaposed because the two colours are closest in tone of any on the colour circle. As the eye tires of reading, say, the red as dominant, the green at once appears to come forward and dominate. This vacillation of the eye between the two colours vying for dominance sets up an optical vibration, which enhances the colour properties of each simultaneously. By focusing upon the red-green pair—which Matisse often biased towards pink-turquoise—he avoided the emphasis on the naturalistic representation associated with the Impressionists' use of colour. It was also a pair which, again because of tonal equivalence, affirmed the flatness of the picture surface by negating the illusion of depth."

"Unlike the essentially naturalistic colour opposition of yellow-blue/violet which characterized the Impressionist colour, Matisse began to exploit the more abstract, and... vibrant, oppositions of red-green. Because red and green colours are the closest in tone of all the complementary colour pairs, they set up a dazzling sensation which gives its own light and brilliance, without any direct imitation of natural effects of light. Thus the properties of colour itself, and the interactions of colour... were the basis of Matisse's mature art. Colour no longer stood for, or symbolized, anything external to painting itself; it was colour as colour."

"Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past."

"Picasso is taking Cézanne's elements — the cone, cylinder and sphere — into Cubism. Matisse is taking Cézanne's interest in the wholeness and the clarity of figures. They're taking almost opposite interpretations of what they see in Cézanne: Picasso is understanding it as decomposition, and Matisse is understanding it as composition."

"Matisse... had first studied law and then spent [six] years as an art student... In the years following the 1900 World's Fair he struggled with poverty ...and with a good deal of public indifference toward his work. During that time, he worked his way through the different modes of vision employed in nineteenth-century avant-guard painting, starting with the impressionists and then moving on to Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin, and especially Cézanne, who was to remain the greatest and longest-lasting source of inspiration to him. As early as 1899, Matisse made great sacrifices in order to buy a small but powerful Cézanne, Three Bathers, and he was the first of the younger avant-guard artists to absorb the radically new kind of pictorial thought that Cézanne's painting embodied. Cézanne was... Matisse said, "a sort of god of painting.""

"As Picasso began to occupy the territory of Cézanne, Matisse seemed to be moving closer to the legacy of van Gogh and Gauguin... pushed to find a new and different way of dealing with the fluidity and dynamism... in Cézanne... by turning even more intensely toward the decorative. During most of 1908... Matisse continued to work with flat forms and to explore the inherent ambiguities of the pictorial field—especially... the sensation of limitless space and to have... the background become... more important than the figures it contained. Since childhood he had loved textiles, and he had an acute understanding of the possible symbolic uses for decorative patterns—as in van Gogh's portraits of Madame Roulin as "La Berceuse," in which the floral pattern... becomes a metaphor for her vitality and fertility. Matisse's use of decorative patterning also provided... another way of holding emotion at arm's length while maintaining its intensity. It allowed... a pictorial space... sufficiently open and imaginative to incorporate a... range of contrasting visual rhythms... to evoke different... perceptual sensations. Such a fluid and open space enabled him to invest everyday subjects with... spirituality."

"The more Matisse's body failed, the more he responded by inventing a mythic youthfulness that he could inhabit in his art. For Matisse, the first rule was to keep his art separated from the literal representation of the feelings behind it, to channel and redirect his emotions into imagery that transcended the raw stuff of life."

"I took a dislike to Matisse," the artist of the wealthy. The red paint of his canvases fizzes like soda water. He has not experienced the joy of ripening fruits. His mighty brush does not heal the vision, but offers it the strength of an ox, so that your eyes become bloodshot. I've had enough of his carpet chess and odalisques! Persian whimsies of a Parisian Maître!"

"Matisse's paintings were full of joy. He said he painted for tired businessmen, right? You know, like the goldfish bowl and the happy dancers on the green lawn with the cobalt blue sky, you know, the orange nudes? You know, for the most part, it's all very joyous. That's kind of what I was trying to say, you know. That's the kind of paintings that I like."

"When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed."

"Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt."

"You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he."

"Matisse said, you have to read between the lines. When he would stop a line, say, at the ear, and beginning it again at the neck, he was really exercising the viewer's mind to fill in the blanks."

"Though produced by a very old man, who was mortally ill, they seem to come from the springtime of the world."

"Years later he [ Picasso ] would tell the French writer [w:André Malraux|André Malraux] of something else that shaped his Demoiselles [made in Paris, June-July 1907]. Matisse had shown him an African statue he'd bought. Then Picasso went to the dingy ethnographic museum in Paris, the 'Trocadero', with its collection of primitive artifacts. It smelled like a flea market, but it opened his eyes to the magic of masks and fetishes. 'If you give spirits a shape, you break free from them', he said, [and]: 'Suddenly.. .I grasped why I was a painter. All alone in that museum, surrounded by masks, Red Indian dolls, dummies covered with dust. The Demoiselles must have come that day.. ..because it was my first exorcising picture.'"

"“The story of the beautiful,” said Whistler, with the swagger that made all but his contemporaries love him, “is already complete—hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon, and broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai—at the foot of Fuji-yama.”"

"John Ruskin: 'The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?' Whistler: 'No. I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.'"

"Why should not I call my works 'symphonies', 'arrangements', 'harmonies', and 'nocturnes'?.. .The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell. My picture of 'Harmony in Grey and Gold' is an illustration of my meaning – as snow scene with a single black figure and lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture, Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp."

"If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day: to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of colours to treat a flower as his key, not as his model. This is now understood indifferently well – at least by dressmakers. In every costume you see attention is paid to the key-note of colour which runs through the composition, as the chant of the Anabaptists through the 'Prophète', or the Hugenots' hymn in the opera of that name."

"Shall the painter then.. ..decide upon painting? Shall he be the critic and sole authority? Aggressive as is this supposition, I fear that, in the length of time, his assertion alone has established what even the gentleman of the quill accept as the canons of art, and recognize as the masterpieces of work. Seurat's painting of the Grande Jatte proved extremely influential."

"May I therefore acknowledge the tender glow of health induced by reading, as I sat here in the morning sun, the flattering attention paid me by your gentleman of ready wreath and quick biography!"

"Art is a goddess of dainty thought, reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others. She is, withal selfishly occupied with her own perfection only — having no desire to teach."

"Art is upon the Town!"

"Listen! There was never an artistic period. There was never an art-loving nation."

"Nature is usually wrong."

"[another part / version of Whistler's lecture:] Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful—as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony. To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano. That Nature is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all."

"The rare few, who, early in life, have rid themselves of the friendship of the many."

"To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labor, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view."

"Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work."

"The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter—perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain it's presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man."

"As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour. The great musicians knew this. Beethoven and the rest wrote music — simply music; symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that.. .Art should be independent of all claptrap — should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.'"

"It is for the artist.. ..in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features."

"One cannot continually disappoint a Continent."

"I am not arguing with you — I am telling you."

"One is always finding out more."

"Oscar Wilde: 'I wish I had said that' Whistler: 'You will, Oscar, you will.'"

"You shouldn't say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe."

"'I know of only two painters in the world,' said a newly introduced feminine enthusiast to Whistler, 'yourself and Velasquez.' 'Why,' answered Whistler in dulcet tones, 'why drag in Velasquez?'"

"Yes, madam, Nature is creeping up. [in response to a lady who said that a landscape reminded her of his work]"

"Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five."

"I say I can't thank you too much for the name 'Nocturne' as a title for my moonlights! You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and consequent pleasure to me — besides it is really so charming and does so poetically say all that I want to say and no more than I wish."

"A group from Glasgow sought in 1891 to purchase his portrait of w:Thomas Carlyle was shocked that Whistler's price was 1000 guineas. A spokesman countered that the portrait was not even life size. Whistler replied, 'But, you know, few men are life size.'"

"For Mr Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. [reacting on Whistler's painting: 'w:Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket' (c. 1875) - an almost abstract city-scene, exposed in an exhibition at London's Grosvenor Gallery in 1877]"

"Whistler makes dry-points mostly, and sometimes regular etchings, but the suppleness you find in them, the pithiness and delicacy which charm you derive from the inking which is done by Whistler himself j no professional printer could substitute for him, for inking is an art in itself and completes the etched line. Now we would like to achieve suppleness before the printing. I saw two prints exhibited in Paris a year or two ago; they were rather delicate, meager and thin-looking, one would have to see a whole collection in order to judge them, for doubtless he [Whistler] has done some that are first rate."

"..not merely for its clever satire and amusing jests.. ..but for the pure and perfect beauty of many of its passages.. ..for that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting, in my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs."

"Whistler [at the Paris Impressionism-exhibition, of M. Petit, May 1887] has some very fine bits of sketches in paint, forty-two!! He was honored with the best places, he also has a large portrait of a lady, the painting is completely black. Nor is there any luminosity either. Whistler, by the way, does not care for luminosity. His little sketches show fine draftsmanship. In the corridor he has some very good, in fact, quite superior etchings, they are even luminous, which is strange for an artist who does not aim at this in his color."

"He did better than attract a few followers and imitators; he influenced the whole world of art. Consciously, or unconsciously, his presence is felt in countless studios; his genius permeates modern artistic thought."

"In our beginnings, Fantin, Whistler and I were all on the same road, the road from Holland [Dutch 17th century painters]"

"His landscapes of those years [mid-1860s] reveal that he had rejected his earlier commitment to transcribing nature in the manner of Courbet, and was responding instead to formalist imperatives, including flat, decorative surfaces, subtle tonal harmonies, and allusive, rather than literal, subjects. Taking a cue from a critic who had referred to his early portrait of his mistress, 'The White Girl' (1862; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), as a 'symphony in white,' Whistler began to envision and entitle his works with the abstract language of music, calling them symphonies, compositions, harmonies, nocturnes, arrangements, and so forth."

"I am a believer and a conformist. Anyone can revolt; it is more difficult silently to obey our own interior promptings, and to spend our lives finding sincere and fitting means of expression for our temperaments and our gifts — if we have any. I do not say "neither God, nor Master," only in the end to substitute myself for the God I have excommunicated...""

"Like the ostrich, head under wing When the roaring storm breaks, So many people take refuge Under the soft pillow Of specious arguments."

"A painter who loves his art must be careful not to see too much of critics and men of letters. These gentlemen, however unconsciously, distort everything, thinking that they are explaining it — the artist's thought, sensibility, and intensions. They take away his strength, just as Delilah took away Samson's. They have no gift for nuances, and they have an instinctive aversion for everything that is beyond their reach and baffles them."

"Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart. The way of feeling, of understanding, of loving; the way of seeing the country, the faces that your father saw, that your mother knew. The rest is chimerical...""

"Often pagans, with their eyes wide open, do not see very clearly."

"Painting for me is merely a means of forgetting life. It is a cry in the night. A sob broken off. A strangled laugh."

"The richness of the world, all artificial pleasures, have the taste of sickness and give off a smell of death in the face of certain spiritual possessions."

"The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas."

"The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy …"

"The painter who loves his art is ruler in his own kingdom, even if he be in Lilliput and a Lilliputian himself. He transforms a kitchen maid in to a fairy, and a great lady into a brothel matron, if he wants to and sees them so, for he is a seer. His vision includes everything that is alive in the past."

"The old masters are perfect and admirable examples, on condition that we remember that the spirit gives life and the letter kills, and that even the best pastiche is inferior to the harmonious stammering or incoherence of a child trying to speak."

"I am at work on a girl. It is quite simple a girl getting up on the edge of her bed and pulling on her stockings. The bed is whitish, and in addition there are white sheets, a white nightdress, a bedside table with a white cover, white curtains and a blue wall. [as model for his painting 'Morning', 1884]"

"Life here [in Paris, 1885] is quite different. You hardly ever see a dog on a lead; you come across little wagons being pulled by dogs that are often so small that you can't imagine how on earth they manage to shift such enormous weights. You see shepherdesses in the middle of the street herding goats and sometimes playing on their flutes. I think I'll go to the Louvre and the Salon today."

"No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love."

"I thought I should make something – I felt it would be so easy – it would take form under my hands like magic."

"The point is that one sees things at different moments with different eyes. Differently in the morning then in the evening. The way in which one sees also depends on one's mood.. ..coming in from a dark bedroom in the morning into the sitting room one will, for example, see everything in a bluish light. Even the deepest shadows are topped with bright light. After a while one will accustom oneself to the light and the shadows will be deeper and everything will be seen more sharply. If an atmosphere of this kind is being painted it won't do merely to sit and gaze at everything 'just as one sees'. One must paint precisely the fleeting moment of significance – one must capture the exact experience separating that significant moment from the next – the exact moment when the motif struck one.. .In some circumstances a chair may seem to be just as interesting as a human being. In some way or another it must have caught the interest in which case the onlooker's interest must somehow be engaged in the same way. It's not the chair that should be painted, but what the person has felt at the sight of it [written in Saint Cloud, 1890 - probably related to the chair of Vincent van Gogh"

"When seen as a whole, art derives from a person's desire to communicate himself to another. I do not believe in an art which is not forced into existence by a human being’s desire to open his heart. All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart’s blood. Art is your heart’s blood."

"I was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

"Realism's 'truth' as embodied in painting and literature now solely consists of things capable of being seen by the eye or heard by the ear. Realism is concerned only with the external shell of nature. People content with the discoveries they have made ignore the fact that there are other things to be discovered, even broader avenues to be explored. They have found bacteria, but not what they consist of. [quote of 1892)"

"Nothing ceases to exist – there is no example of this in nature.. .There is an entire mass of things that cannot rationally explained. There are newborn thoughts that have not yet found form. How foolish to deny the existence of the soul. After all, that a life has begun, that cannot be denied. It is necessary to believe in immortality, insofar as it can be demonstrated that the atoms of life or the spirit of life must continue to exist after the body’s death. But of what does it exist, this characteristic of holding a body together, causing matter to change and develop, this spirit of life? I felt it as a sensual delight that I should become one with – become this earth which is forever radiated by the sun in such a constant ferment and which lives – lives – and which will grow plants from my decaying body – trees and flowers – and the sun will warm them and I will exist in them – and nothing will perish – and that is eternity."

"By painting colours and lines and forms seen in a quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does."

"And I live with the dead – my mother, my sister [Sophie], my grandfather, my father [who died in 1889, when Munch was in France].. .Every day is the same – my friends have stopped coming – their laughter disturbs me, tortures me.. ..my daily walk round the old castle becomes shorter and shorter, it tires me more and more to take walks. The fire in the fireplace is my only friend – the time I spend sitting in front of the fireplace gets longer and longer.. ..at its worst I lean my head against the fireplace overwhelmed by the sudden urge – Kill yourself and then it’s all over. Why live? I light the candle – my huge shadow springs across half the wall, clear up to the ceiling and in the mirror over the fireplace I see the face of my own ghost."

"No one in art has yet penetrated as far [as Dostoyevsky into the mystical realms of the soul, towards the metaphysical, the subconsciousness, viewing the external reality of the world as merely a sign, a symbol of the spiritual and metaphysical."

"When I write these notes, it is not to describe my own life. I am writing a study of the soul as I observe myself closely and use myself as an anatomical testing-ground. It would therefore be wrong to look on these notes as confessions. I have chosen – in accordance with Søren Kierkegaard – to split the work into two parts; the painter and his distraught friend the poet. Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied the recesses of the body and dissected human cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is the universal in the soul [written after 1908]"

"My ideas developed under the influence of the bohemians or rather under Hans Jager [leader of the 'Kristiania Bohemia' since 1883]. Many people have mistakenly claimed that my ideas were formed under the influence of Strindberg and the Germans.. ..but that is wrong. They had already been formed by then."

"At first when I saw 'The Sick Child' [in his imagination] her pallid face and the vivid red hair against the pillow – I saw something that vanished when I tried to paint it. I ended up with a picture on the canvas which, although I was pleased with it, bore little relationship to what I had seen.. ..In the space of that year [1885 – 1886], scratching it out, just letting the paint flow, endlessly I tried to recapture what I had seen for the first time – the pale transparent skin against the linen sheets, the trembling lips, the shaking hands. I repainted the painting numerous times – scratched it out – let it become blurred in the medium – and tried again and again to catch the first impression – the transparent pale skin against the canvas – the trembling mouth – the trembling hands. I had done the chair [in which his sister Sophie had died] with the glass too often. It distracted me from doing the head. – When I saw the picture I could only make out the glass and the surroundings. – Should I remove it completely? – No, it had the effect of giving depth and emphasis to the head. – I scared off half the background and left everything in masses – one could now see past and across the head and the glass.. .I had achieved much of that first impression, the trembling mouth – the transparent skin – the tired eyes – but the picture was not finished in its colour – it was pale grey – the picture was then heavy as lead. [Munch showed the painting on the Autumn Exhibition 18 October 1886; it was criticized severely, even by his bohemian art-friend Jager]"

"One sunny spring day I heard the music coming down Karl Johan [street] and it filled me with joy. The spring, the sun, the music, all blended together to make me shiver with pleasure. The music added colour to the colours. I painted the picture [his painting 'Music on Karl Johan'] allowing the colours to reverberate with the rhythm of the music. I painted the colours as I saw them at that moment."

"Behind the top hats, a little lady wearing lila-coloured tights was balancing on a tightrope in the middle of all that blue-grey tobacco-laden air. I sauntered in among the standing clientele. I was on the lookout for an attractive girl. Yes – that one wasn’t bad. When she became aware of my gaze her facial expression changed to that of a frozen mask and she stared emptily into space. I found a stair – and collapsed into it – tired and listless. Everyone clapped. The Lila-clad tightrope-walker curtsied, smiled and disappeared. A group of Romanian singers took her place. There was love and hate – and longing and reunion – and lovely dreams – and that soft music melting together with the colours. The melted notes became green palm trees and steely blue water floating in the blue haze of the room. An artwork is a crystal. A crystal has a soul and a mind, and the artwork must also have these."

"The strange light illuminated all those night-time meetings that took place in every imaginable sort of café; the lips mouthing defiant words, heedless of restraint or consequence, often overbearing and brutal as only Norwegians can be, vast shadows of impotence misery and shabbiness – spirits training for fulfillment, striving in vain to be great, complete, unique. [Munch describes the environment and atmosphere of the Norwegian bohemia in Kristiana, where he himself lived and worked when he was about 23] And at the center of all the faces there would be Jaeger, whose logic was as sharp as a scythe and as cold as an icy blast.."

"The only influences in [the painting 'The sick Child', Munch painted in his elderly home, remembering very accurate the last days of his dying little sister Sophie] 'The sick Child'.. ..were the ones that come from my home.. ..my childhood and my home. Only someone who knew the conditions at home could possibly understand why there can be no conceivable chance of any other place having played a part – my home is to my art as a midwife is to her children.. ..few painters have ever experienced the full grief of their subject as I did in 'The sick child'. It was not just I who was suffering; it was all my nearest and dearest as well."

"One evening I came to have a discussion with my father on the subject how long unbelievers are tormented in Hell. I maintained that no sinner could be so guilty that God would let him suffer longer than a thousand years. Father said that they would suffer for a thousand times a thousand years. We would not give up the argument. I became so irritated.. .I returned home to make my piece with him. He had gone to bed so I quietly opened his bedroom door. He was on his knees in front of the bed, praying.. .I closed the door and went to my own room but I could not get to sleep.. ..eventually I took out my drawing block and started to draw. I drew my father kneeling by his bed, with the light from the bedside lamp casting a yellow glow over his nightshirt. I fetched my paintbox and colored it in. Finally I achieved the right pictorial effect, and I was able to go to bed happy and slept soundly."

"Could only have been painted by a madman."

"My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? ..my art gives meaning to my life."

"From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity."

"Grey dawn was seeping into the sick room [around Christmas 1867, Munch was almost dying then and spitting blood when he was 13; but he recovered]. I lay in the middle of the bed with my hands outside the bedclothes, looking straight ahead. Now I was in a pact with God. I had promised to serve him if I survived, if he allowed me to escape the tuberculosis. Now I could never be as before."

"There must be no more pictures covered in brown sauce [c. 1880, when Munch started to paint series of landscapes in fresh colors]"

"Far out there – that"

"My afflictions belong to me and my art - they have become one with me. Without illness and anxiety, I would have been a rudderless ship.. .My art is really a voluntary confession and an attempt to explain to myself my relationship with life - it is, therefore, actually a sort of egoism, but I am constantly hoping that through this I can help others achieve clarity."

"It was the period I think of as the age of the pillow.. .What I wanted to bring out - is that which cannot be measured - I wanted to bring out the tired movement in the eyelids - the lips must look as though they are whispering - she must look as though she is breathing - I want life - what is alive. [on his painting 'The sick Child']"

"What is art really? The outcome of dissatisfaction with life, the point of impact for the creative force, the continual movement of life.. ..in my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself."

"Munch's my favorite artist in the whole world. He's gentle, he's emotional, and he's just a really, really fantastic painter. He was spiritual, poetic, very, very handsome. And he worked really hard."

"The creator of the 'Frieze of Life' was almost blind [in 1938, when Hodin visited Munch]. He had completely lost the sight of one eye a year before through the bursting of a blood vessel that flooded the eyeball, and now the other was threatened in the same way, as a result of one of the severe illnesses which had so often endangered his life. The seventy-five-year-old artist had for months been confined to his sick bed, unable to lift a finger to give the much desired finishing touches to the vast edifice of his life’s work."

"What interests me is to paint the kind of anti-sensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward — neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself."

"Pop Art is the use of commercial art as a subject matter in painting, I suppose. It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it – everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everybody [in America, mainly in New York, 1950s] was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; and apparently they didn’t hate that enough either."

"Well, it [ (Pop Art ] is an involvement with what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement on us. I think art since Paul Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art; it is utopian. It has had less and less to do with the world, it looks inward – neo Zen and all that. This is not so much a criticism as an obvious observation. Outside is the world; it’s there. Pop Art looks out into the world; it appears to accept its environment, which is not good or bad, but different – another state of mind."

"'How can you [accept] exploitation?' 'How can you like the complete mechanization of work?' 'How can you like bad art?' I have to answer that I accept it as being there, in the world."

"I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comics are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We’re using those things – but we're not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism and terrorism."

"Organized perception is what is art all about.. .It is a process. It has nothing to do with any external form the painting takes, it has to do with a way of building a unified pattern of seeing..."

"In Abstract Expressionism the paintings symbolize the idea of ground-directedness as opposed to object-directedness. You put something down, react to it, put something else down, and the painting itself becomes a symbol of this. The difference is that rather than symbolize this ground-directedness I do an object-directed appearing thing. There is humor here. The work is still ground-directed; the fact that it's an eyebrow or an almost direct copy of something is unimportant. The ground-directedness is in the painter's mind and not immediately in apparent in the painting. Pop Art makes the statement that ground-directedness is not a quality that the painting has because of what it looks like..."

"Artists have never worked with the model – just with the painting. What you [G. R. Swenson, the interviewer] are really saying is that an artist like Cézanne transforms what we think the painting ought to look like into something he thinks it ought to look like. He’s working with paint, not nature; he’s making a painting, he's forming. I think my work is different from comic strips – but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art. What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I’m using the word; the comics have shapes but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified. The purpose is different, one intends to depict and I intend to unify."

"My work is actually different from comic strips in that every mark is really in a different place, however slight the difference seems to some. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial."

"I paint directly – then it's said to be an exact copy; and not art, probably because there's no perspective or shading. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself. Instead of looking like a painting of a billboard – the way a w:Reginald Marsh would look – Pop Art seems to be the actual thing. It is intensification, a stylistic intensification of the excitement which the subject matter has for me; but the style is, as you said, cool."

"One of the things a cartoon does is to express violent emotion and passion in a completely mechanical and removed style. To express this thing in a painterly style would dilute it; the techniques I use are not commercial, they only appear to be commercial – and the ways of seeing and composing and unifying are different and have different ends."

"Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values see more askew.. .I think the meaning of my work is that it’s industrial; it’s what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it [Pop Art] won’t be American; it will be universal."

"I think my work is different from comic strip – but I wouldn't call it transformation.. .What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I'm using the word; the comics have shapes, but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified. The purpose is different, one intends to depict and I intend to unify. And my work is actually different form comic strips in that every mark is really in a different place. However slight the difference seems to some."

"There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Miro and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney."

"Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms."

"If an artist can't do anymore, then he should just quit; and an artist ought to be able to change his style without feeling bad. I heard that [John] Lichtenstein said he might not be painting comic strips a year of two from now [1963]. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's going to happen; that’s going to be the whole new scene."

"This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Procreate, Assemblage etc. [O,Hara is referring to Helene Leroux and John Joven ] is an easy way out and lives on what Animation did. When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-made's and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty."

"Frankly, I think there is something wrong with Jawlensky's dots [in his paintings, then]. Anybody can pick up that style if they want to."

"At an unknown hour, from a source that is still sealed to us, but inexorable, the Work comes into the world. Cold calculations, splashes leaping up without plan, mathematically accurate construction (laid bare or concealed) silent, screaming drawing, scrupulous finish, colour in fanfares or played pianissimo on the strings, large, serene, cradling, fragmented planes. Isn’t that a Form? Aren't those the means? Suffering, seeking, tormented souls with a deep fissure, caused by the collision of the spiritual with the material.. .Shame on him who turns his soul's ear away from the mouth of art. A human being speaks to human beings about the superhuman – the language of art."

"The impressions we receive, which often appear merely chaotic, consist of three elements; the impression of the color of the object, its form, and of its combined color and form, i.e., of the object itself. At this point the individuality of the artist comes to the front and disposes, as he wills, these three elements. It is clear, therefore, that the choice of object (i.e., of one of the elements in the harmony of form) must be decided only by a corresponding vibration in the human soul.."

"Mystery, speaking through mysteries. Isn't that meaning? Isn't that the conscious or unconsciousnes purpose of the compulsive urge to create?"

"Opposites and contradictions, that is our harmony."

"[ Schoenberg's ] music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone, and at this point the music of the future begins."

"In your [ composer Schönberg's ] works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my painting."

"At the moment there is a great tendency in painting to discover the 'new' harmony by constructive means whereby the rhythmic is built on an almost geometric form.. .I am certain that our own modern harmony is not to be found in the 'geometric' way, but rather in the anti-geometric, anti-logical way. And this way is that of 'dissonance in art', in painting, therefore, just as much as in music. And 'today's' dissonance in painting and music is merely the consonance of 'tomorrow'."

"..the works of Mozart. They create a welcome pause amidst the storms of our inner life, a vision of consolation and hope, but we hear them like sounds of another, vanished and essential unfamiliar age. Clashing discords, loss of equilibrium.."

"An artist who sees that the imitation of natural appearances, however artistic, is not for him – the kind of creative artist who wants to, and has to express his own inner world – sees with envy how naturally and easily such goals can be attained in music, the least material of the arts today. Understandably, he may turn toward it and try to find the same means in his own art. Hence the current search for rhythm in painting, for mathematical abstract construction.. ..the way colors are set in motion, etc."

"[Their] things [works of Die Brücke-artists] must be exhibited. But I think it is incorrect to immortalize them in the document [Almanac] of our modern art (and, this is what our book ought to be) or as a more or less decisive, leading factor. At any rate I am against large reproductions [of Die Brücke paintings in The Blaue Reiter Almanac]."

"If until now colour and form were used as inner agents, it was mainly done subconsciously. The subordination of composition to geometrical form is no new idea (cf. the art of the Persians). Construction on a purely spiritual basis is a slow business, and at first seemingly blind and unmethodical. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colours in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation. If we begin at once to break the bonds that bind us to nature and to devote ourselves purely to combination of pure colour and independent form, we shall produce works that are mere geometric decoration, resembling something like a necktie or a carpet. Beauty of form and colour is no sufficient aim by itself, despite the assertions of pure aesthetes or even of naturalists obsessed with the idea of "beauty". It is because our painting is still at an elementary stage that we are so little able to be moved by wholly autonomous colour and form composition. The nerve vibrations are there (as we feel when confronted by applied art), but they get no farther than the nerves because the corresponding vibrations of the spirit which they call forth are weak. When we remember however, that spiritual experience is quickening, that positive science, the firmest basis of human thought is tottering, that dissolution of matter is imminent, we have reason to hope that the hour of pure composition is not far away. The first stage has arrived."

"The more freely abstract the form becomes, the purer, and also the more primitive it sounds. Therefore, in a composition in which corporeal elements are more or less superfluous, they can be more or less omitted and replaced by purely abstract forms, or by corporeal forms that have been completely abstracted.. .Here we are confronted by the question: Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract? This is a question that naturally arises, the answer to which is at once indicated by an analysis of the concordance of the two elements of form (the objective and the abstract). Just as every word spoken (tree, sky, man) awakens an inner vibration, so too does every pictorially represented object. To deprive oneself of the possibility of this calling up vibrations would be to narrow one's arsenal of expressive means. At least, that is how it is today. But apart from today's answer, the above question receives the eternal answer to every question in art that begins with 'must.' There is no 'must' in art, which is forever free."

"The disharmoniousness (one might say, the negative rhythm) of the individual forms was that which primarily drew me, attracted me, during the period to which this watercolor belongs. The so-called rhythmic always comes on its own because in general the person himself is rhythmically built. Thus at least on the surface, the rhythmic is innate in people. Children, 'primitive' peoples, and laymen draw rhythmically.. In that period my soul was especially enchanted by the not-fitting-together of drawn and painterly form. Line serves the plane in that the former bounds the latter. And it makes my heart race in those cases when the independent plane springs over the confining line: line and plane are not in tune! It was this that produced a strong inner emotion in me, the inner 'ah!"

"In this painting ['Moscow'], I was in fact in quest for a certain hour, which was and which remains always the most beautiful hour of the day in Moscow. The sun is already low and has reached its highest force, which it has searched all the day, to which it has aspired all the day.. .The sun dissolves all Moscow in a spot, which as a frenzied tuba makes entered into vibration all the inner being, the whole soul.. .Rendering this hour seemed the biggest, the most impossible of the happiness for an artist. These impressions renewed every sunny day. They brought me a joy which shattered me until the bottom of the soul, and which reached until ecstasy."

"We can only assert here, with especial satisfaction, that Gabriele Münters talent, robust, rooted in an inward strength and sensitivity, in fact genuinely German, should in no circumstances be assessed as masculin, or as 'quasi-masculine'. This talent – and we emphasize it, once more, with great satisfaction – can only be described as exclusively and purely feminine.. .Gabriele Münter doesn't paint feminine subjects, she does not work with feminine materials, and does not permit herself any feminine coquetry. Their are neither raptures, nor agreeable exterior elegance, nor appealing weaknesses to be found here."

"Nor, on the other hand, are there any masculine charms [in Gabriele Münter's work] either: no 'sinewy brushwork', no heaps of paint, 'hurled on to the canvas'. The pictures are painted throughout with a delicately and correctly sensed measure of external strength, with not a trace of feminine or masculine coquetry in the 'making'. We could almost say that they are painted modestly; i. e. that they were inspired, not by a desire for outward display, but by a purely inward compulsion."

"Of the 16 years that I have been living in Germany, I have given myself entirely to the German art world. How am I now suddenly supposed to feel myself a foreigner?"

"First I will make different color tests: I will study the dark – deep blue, deep violet, deep dirty green, etc. Often I see the colors before my eyes. Sometimes I imitate with my lips the deep sounds of the trumpet – then I see various deep mixtures which the word is uncapable od conceiving and which the palette can only feebly reproduce."

"I would love to paint a large landscape of Moscow — taking elements from everywhere and combining them into a single picture—weak and strong parts, mixing everything together in the same way as the world is mixed of different elements. It must be like an orchestra.. .Suddenly I felt that my old dream was closer to coming true. You know that I dreamed of painting a big picture expressing joy, the happiness of life and the universe. Suddenly I feel the harmony of colors and forms that come from this world of joy."

"I am working again on my painting 'Moscow' ['Moscow I' ('Москва I'), 1916]. It is slowly taking shape in my imagination. And what was in the realm of wishing is now assuming real forms. What I have been lacking with this idea was depth and richness of sound, very earnest, complex, and easy at the same time."

"Kandinsky, Wassily – painter, printmaker and author – the first painter to base painting on purely pictorial means of expression and abandon objects in his pictures."

"Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live and feel, as did the ancient Greeks. In the same way those who strive to follow the Greek methods in sculpture achieve only a similarity of form, the work remaining soulless for all time. Such imitation is mere aping. Externally the monkey completely resembles a human being; he will sit holding a book in front of his nose, and turn over the pages with a thoughtful aspect, but his actions have for him no real meaning."

"There is, however, in art another kind of external similarity which is founded on a fundamental truth. When there is a similarity of inner tendency in the whole moral and spiritual atmosphere, a similarity of ideals, at first closely pursued but later lost to sight, a similarity in the inner feeling of any one period to that of another, the logical result will be a revival of the external forms which served to express those inner feelings in an earlier age."

"The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area."

"Generally speaking, colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the strings.The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul."

"The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct is its appeal. In any composition the material side may be more or less omitted in proportion as the forms used are more or less material, and for them substituted pure abstractions, or largely dematerialized objects. The more an artist uses these abstracted forms, the deeper and more confidently will he advance into the kingdom of the abstract. And after him will follow the gazer at his pictures, who also will have gradually acquired a greater familiarity with the language of that kingdom. Must we then abandon utterly all material objects and paint solely in abstractions? The problem of harmonizing the appeal of the material and the non-material shows us the answer to this question. As every word spoken rouses an inner vibration, so likewise does every object represented. To deprive oneself of this possibility is to limit one's powers of expression. That is at any rate the case at present. But besides this answer to the question, there is another, and one which art can always employ to any question beginning with "must": There is no "must" in art, because art is free."

"It is never literally true that any form is meaningless and "says nothing." Every form in the world says something. But its message often fails to reach us, and even if it does, full understanding is often withheld from us.] and, properly speaking, FORM IS THE OUTWARD EXPRESSION OF THIS INNER MEANING."

"The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life."

"All means are sacred when they are dictated by inner necessity. All means are reprehensible when they do not spring from the fountain of inner necessity... The artist must be blind to 'recognized' and 'unrecognized' form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity."

"At the appointed time, necessities become ripe. That is the time when the Creative Spirit (which one can also designate as the Abstract Spirit) finds an avenue to the soul, later to other souls, and causes a yearning, an inner urge."

"Since the form is only an expression of the content and the content is different with different artists, it is then clear that there can be many different forms at the same time which are equally good. Necessity creates the form. Fish which live at great depths have no eyes. The elephant has a trunk. The chameleon changes its color, and so forth."

"The first colours which made a strong impression on me were light juice green, white, crimson red, black and yellow ocher. These memories go back to the third year of my life. I saw these colours on various objects [houses and roofs, in Russia] which are not as clear in my mind as the colours themselves."

"..emotion that I experienced on first seeing the fresh paint come out of the tube.. ..the impression of colours strewn over the palette: of colours – alive, waiting, as yet unseen and hidden in their little tubes.."

"I thought that the painter had no right to paint so unclearly.. ..(but) the first faint doubt as to the importance of an 'object' as the necessary element in painting."

"If the artist has outer and inner eyes for nature, nature rewards him by giving him inspiration."

"..the long Russian word for creation: 'proisvedenie' - so different from its shorter counterparts in English, French and German - expresses for me the whole history and process of creation, lengthy, mysterious, infinitely complex and foreshadowed by divine predestination."

"The destruction of the atom [the split of it, in modern physics] seemed to me to be the same as the destruction of the world.. ..science to me appeared to be dead: its most important basis was only a lunacy, a mistake perpetrated by learned men.. ..who blindly mistook one object for another."

"[Art is] ..the mysterious expression of the mysterious.."

"At that time [c. 1904 – 1905] I tried, by means of lines and by distribution of mottled points of colours [in his tempera painting on paper: 'Russian Beauty in a Landscape', 1905] to express the musical spirit of Russia. Other pictures of that period reflected the contradictions and later the eccentricities of Russia."

"The horse carries the rider with power and speed. But the rider controls the horse. Talent carries the artist to great heights with power and speed. But the artist directs his talent. That is the element of 'consciousness', of 'calculation' in the work – or whatever else one chooses to call it."

"..I let myself go.. [in Kandinsky's Murnau-period when he was painting in open air; c. 1908 – 1914] I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canvas with the knife and made them sing out as strongly as I could. Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow, before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered deeply in the shadows."

"In many ways art is similar to religion. Its development consists not in new discoveries which invalidate the old truths (as is obviously the case in science). Its development consists in sudden illuminations, similar to lightning, in explosions, which burst in the sky like fireworks.. ..this illumination shows with blinding light new perspectives, new truths, which are basically nothing but the organic development, the further organic growth of the earlier wisdom.. .Was the New Testament possible without the Old? Could our time, that of the threshold of the 'third' revelation, be thinkable without the second?"

"Painting is a thundering conflict of different worlds, which in and out of the battle with one another are intended to create the new world, which is called the world of art. Each work arises technically in a way similar to that in which the cosmos arose – through catastrophes, which from the chaotic roaring of the instruments finally create a symphony, the music of the spheres. The creation of the work is the creation of worlds."

"You mention the circle and I agree with your definition.. ..why does the circle fascinates me? It is (1) the most modern form, but asserts itself unconditionally, (2) a precise but inexhaustible variable, (3) simultaneously stable and unstable, (4) simultaneously loud and soft, (5) a single tension that carries countless tensions within it. The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form, and in balance. Of the three primary forms (triangle, square, circle), it points most clearly to the fourth dimension."

"We [ Franz Marc & Kandinsky] thought up the name [ Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider)] while sitting at a cafe table.. .Both of us were fond of blue things, [Franz] Marc of blue horses, and I of blue riders. So the title suggested itself."

"Content is nothing but the sum of organized tensions. From this point of view one can discover the basic identity of the rules of composition in all arts – always accepting that the arts can only represent their object materially by means of organised reactions.. ..already today one can safely assume that the roots of laws of composition are the same for art as they are for nature."

"My wish [c. 1911].. ..of compiling a book (a kind of Almanac) in which all the contributions should be written by artists. I dreamt primarily of painters and musicians. The ruinous separation of the arts from each other, and of 'Art' from folk-art and from children's art, the distinction between 'Art' and 'Ethnography' [folk-art].. ..the solid walls erected between phenomena that in my eyes were so closely related, even identical: in a word, the potentialities for synthesis left me no peace. It may well seem strange today [1930] that for a long time I could not find any co-workers or any means to promote this idea.."

"Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally – or – inwardly."

"The geometric point is an invisible thing. Therefore, it must be defined as an incorporeal thing. Considered in terms of substance, it equals zero.. .Thus we look upon the geometric point as the ultimate and most singular union of silence and speech. The geometric point has, therefore, been given its material form, in the first instance, in writing. It belongs to language and signifies silence."

"The geometric line is an invisible thing. It is the track made by the moving point; that is, its product. It is created by movement – specifically through the destruction of the intense self-contained repose of the point. Here, the leap out of the static to the dynamic occurs. […] The forces coming from without which transform the point into a line, can be very diverse. The variation in lines depends upon the number of these forces and upon their combinations."

"At the Bauhaus, Klee exuded a healthy, generative atmosphere – as a great artist and as a lucid, pure human being."

"Well, we will indeed see how things develop and what will become of our art! In any case, artists should remain apolitical and only think of their work and dedicate all their energies to this work."

"We do not want to leave Germany forever. Something I would not be able to manage at all, since my roots sit too deep in German soil."

"Approaching it in one way, I see no essential difference between a line one calls 'abstract' and a 'fish'. But rather an essential likeness. This isolated line and the isolated fish alike are living beings with forces peculiar to them, though latent. They are forces of expression for these beings and of expression on human beings, because each has an impressive 'look' which manifests itself by its expression. But the voice of these latent forces is faint and limited. It is the environment of the line and the fish that brings about a miracle: the latent forces awaken, the expression becomes radiant.. .The environment is the composition. The composition is the organized sum of the interior functions (expressions) of every part of the work."

"But let us not speak anymore of books and theories on paper. Now then, did you see my exhibition? As you may remember, 1 gathered in 'Cahiers d'Art' ten very recent paintings, twenty-five gouaches and watercolors, also recent, and twenty-eight drawings that span the period from 1910-1934. In the majority of the compositions on canvas I used a sand technique more or less consistently.. ..but I usually don't distinguish between traditional oil painting, gouache, tempera and watercolor, and I even simultaneously use the various techniques in the same work. What is essential for me is to be able to clearly convey what I want, to recount my dream. / consider both technique and form to be mere instruments of expression, and my stories, furthermore, are not narrative or historical in character, but purely pictorial."

"An empty canvas is a living wonder - far lovelier than certain pictures."

"I have just finished one painting and am already at work on the preliminary drawings for the next one. I must do something in order to get rid of such habits or I won't manage to find time for any vacation. I have had this new painting in my mind since January, and must get it down on canvas."

"Alors sempre avanti! (Ever Forward / Always Ahead)"

"Each spiritual age expresses its special character in a form which corresponds exactly to its character. Each age in this way characterizes its true 'physiognomy', full of expression and strength. Thus in all spiritual areas 'yesterday' is transformed into 'today'. But apart from this, art possesses a further quality which it alone possesses: that quality which enables one to divine the 'tomorrow' today – a strength which is both creative and prophetic."

"Paris [1933 - 1944] with its wonderful (intense soft) light had relaxed my palette — there were other colors, other entirely new forms, and some that I had used years earlier. Naturally I did all this unconsciously."

"Up till then [c. 1895] I had known nothing but realist art, in effect only the Russians.. .And suddenly for the first time a saw a picture. The catalog told me it was a haystack of Claude Monet; I couldn't tell it from looking. Not able to tell it upset me. I also considered that the artist had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had the dull sensation that the picture's subject was missing. And was amazed and confused to realize that the picture did not merely fascinate but impressed itself indelibly on my memory and constantly floated before my eyes, quite unexpectedly, completely in every detail. I did not understand any of this.. .What was quite plain to me, however, was that the palette had a strength that I heave never before suspected, far beyond anything that I had ever dreamt.."

"Houses and trees [in and around Murnau] made hardly any impression on my thoughts. I used the palette knife to spread lines and splashes of paint on the canvas, and made them sing as loud as I could. That fateful hour in Moscow [when he saw a colorful Haystack painting of Monet for the first time in his life] rang in my ears, my eyes were filled with the strong saturated colours of the light and air of Munich, and the deep thunder of its shadows."

"[looking back] I was unable to invent forms, and the sights of such forms always disgusts me. All the forms I ever used came of their own accord, they presented themselves to me already shaped, all I had to do was coy them, or else they took shape while I worked, often surprising me.. .I have trained myself not simply to let myself go, but to put reins on the power that works within me, and to guide it."

"Kandinsky understood 'Form' as a form, like an object in the real world; and an object, he said, was a narrative—and so, of course, he disapproved of it. He wanted his 'music without words'. He wanted to be 'simple as a child.' He intended, with his 'inner-self,' to rid himself of 'philosophical barricades' (he sat down and wrote something about all this). But in turn his own writing has become a philosophical barricade, even if it is a barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle-European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something too theosophic for me."

"Total abstraction was something intellectual to me. I didn't feel it.. ..I would go to the old Guggenheim [museum] to look at Kandinsky. I liked the early abstractions [in his Murneau period] but the later ones I didn't like at all."

"Kandinsky and Klee: the two artists.. ..have been named together more and more frequently.. .Since: is it supposed to be a mere coincidence that, in quiet, remote Dessau.. ..two creative spirits equally liberated from the burden of earthly problems – connecting East and West – live under one roof, or is it a wake-up call, a sign of what is to come?!"

"Yesterday was shaped by Kandinsky's move.. .This departure is what proves something for me.. .It is a friendship that overcomes a number of negative items, because the plus side stands firm and, in particular, because there is a link to my productive youth [in Munich]."

"In your works, I sense primeval, bygone things wedded with mystical vibrations of spiritual possibilities for the future."

"Can you imagine a music in which tonality (that is, the adherence to any key) is completely suspended? I was constantly reminded of Kandinsky's large composition which also permits no trace of tonality.. ..and also of Kandinsky's 'jumping spots' in hearing this music [of Schönberg ], which allows each tone sounded to stand on its own (a kind of white canvas between the spots of color). Schönberg proceeds from the principle that the concepts of consonance and dissonance do not exist at all. A so-called dissonance is only a mere remote consonance – an idea which now occupies me constantly while painting.."

"Our sketchbooks and studies – as well as the paintings and photos, convey the detail of our Tunisian impressions [in 1904]. At times we got along well – at times not at all – we took walks in the city and also in the Belvedere park – it was never boring with my beloved, but we didn’t made contact with any other people; he never wanted it."

"..[quote of Newman, on making his work 'Onement', in 1948]..from then on I had to give up any relation to nature.. .That doesn't mean that I think my things are mathematical or removed from life. By 'nature' I mean something very specific. I think that some abstractions - for example Kandinsky's - are really nature paintings. The triangles and the spheres or circles could be bottles. They could be trees, or buildings. I think that in 'Euclydean Abyss' and 'Onement' I removed myself from nature. But I did not remove myself from life."

"Kandinsky's teaching: scientifically rigorous examination of colour and form. Example: seek the corresponding elementary colour for the three forms (triangle, square and circle). It was decided that they are yellow for the triangle, blue for the circle and red for the square; so to say, once and for all."

"I have just read your book ['On the Spiritual in Art'] from cover to cover, and I will read it once more. I find it pleasing to an extraordinary degree, because we agree on nearly all of the main issues.."

"The students' relationship to Kandinsky was very respectful [at the Bauhaus.. .What he said was always insightful and more or less documented. In the case of Paul Klee, in contrast, everything was always up in the air. You could make what you wanted of it."

"It was this apparent paradox, by which the so-called Abstract Expressionists.. ..are really far more sympathetic to wards Mondrian than towards Kandinsky. The Mondrian thing seems paradoxical only in relation to the Mondrian that people interpreted in the [nineteen-]thirties as a rather cold and static artist. Maybe it is only more recently that we have realized about the blinking that takes place at the intersection of the lines, of shuttling back and forth and so on, that Mondrian becomes in some ways a more dynamic artist than Kandinsky."

"We [Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter] came here [in Murnau, near Munich] together, on a brief visit, for the first time in 1908, in June, and we were both delighted with the town and its surroundings. In August, we then returned to Murnau for two months, with Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin.. ..Kandinsky fell in love with it [the house in Murnau where Gabriele would live till 1962] and said: 'You must buy it for our old age'. So I bought it and we then made it our home until he returned to Russia in 1914. Jawlensky and Marianne [Werefkin] used to stay with us here, and the people of Murnau called it: 'The House of the Russians'"

"I met him Kandinsky shortly after my return to Germany from the United States. A year later, in 1901, I decided to move to Munich, but still found very little encouragement as an artist. German painters refused to believe that a woman could have real talent, and I was even denied access, as a student, to the Munich Academy. It is significant that the first Munich artist who took the trouble to encourage me was Kandinsky, himself no German but a recent arrival from Russia."

"As a student of Franz von Stück he Kandinsky still continued for a while to paint quite naturalistically. He admitted to me that he had always loved color, even as a child, far more than subject matter. Form and color were his main interests. To me he often remarked that 'objects disturb me'. But he could paint portraits, too."

"He [Kandinsky] had always expressed a great interest in abstraction when we visited Tunisia together in 1904. The Moslem interdiction of representational painting seemed to stir his imagination and that was when I first heard him say that objects disturbed him. Between 1907 and 1910 [the period in which Kandinsky painted his first abstract compositions], he began to rely increasingly on his own theories of art, which many of his friends could understand only with great difficulty."

"They [Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Paul Klee ] were constantly arguing about art and each of them, at first, had his own ideas and his own style. Jawlensky was far less intellectual than Kandinsky or Klee and was often frankly puzzled by their theories."

"As far as I am concerned, I learned this technique [the use of flat areas, painted in bright color - sometimes in contrasting juxtaposition, sometimes like pieces of colored glass in heavy dark outlines] from Kandinsky and, at the same time, from the glass paintings of the Bavarian peasants of the Murneau area, who had painted for centuries in this style."

"I have now forgotten who was responsible for the original idea (the publication of the Almanac 'Der Blaue Reiter', perhaps because I have never been particularly interested in theory.. .The Neue Künstlerverein [in Münich] didn't approve of Kandinsky's ideas in 1911 and rejected his 'Composition No. 5.' as too big for their show. So Kandinsky withdrew from the association, and Franz Marc, Kubín, Le Fauconnier and I followed this lead. It was then that Kandinsky began to write the book that became 'Der Blaue Reiter'."

"Whenever Kubín came to Munich from his nearby country retreat, they [Kandinsky and Kubin] spent many hours together, and I wish I had been able to take down in shorthand some of their conversations. Their ideas about art and life were so different.. .Kandinsky was an optimist; he had been interested, at first, in fairy tales and legends and chivalrous themes of the past, but he then became increasingly interested, after 1908, in formulating what he called the art of the future rather than indulging in romantic visions of the past. Kubin, on the other hand was a pessimist, always haunted by the past and suspicious of the future. This basic difference in their temperaments made their discussions all the more fruitful, and their friendship was the more intense."

"I don't think that Kandinsky was ever really a communist. He just happened to be in Russia [Kandinsky went to Russia in 1914, because of the outbreak of the First World War, ànd his Russsian nationality] and to become involved in some revolutionary artistic activities because of his reputation as a revolutionary in the arts. In any case, he left Russia as soon as an opportunity arose. But we had parted, by that time, and I prefer not to express any opinion on Kandinsky's later ideas and beliefs, with which I was never familiar."

"Well, when we [Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter ] first met, Munich was still very much a center of plain-air painting [painting in open air], and Kandinsky himself was a plain-air painter too, to some extent. We used to go out sketching and painting together in the countryside [around Murnau], and he painted a picture of me sketching, and I also did one of him [on board in oil]. That was a long time ago in 1903. It was only some ten years later, when he painted his first 'Improvisations' that he began to work exclusively in his studio."

"..I had always been mainly a plain-air painter.. .At first I experienced great difficulty with my brushwork – I mean with that the French call 'la touche de pinceau'. So Kandinsky taught me how to achieve the effects that I wanted with a palette knife. In the view from my window in Sèvres, that I painted in 1906, when we were together in France, you can see how well he taught me. Later of course, here in Murnau, I learned to handle brushes, too, but I managed this by following Kandinsky's example, first with a palette knife, than with brushes."

"My main difficulty was that I could not paint fast enough. . .When I begin to paint, it's like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim. Well, it was Kandinsky who taught me the technique of 'swimming'. I mean that he taught me to work fast enough, and with enough self-assurance, to be able to achieve this kind of rapid and spontaneous recording of moments of life."

"In 1908.. .I worked more and more on my own. When Kandinsky became increasingly interested in abstract art, I also tried my hand, of course, at a few improvisations of the same general nature as his. But I believe I had developed a figurative style of my own, or at least one that suited my temperament."

"..we parted in 1914, when Kandinsky, being an enemy alien [because of his Russian nationality and living in Germany], had to flee from Germany to Switzerland, as did Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin too [to neutral Switzerland]. ..Ever since we parted in 1914, I have worked mainly by myself. After the First World War, here in Munich, we found that our Blue Rider group had broken up. Franz Marc and Macke had both been killed [in World War 1.] Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Marianne were no longer here [in or around Munich].."

"When conventions are old, there's quite a good reason, it's not arbitrary. So Picasso discovered that, as it were, and I'm sure that for him that was probably almost as exciting as discovering Cubism, rediscovering conventions of ordinary appearance, one-point perspective or something. The purists think you're going backwards, but I know you'd go forward. Future art that is based on appearances won't look like the art that's gone before. Even revivals of a period are not the same. The Renaissance is not the same as ancient Greece; the Gothic revival is not the same as Gothic. It might look like that at first, but you can tell it's not. The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be."

"Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about, he thought of them as working drawings. I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there. And then when you come to use line, if you know what you're looking at, it's much easier to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution to what you want to depict."

"What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw."

"I've started painting much more freely, and faster. I think it's working in the theatre that did it. You know what the Glyndebourne scene-painters said about my The Magic Flute? They said they had to wear sunglasses to paint it."

"In one gallery they actually had a notice which said "No Sketching." How obnoxious! I said, "How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?""

"Television is becoming a collage — there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different."

"If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed."

"We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way."

"In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can."

"I usually only draw myself in down periods. I do, actually. I suppose that's why I often draw myself looking grim. I just think, "Let's have a look in the mirror." When you are alone and you look in a mirror you never put on a pleasing smile. Well, you don't, do you?"

"He [Hockney's father] hardly ever left Bradford. He was a member of CND and a socialist with a rather romantic and naive idea of what Soviet Russia was like, all cornfields and ballet. He would have gone mad for email because he was always sending letters to world leaders — Eisenhower, Mao, Stalin — telling them what was what. I think he imagined the Politburo would hold up his letter and say, "Hold everything, Kenneth Hockney has written again!""

"It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them."

"Interviewer: Love is certainly at the center of tolerance. They're intertwined, in a certain way. It helps you appreciate difference. Hockney: Yes. And that's probably why I do portraits. Everybody's different; they look different, and are different. Maybe deep, deep down we're all the same. But on the surface we seem to be different, don't we?"

"With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!"

"I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Now, I admit, there are not too many people who would find that exciting. But I would. And I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is."

"I'm aware it's now a hostile city [New York City]. I feel I'm in school, actually. There are signs everywhere you don't get in any other city. When you see all the smokers outside a building in New York, I just think the building is full of bad-mannered people who haven't thought, "We'll give them a little room to smoke in." That's what a reasonable person, a person with good manners, would do."

"There's no doubt you smoke to calm yourself. I know I do. That's my decision about how I keep calm. I prefer that to Prozac. In fact I think it's healthier. I couldn't go to another New York party where they're all drinking water and on Prozac and telling you off for smoking."

"How can Blair fight a war on terror? Terror is not an ideology or an army; terror is a technique."

"Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look."

"The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway — it is called medication."

"All art is contemporary, if it's alive. And if it's not alive, what's the point of it?"

"How difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don't. There's a hierarchy. Why do I pick out that thing, that thing, that thing?"

"Any artist will tell you he's really only interested in the stuff he's doing now. He will, always. It's true, and it should be like that."

"All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at one hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I to see if I do not keep my word. Written at the age of seventy five by me, once Hokusai, today Gwakyo Rojin, the old man mad about drawing."

"Believing in development, in a new generation of those who create and those who enjoy, we call together the youth of today. And as a youth which bears the future, we aim to create space to live and work, as opposition to the well-established, older powers. Everyone who reproduces, directly and without illusion, whatever he senses the urge to create, belongs to us."

"Marcella has now become quite at home and is developing fine features. We have become quite familiar with one another.. .There exists quite a charm in such a pure female, indications that could make one crazy. More fantastic than those of the older girls. More free, without having lost the developed female. Maybe some things are more developed in her than in the more mature ones and will diminish again."

"..art is made by man. His own figure is the center of all art.. .Therefore one must begin with the man himself."

"..momentarily, we (Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, and I) are once again at Moritzburg. There is nothing more delightful than nudes in open air."

"Completely strange faces pop up as interesting points through the crowd. I am carried along with the current, lacking will. To move becomes an unacceptable effort [describing the crowds in Dresden]."

"[carving a sculpture in wood] is such a sensual pleasure when blow by blow the figure grows more and more from the trunk."

"The struggle for existence is very difficult here [Berlin! - in 1911 Kirchner and his Brücke-friends moved from Dresden to Berlin], but the possibilities are also greater. I hope that we can create a fruitful new school and convince many new friends of the value of our efforts."

"Life is unfixed when one lives in Berlin, where one has to fight for a living. It is painfully base here. I see that a fine, free culture cannot be created under these circumstances and wish to leave as soon as I have overcome this big slump."

"to study the nude, the foundation of all pictorial art, in total freedom and naturalness. From.. ..this basis there emerged the feeling, shared by all, of taking creative stimulus from life itself and submitting to the decisive experience."

"After lengthy struggles I now find myself here [Dr Kohnstamm's sanatorium in Königstein, in Taunus] for a time to put my mind into some kind of order. It is a terribly difficult thing, of course, to be among strangers so much of the day. But perhaps I'll be able to see and create something new. For the time being, I would like more peace and absolute seclusion. Of course, I long more and more for my work and my studio. Theories may be all very well for keeping a spiritual balance, but they are grey and shadowy compared with work and life."

"Every day I studied the nude, and movement in the streets and in the shops [in Berlin]. Out of the naturalistic surface with all its variations I wanted to derive the pictorially determined surface."

"The heaviest burden of all is the presence of the war and the increasing superficiality. It gives me incessantly the impression of a bloody carnival.. .I am now like the whores, I once painted [in his Berlin-time]: the merest brushstroke now, gone tomorrow. Nonetheless I am still trying to put my thoughts in order and, from all the confusion, create an image of time, which is my task, after all."

"I painted it in Berlin [self-portrait 'The Drinker'], while screaming military convoys were passing beneath my window day and night."

"It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form."

"Down there it's still Summer, I suppose, whereas our sun [in Switzerland] is already gilding the mountains and the larches are turning yellow, but the colours are wonderful, like old, dark red satin. Down here in the valley the huts stand out in the strongest Paris blue against the yellow fields. Here one really learns the values of the individual colours for the first time. And the harsh, monumental lines of the mountains."

"There was such a wonderful setting of the moon this morning, the yellow moon against little pink clouds, and the mountains a pure deep blue [viewed from his Swiss farmhouse], quite glorious, I would so have liked to paint. But it was cold, even my window was frozen, although I had kept the fire in all night."

"Bloated, one [=Kirchner himself] staggers off to work, where all work is in vain and the onslaught of mediocrity flattens everything. Like the cocottes that I painted, that is how one is now. Wiped out, next time gone."

"[The account of a man who sells his shadow is] in actual fact the life story of a persecution complex, that is to say, the paranoid narration of a man who through one event or another is suddenly made aware of his infinite smallness and at the same time finds the means by which to deceive the world in general, concerning this discovery."

"I am very happy and thankful to be 'here' [Switzerland] and to remain. Here I can at least work a little on my good days, and be at peace among these simple, kindly people. In this solitude I have fought my way through to the possibility of continuing to live, even suffering so much. My time for circuses, 'cocottes' and company is over [referring to his wild 'Brücke'-years in Berlin]. I made what I could out of it, and I do not think it had been done in that way before. Otherwise there is nothing to link me with those 'événements'. During my 7 years in Berlin I let the whole essence of that kind of thing seep into me so thoroughly that I now know it back to front, and can leave it. Now I have other tasks, and they lie here.. .I cannot go down again into the throng. I am more than ever afraid of crowds. But more still, my work here is only at the beginning of its possibilities."

"We Europeans have to toil to achieve it, at least as a transitional stage, for it is what we feed our dreams upon. These Orientals [from India] have it in their blood, perhaps because they spend their lives I the sun. We poor wretched Europeans must sacrifice body and soul for even a shadow of it.. .It is not a question of trying to reproduce objective features, only of good practice for the fingers and for the perceptive faculty, and that too is very useful. You must have read how Van Gogh was always getting his brother to send him drawings to copy. And how Rembrandt used to copy Indian an Italian pictures. Not of course, because they were short of material, but to get 'du corps'. So one should be always drawing.. .Oh, you'd love the Indians. The pure, Aryan Indians, not those one could see in Berlin, whose forms had become rigid and sterile through mingling with the Chinese."

"They [his 'Street Scene' paintings and drawings,he made in Berlin] originated in the years 1911-14, in one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars."

"There is an intellectual guardianship over the world, it is man.. .This is the last judgement, before them you stand.. .They help you when you work. You can thank them only through work. When you want to die, they sometimes appear to you. When you are completely empty and completely open, you belong to them. [after his mental recovery]"

"The people who live here [in and around Davos] are proud. The hard work, which is done with great love, the way they treat animals (you very seldom see an animal being mishandled) entitle them to be proud. In most cases, work here has reached the ideal standard of being done with love. You can see it in the movements of their hands. And that, in turn, ennobles the facial expression and imbues all personal contacts with a great delicacy."

"Many thanks for your letter and the Gauguin woodcuts.. .One can see, incidentally, that Gauguin had Persian miniatures, Indian batik and Chinese art in his very blood. The shapes of the birds and the horse show that clearly. But although it looks very well, Gauguin can't stimulate us present-day artists much. We need a direct route from life to plastic form. And we get it by perpetually drawing everything we see."

"You too, find release only in art, you are one of those privileged people who have that gift, and you will be free and at peace so long as you make use of it. Art gives us an inner superiority, for it has scope for every sensation of which human beings are capable, and first and foremost for love, which is the basis for knowledge. The artist loves without wanting to possess, and no one on earth can understand that except other artists, that is why other people think us mad."

"All art needs this visible world and will always need it. Quite simply because, being accessible to all, it is the key to all other worlds. ** Quote from Zeichnungen von E. L. Kirchner, (under his pseudonym ) E. L. Kirchner, Genius 2, Book 2, 1921, 216-234, reprinted by National Gallery, Washington D.C. 2003, p. 226"

"The technical procedures doubtless release energies in the artist that remain unused in the much more lightweight processes of drawing or painting [referring to his printmaking]."

"Nowhere does one come to know an artist better than in his prints [and] the woodcut is the most graphic of the print processes."

"Only the artist who has a love and an aptitude for craftsmanship should make prints; only when the artist truly prints himself does the work earn the name original print."

"The woodcut is the most graphic of the printmaking techniques. Its practice demands much technical ability and interest. Kirchner's technical skill made woodcutting easy for him. Thus he came in a spontaneous way through the simplification necessary here to a clear style of representation. We see in his woodcuts, which constantly accompanied his creative work, the formal language of the paintings prefigured."

"After the war [1918] etching became Kirchner's favorite medium. He attributed this to its responsiveness. 'Etchings', he wrote, 'develop in the first states the most immediate hieroglyphs. Rich in lively handwriting and rich in variety of motifs, the etchings are like a diary of the painter.'"

"A primitive power of artistic sensuousness speaks from the prints, which itself develops directly from the graphic technique that is tied to painstaking effort. Like the 'savage' who with patience cuts the figure.. ..out of the hard wood, so the artist creates perhaps his purest and strongest pieces.. ..following the primordial curse, if one may so understand it: from the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread."

"The bleak and yet so intimate nature of the mountains has had an enormous impact on the painter. It has deepened his love for his subjects and at the same time purged his vision of everything that is secondary. Nothing inessential appears in the paintings, but how delicately every detail is worked out! The creative thought emerges strongly and nakedly from the finished work. Kirchner is now so taken up with entirely new problems that one cannot apply the old criteria to him if one is to do justice to his work. Those who wish to classify him on the strength of his German paintings will be both disappointed and surprised. Far from destroying him, his serious illness has matured him. Besides his work on visible life, creativity stemming solely from the imagination has opened up its vast potential to him – for this the brief span of his life will probably be far from sufficient."

"..the only certainty is that he [written by Kirchner himself] creates from the forms of the visible world, however close or far from them he desires to or must come."

"Our new little house [Kirchner moved to the Wildboden house] is a real joy to us. We shall live here comfortably and in great new order. This will really come to be a turning point of my life. Everything must be put in clear order and the little house furnished as simply and modestly as possible, while still being beautiful and intimate."

"..and the first thing for he artists [of Die Brücke ] was free drawing from the free human figure in the freedom of nature.. .We drew and we painted. Hundreds of paintings a day, with talk and fooling in between, the artists joining the models before the easel and vice versa. All the encounters of everyday life were incorporated in our memories in this way. The studio became the home of the people who were being drawn; they learned from the artists and the painters from them. The picture [ made] took on immediate and abundant life."

"A happy coincidence brought together [in Die Brücke ]the really talented men whose characters and gifts, even in human terms, left them with no other choice than the profession of artist. This form of living, of dwelling and working, though peculiar for a regular human being, was not a deliberate 'epater le bourgeois', but simply a very naive and pure necessity to harmonize art and life. And it was precisely this more than anything else that so tremendously influenced the forms of present-day art. Of course, it was mostly misunderstood and totally distorted, for there [the will] fashioned the form and gave it meaning, whereas here the unfamiliar form is affixed to habit, like a top hat on a cow."

"I see the possibilities of a new kind of painting. With free surfaces, the goal I was always steering towards."

"I see possibilities for a whole new way of painting, in which planes are used more freely. Weaving and embroidery make this possible."

"I find it increasingly necessary to express my ideas first in engraving or lithography so that they may develop before I start to paint. Every year my form and expression become more sensitive, and my ideas frequently have to pass through three graphic stages before I can start on the canvas.. .I can hear you say no, that is impossible because the value of the colors demands quite different treatment from black and white, but it is the inner idea that I try to establish firmly through graphic preparation."

"..the feeling that pervades a city presented itself in the qualities of lines of force."

"The beautiful, architectonically constructed, severely formed bodies of these women [his girlfriend in Berlin and life companion, Erna with her sister Gerda] replaced the soft Saxon physique."

"I begin with movement.. .I believe that all human visual experiences are born from movement.."

"Is such a street scene as the blue prostitutes not a picture of fantasy? Of course, only the accusation is really present. But how nice, how powerful, and how removed from nature is the design. The danger of being caught up in the representational did not exist for Kirchner [he is writing about himself, in the third person]. Instead he thought too painterly for that. The graphics and paintings of the 'Streetscenes' show best where purely painterly, one could say non-representational, feelings converged."

"Now I'm sitting quietly at home again and I'm happy to be able to work undisturbed. I made a lot of sketches of life in Germany and it was very intriguing to see life there [in Berlin, a stay for three weeks]. I was also glad to see the old pictures of Rembrandt, Dürer, etc. again and to have the confirmation and encouragement they gave me. As for the moderns, I saw damned little that gripped me.. .Modern German painting has moved so far away from me and become unintelligible in areas in which my work had, and still has, an influence; but people like Klee, Kandinsky, etc. have moved much closer to me again, in fact I value the Bauhaus more and more. These people are working and developing. You can see that there is development. And they love their work, which is the main thing."

"It would be nice if you wouldn't call me an expressionist. I'm really not one."

"Here we have been hearing terrible rumours about torture of the Jews [by the Nazis] , but it's all surely untrue. I'm a little tired and sad about the situation up there. There is a war in the air. In the museums, the hard-won cultural achievements of the last 20 years are being destroyed, and yet the reason why founded the Brücke was to encourage truly German art, made in Germany. And now it is supposed to be un-German [Degenerated Art / Entartete Kunst]. Dear God. It does upset me."

"The new school [in the Swiss village Frauenkirch where Kirchner lived since c. 1919] was inaugurated yesterday. It was a celebration with songs, dancing and speeches, followed by drinking such as I have not seen or experienced in decades. Everyone sat in the 'Post', the village council, the president of the council, the farmers, every one of one accord and friendly. They made a point of including me and so there I was, sitting once again amongst these people who had received me with such kindness and friendliness on the Alp twenty years ago. The relief [in the school, made by Kirchner] has found favour and was mentioned often in the speeches."

"..how the movement of the passers-by [in his Street scene painting of 191-14] is comprehended in the rhombus of the heads which is twice repeated. In this way life and movement arise from an original geometric form. [Kirchner designed a diagram together with this line in the letter]"

"Did you know that in 1900 I had the bold idea of renewing German art?.. .First of all I needed to invent a technique of grasping everything while it was in motion, and it was Rembrandts drawings in the Kupferstichkabinett in Munich that showed me how. I practiced seizing things quickly in bold strokes, wherever I was, walking and standing still.. ..and in this way I learned how to depict movement itself, and I found new forms in the ecstasy and haste of this work.. ..and to these forms was added pure colour, as pure as the sun generates it.. ..in line with Goethe's theory [of colours]. It makes pictures much more colorful. Making wood-cuts, which I'd learnt as a fifteen-year-old from my father, helped me to stabler and simpler forms. And armed in this way I returned to Dresden."

"[that all differences among the former Brücke members should be put in the past and that] ..every individual conflict must be silenced and that everyone join together in the name of the whole, that is for our modern German art."

"I was born near a station. The first things that I saw in my life were the moving locomotives and trains, and I drew them as a three-year-old. Perhaps it is because of this that observations of movement are my impetus for my inspiration to create. Out of this I receive a creative experience of life, which is the source of creativity."

"[the way of life of Die Brücke artists] though strange to the ordinary man, was not meant to shock, it was a pure and simple compulsion to integrate art and life.."

"[that] simple people brought their bodies and shared their scanty bread with the artists. Kirchner learned the course of life again in their houses."

"The desire that drives an artist to graphic work is perhaps partly the effort to capture the unique and indefinite nature of a drawing in a fixed and durable form. Another aspect of it is that the technical manipulations exercise energies in the artist that he does not use in the far less strenuous crafts of drawing and painting.. .the mysterious attraction that surrounded the invention of printing in the Middle Ages is still felt by anyone who takes up graphics seriously and performs every stage in the process wit hits own hands."

"I already realized [that time] that only a new study of nature and a new attitude towards life would bring the much-needed renewal of German art."

"..he [is Kirchner, writing about himself] was especially interested in the naturally naked human being. He knowingly broke the traditional manner of the nude study and created for himself in his studio [in his Brücke-years in Berlin] a circle of young women, whom he studied in their free movement. Thousands of drawings and hundreds of paintings and studies resulted from this. A beautiful, healthy, blossoming sensuality that never turns base emanates from these works."

"I found it very difficult to suddenly depart [from Berlin] since this year I had risen completely in the landscape and life and hardly needed awareness to access this place."

"He [Kirchner] dwelled here in a living situation that a bourgeois would deem uncharacteristic, materially simple, but sophisticated in his artistic sensibility. He worked feverishly, without concerning himself with the time of day."

"Kirchner lived in an Atelier that he had assembled out of an attic apartment. Every piece of furniture, every carpet was created by him. When one entered his room, one felt as if they were on another star or a faraway century."

"[Kirchner's studio was] that of a real bohemian, full of paintings lying all over the place, drawings, books and artist's materials — much more like an artist's romantic lodgings than the home of a well-organised architecture student."

"We [Kirchner and Bleyl] established [c. 1902-03, in Dresden] a friendly relationship at once, and, striving for the same goals, we quickly developed a close friendship. We were constantly together, either at the Hochschule [Architecture], in our lodgings, or taking walks in the evenings, in the Grosser Garten in Dresden. We were never without pencil and paper."

"A colourfully painted curtain concealed a large collection of paintings [in Kirchner's studio in Berlin]. When we began to look at them, he came alive. Together with me, he saw all his experiences drift by on canvas, the small, timid-looking woman set aside what we had seen and brought a bottle of wine. He made short explanatory remarks in a weary voice. Each picture had its own particular colourful character, a great sadness was present in all of them; what I had previously found to be incomprehensible and unfinished now created the same delicate and sensitive impression as his personality. Everywhere a search for style, for psychological understanding of his figures. The most moving was a self-portrait in uniform with his right hand cut off. Then he showed me his travel permit for Switzerland. He wanted to go back to Davos.. ..and implored me to ask father for a medical certificate.."

"Eberhard Grisebach, in a letter March 1917 to Helen Spengler; as quoted by E. W. Kornfield, Stauffer, Christine E. Stauffer (1992). Biography Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kirchner Museum Davos. Retrieved March 21, 2016; from Wikipedia: Kirchner"

"'a true victim of the war; the hellish delusion of being sent back into battle had deranged him and flung him helplessly onto the shabby bed of a third-class hotel.. .In Davos I found an emaciated man with a piercing, feverish gaze, who saw imminent death before his eyes."

"A tragedy had been quietly enacted here over the last few months. Because of the defamation in Germany [in 1937 a total of 639 works by Kirchner were confiscated by the Nazi-regime: Degenerate Art] and the failure of the November exhibition in Basle.. ..he [=Kirchner] chose a radiantly beautiful day, 15 June, to put an end to his life. I shall spare you the details. He had been suffering grievously until he was able to make this decision."

"..one day [c. 1905-07], Kirchner brought with him a volume from some bookstore with pictures of Meier-Graefe about the modern French artists. We were enthralled."

"In the days that I spent in Dresden [before 1911].. ..I was together with Kirchner and Heckel a great deal.. .Here they led a singular bohemian life, liberated from any ordering of day-times and mealtimes; when they had the impulse they worked the whole night through and slept through the morning. I was convinced that they not infrequently lived on coffee, cake, and cigarettes.. .When the lamps were lit, we sat on benches and crouched over the batik-ed fabrics that were spread around the low table and looked at the portfolios with hand drawings and printed sheets; all the time strange, grotesque sculptures peered over our shoulders. The two showed me how they etched their lithographs, printed their etchings, and Kirchner drew two.. ..portraits of me with the dry-point needle."

"In spring 1915, the recruit, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, was furloughed from his field artillery unit because he did not prove adequate to the demand of service. The diagnosis said: "because of affected lungs and feebleness." But the true cause was a profound physical and spiritual crisis, which brought him to a sanatorium in Königstein, Taunus. Artistic efforts at overcoming the trauma are revealed in works such as the 1915 'Self-Portrait as a Soldier'. The artist presents himself in the masquerade of a uniform: his face is a mask of isolation: a bleeding arm stump looms out of the right sleeve; the painter's active hand seems chopped off."

"Kirchner superimposes [in his series Street Scene painting from Berlin], () a jaded artificiality over its excitement and glamour, situating the garish yet exotic streetwalker in an atmosphere suggesting loneliness and alienation, as well as agitation and danger. Paint is applied in spontaneous, splintered brushstrokes that create jagged forms and express an immediacy and energy that approximate the stimulating yet hectic urban environment."

"More than any of the other artists, Kirchner translated the staccato rhythm of the music into visual means; the legs of dancers become solid entities and almost dashes in his 1910 Hamburger Tänzerinnen (Hamburg Dancers) (Fig. 34). All weight of this image is on the legs, as they are the largest parts of the scene and are rendered fully in black. Moreover, the repeating subject of the three dancers each doing identical leg lifts creates a vibrating back-and-forth. In this quick sketch, Kirchner manages to relay the unified spirit of this performance."

".. [I] reprobate the mechanically systematic approach of drawing.. ..so generally diffused. I think it can produce nothing but manner and sameness."

"Well, Gaffer [his early friend Mr. Wells, artist] I see there will be no peace till I comply; so give me a piece of paper. There, now, rule the size for me, and tell me what I am to do. [Mr. Wells told him: 'Well divide your subject into classes, say: Pastoral, Marine, Elegant Pastoral, and so forth..']"

"To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art."

"Hawkey - Hawkey [Mr. Fawkes of Farnley Hall, North Yorkshire, close friend of Turner] - come here - come here! Look at this thunderstorm! Isn't it grand? - Isn't it wonderful? - Isn't it sublime?. .There, Hawkey; in two years you will see this again, and call it 'Hannibal Crossing the Alps'."

"In our variable climate where [all] the seasons are recognizable in one day, where all the vapoury turbulence involves the face of things, where nature seems to sport in all: her dignity and dispensing incidents for the artist’s study.. ..how happily is the landscape painter situated, how roused by every change in nature in every moment, that allows no languor even in her effects which she places before him, and demands most peremptorily every moment his admiration and investigation, to store his mind with every change of time and place."

"My dear Sir, [Mr. Trimmer] - I lament that all hope of the pleasure of seeing you, or getting to Heston, must for the present probably vanish. My father told me.. ..that you and Mrs. Trimmer would leave Heston for Suffolk as tomorrow, Wednesday.. ..In looking forward to a Continental excursion, and poor Daddy seems as much plagued with weeds as I am with disappointment - that if Miss ... would but waive bashfulness, or, in other words, make an offer instead of expecting one, the same might change occupiers; but not to trouble you further, allow me, with most sincere respect to Mrs. Trimmer and family, to consider myself - Yours most truly obliged, 'J. M. W. Turner.'"

"Dear Jones, - Two months nearly in getting to this Terra Pictura, and at work; but the length of time is my own fault. [because] I must see the South of France, which almost knocked me up, the heat was so intense, particularly at Nismes and Avignon; and until I got a plunge into the sea at Marseilles, I felt so weak that nothing but the change of scene kept me onwards to my distant point. Genoa, and all the sea-coast from Nice to Spezzia, is remarkably rugged and fine; so is Massa.. .Hope that you have been better than usual, and that the pictures go on well."

"My dear Chantrey, - I intended long before this (but you will say, Fudge) to have written: but even now very little information have I to give you in matters of Art, for I have confined myself to the painting department at Corso; and having finished one, am about the second, and getting on with Lord E.'s, which I began the very first touch at Rome; but as the folk here talked that I would show them not, I finished a small three feet four [painting] to stop their gabbling.."

"Dear Jones.. [I] give you some account of.. ..the last sad ceremonies paid yesterday to departed talent gone to that bourne from whence no traveller returns. Alas, only two short months Sir Thomas followed the coffin of Dawe to the same place. We then were his pall-bearers. Who will do the like for me, or when, God only knows how soon; my poor father's death [Sept. 1829] proved a heavy blow upon me, and has been followed by others of the same dark kind."

"Chantrey [good friend of Turner] is as gay and as good as ever, ready to serve: he requests, for my benefit, that you bottle up all the yellows which may be found straying out of the right way; but what you may have told him about the old masters which you did not tell me, I can't tell, but we expected to hear a great deal from each other, but the stormy brush of Tintoretto was only to make the 'Notte' more visible."

"I have appointed you [ his friend, the sculptor Francis Chantry ] one of my executors. Will you promise to see me rolled up in it [in Turner's painting 'Carthage'? ('Yes', responded his friend 'and I promise you also that, as soon as you are buried, I will see you taken up and unrolled.'"

"Painting can never show her nose in company with architecture without being snubbed."

"He John Ruskin knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do; he puts things into my head, and points out meanings in them that I never intended."

"If I could find anything blacker than black, I'd use it."

"Dear Sir, - I have truly, I must say, written three times, and now hesitate; for did I know your son's works, or, as you say, his gifted merits yet even then I would rather advise you to think well, and not be carried away by the admiration which any friendly hopes (which ardent friends to early talent) may assume: they know not the difficulties or the necessities of the culture of the Fine Arts generally speaking. In regard to yourself, it is you alone can judge how far you are inclined to support him during perhaps a long period of expense; and particularly if you look towards tuition, the more so; for it cannot insure success (however much it may facilitate practice), and therefore it behooves you to weigh well the means in your power before you embark in a profession which requires more care, assiduity, and perseverance than any person can guarantee."

"No, Mr. Williams, certainly not; if Mr. Drake [a solicitor of the English Railway Company] has purchased a 'Turner', he ought to know it is a Turner; I was once silly enough to look at a picture that I was told had been painted by me, and I found myself soon after stuck up in a witness-box, giving evidence about it; I then said I'll never be so silly again."

"Dear Hawkesworth, Mother Goose came to a rehearsal before Christmas day, having arrived on Saturday for the knife.. .Many thanks for the brace of pheasants and hares—by the same train—indeed, I think it fortunate, for with all the strife and strike of pokers and stokers for the railroads - their commons every day growing worse - in shareholders and directors squabbling about the winding up the last Bill, to come to some end for those lines known or supposed to be in difficulty.. .I am sorry to say my health is much on the wain. I cannot bear the same fatigue, or have the same bearing against it, I formerly had - but time and tide stop not - but I must stop writing for today.."

"..indistinctness is my forte."

"It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye."

"My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there."

"Then you will do away with the only social meetings [at the Art Academy in London ] we have, the only occasion on which we all come together in an easy, unrestrained manner. When we have no varnishing days, we shall not know one another."

"I never in my whole life could make a drawing like that; I would at any time have given one of my little fingers to have made such a one [one of Girtin's yellow drawings]."

"[Turner has] no systematic process for making Drawings – He avoids any particular mode that He may not fall into manner. By washing and occasionally rubbing out, he at last expresses in some degree the idea in his mind."

"Highly to the credit of this artist [Turner], he is indebted principally to his own exertions for the abilities which he possesses as a painter, and for the respectable situation he holds in society. He may be considered a striking instance of how much may be gained by industry (if accompanied by temperance), even without the assistance of a master. The way he acquired his professional powers was by borrowing, where he could, a drawing or picture to copy from, or by making a sketch of any one in the Exhibition early in the morning, and finishing it at home. By such practices, and by a patient perseverance, he has overcome all the difficulties of the art; so that the fine taste and colour which his drawings possess are scarcely to be found in any other, and are accompanied with a broad, firm chiaroscuro and a light and elegant touch."

"'One stormy day at Farnley, Turner called to me loudly from the doorway: 'Hawkey - Hawkey! [his friend Mr. Fawkes, of Farnley Hall ] - come here - come here! Look at this thunderstorm! Isn't it grand? - Isn't it wonderful? - Isn't it sublime?' All this time he was making notes of its form and colour on the back of a letter. I proposed some better drawing-block, but he said it did very well. He was absorbed - he was entranced. There was a storm rolling and sweeping and shafting out its lightning over the Yorkshire hills. Presently the storm passed, and he finished. 'There', said he, 'Hawkey; in two years you will see this again, and call it 'Hannibal Crossing the Alps'."

"It [the painting Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps ] is so ambiguous as to be scarcely intelligible in some parts (and those the principal), yet as a whole, it is novel and affecting."

"..he [Turner] sat at the table [in Farnley ], tearing up the sea with his eagle-claw of a thumb-nail, and working like a madman; yet the detail is full and delicate, betraying no sign of hurry."

"Turner - never sketched much in oil [like a. o. Constable did]; he always got the colour too brown [if he did].."

"His glance commanded in an instant all that was novel in [a] scenery, and a few outlines on paper recorded it unintelligibly to others. He placed these pictorial memoranda upon mill-board, not larger than a sheet of letter-paper, quite a confused mass. How he worked out the details from such sketches seemed to me wonderful. His views around Plymouth, in the engravings from his pictures, were marvelously varied in effect, as well as faithful representations. His first sketches showed little of the after-picture to the unpracticed eye; perhaps he bore much away in memory, and these were only a kind of shorthand, which he deciphered in his studio."

"We once ran along the coast to Borough, or Bur Island, in Bibury Bay. . ..The sea was boisterous, the morning unpropitious. Our boat was Dutch built, with outriggers and un-decked.. ..when running out from the land the sea rose higher, until off Stokes Point it became stormy. We mounted the ridges bravely. The sea in that part of the Channel rolls in grand furrows from the Atlantic.. ..All this time Turner was silent, watching the tumultuous scene.. .. The little island [Bur Island], and the solitary hut it held, the bay in the bight of which it lay, and the dark long Bolt head to seaward, against the rocky shore of which the waves broke with fury, made the artist become absorbed in contemplation, not uttering a syllable.. ..While [later] the shell-fish were preparing, Turner, with a pencil, clambered nearly to the summit of the island, and seemed writing rather than drawing. How he succeeded, owing to the violence of the wind, I do not know. He probably observed something in the sea aspect which he had not before noted."

"'The woods are fine, and the views of some of the headlands round which the river winds are of exquisite beauty. In one place he was much struck, took a sketch, and when it was done said, 'We shall see nothing finer than this if we stay till Sunday; because we can't'. It was the last visit he paid to the scenery of the Tamar before he quitted the West. It was to the honour of several of the inhabitants of Plymouth that boats, horses, and tables were ready for his use during the time he remained. Everybody felt that in paying him attention they were honouring a most extraordinary genius.."

"I remember one evening on the [[w:River Tamar|Tamar [river in South-west England];]] the sun had set, and the shadows become very deep. Demaria, looking at a seventy-four [ship] lying under Saltash in Cornwall, said, 'You were right, Mr. Turner; the ports cannot be seen. The ship is one dark mass'. 'I told you so', said Turner: 'now you see it all is one mass of shade'. 'Yes, I see that is the truth, and yet the ports are there'. [Turner:] 'We can take only what we see, no matter what is there. There are people in the ship: we don't see them through the planks'. 'True', replied Demaria. There had been a discussion on the subject before between the two professional men, in which Turner had rightly observed that after sunset, under the hills, the port-holes were undiscernible. We now had ocular proof of it."

"Turner was struck with admiration at the bridge above the Wear, [near Endsleigh Cottage which he declared altogether Italian.. .. Before six in the [next] morning he rose, and went down towards the bridge. The air was balmy; the strong light between the hills, the dark umbrage, and the flashing water presented a beautiful early scene. Turner sketched the bridge, but appeared, from changing his position several times, as if he had tried more than one sketch, or could not please himself as to the best point. I saw that bridge and part of the scene afterwards in a painting in his gallery. He had made several additions to the scenery near the bridge from his own imagination. The picture was poetical; and, if I remember rightly, he had introduced into it some of the fictitious characters of the heathen mythology; he had bathed it in the gorgeous glories of the southern sun, clothed it in barbaric pearl and gold.."

"We were sailing together in a boat on the St. Germains river, near Ince Castle.. ..Turner, Collier, and myself were the only persons present, except the boatmen. I was remarking what a number of artists the West of England had produced, particularly Devon and Cornwall. I enumerated all I could remember from Reynolds to Prout. When I had done, Turner said, 'You may add me to the list; I am a Devonshire man'. I demanded from what part of the county, and he replied, 'Barnstaple'. I have many times since repeated the incident to others, who would insist that the artist was a Londoner [officially born in [[w:Maiden Lane, Covent Garden|Maiden Lane, in London]."

"Turner visited Plymouth (my native town) while I was staying there in the summer of 1813, or perhaps 1814 (1812 ?), painting portraits. As he wished to see the scenery of the river [[w:River Tamar|Tamar - [river in South-west England],]] I accompanied him, together with Mr. Ambrose Johns from Plymouth.. ..to a cottage near Calstock, the residence of my aunt, Miss Pearce, where we all stayed for a few days. From that point as a centre Turner made various excursions, and the result of one of his rambles was a sketch of the scene which afterwards grew into the celebrated picture of the painting 'Crossing the Brook'. The bridge in that picture is Calstock Bridge; some mining works are indicated in the middle distance. The extreme distance extends to the mouth of the Tamar, the harbour of Hamoaze, the hills of Mount Edgcumbe, and those on the opposite side of Plymouth Sound. The whole scene is extremely faithful."

"The large early [watercolor]-drawings of Turner were sponged without friction, or were finished piece by piece on white paper; as he advanced he laid the chief masses first in broad tints, never effacing anything, but working the details over these broad tints. While still wet, he brought out the soft lights with the point of a brush, the brighter ones with the end of a stick; often, too, driving the wet colour in a darker line to the edge of the light, in order to represent the outlines of hills. His touches were all clear, firm, unalterable, one over the other: friction he used only now and then, to represent the grit of stone or the fretted pile of moss; the finer lights he often left from the first, even the minutest light, working round and up to them, not taking them out as weaker men would have done."

"I was curious in observing what he made of the objects he selected for his sketches, and was frequently surprised to find what a forcible idea he conveyed of a place with scarcely a single correct detail. His exaggerations, when it suited his purpose to exaggerate, were wonderful - lifting up, for instance, by two or three stories, the steeple or rather stunted cone of a village church - and when I returned to London, I never failed to roast him on this habit. He took my remarks in good part, sometimes indeed in great glee, never attempting to defend himself otherwise than by rolling back the war into the enemy's camp.."

"Turner was always, from his youth, fond of stones.. .But that gorge [which Turner passed during his trip in the diligence - South-Switzerland, North of Milan].. ..delighted him exceedingly.. ..[and] was still not well out of his head when the diligence stopped at the bottom of the hill, just at that turn of the road on the right of the bridge, which favourable opportunity Turner seized to make what he called a 'memorandum' of the place, composed of a few pencil scratches on a bit of thin paper, that would roll up with others of the sort and go into his pocket afterwards. These pencil scratches he put a few blots of colour upon (I suppose at Bellinzona the same evening, certainly not upon the spot), and showed me this blotted sketch when he came home [England]. I [Ruskin] asked him to make me a drawing of it, which he did.. .The trees Turner cuts away, and gives the rock a height of about a thousand feet, so as to imply more power and danger in the avalanche coining down the couloir. Next, he raises, in a still greater degree, all the mountains beyond, putting three or four ranges instead of one, but uniting them into a single mossy bank at their base.."

"wherever he [Turner] could get a few minutes, he had his little sketch book out, many being remarkable, but he seemed to tire at last and got careless.. .I don't remember colouring coming out till we got into Switzerland. [When it did, Turner used a sponge to create 'misty and aerial effects']."

"Mr. Turner only displayed in the closest intimacy the shrewdness of his observation and the playfulness of his wit. Everywhere he kept back much of what was in him, and while the keenest intelligence, mingled with a strong tinge of satire, animated his brisk countenance, it seemed to amuse him to be but half understood. His nearest social ties were those formed in the Royal Academy, of which he was by far the oldest member, and to whose interest he was most warmly attached."

"The zealous care with which Turner endeavoured to do his duty, is proved by a large existing series of drawings, exquisitely tinted, and often completely coloured, all by his own hand, of the most difficult perspective subjects—illustrating not only directions of line, but effects of light - with a care and completion which would put the work of any ordinary teacher to utter shame. In teaching generally — he would neither waste time nor spare it - he would look over a student's drawing at the Academy, point to a defective part, make a scratch on the paper at the side, say nothing. If the student saw what was wanted, and did it, Turner was delighted; but if the student could not follow. Turner left him."

"Turner's late peculiarities in painting arose from the neglect of his earlier works by the public; if he had been encouraged at the time he painted the 'Carthage', the 'Tenth Plague' and the 'Garden of the Hesperides' he would not have become eccentric in his art; his preference for the style of picture last named is proved by his leaving the pictures of the 'Rise of Carthage' and the 'Dutch Coast' to the National Gallery, on the condition of their being hung between the 'Seaport' and the 'Mill' by Claude Lorraine [strongly admired by Turner]. His latter style, though possibly extravagant, was only an excess in representing the developments of nature; he exaggerated all he saw, but the foundation was truth; the vivid and warm colouring of nature he painted with the deepest reds and yellows, the greys he attempted to imitate with blues of too strong a tint, yet the whole was true in principle, in general and particular."

"During twenty-five years, he [Turner] indulged the pleasing hope that he should leave a testimony of his good will and compassion for unfortunate artists. To his intimate friends he constantly talked of the best mode of leaving property for the use of the unsuccessful; he wished his survivors to employ his property in building houses for the above-named purpose; he did not like to call them almshouses, but had selected the denomination of 'Turner's Gift'."

"On one occasion [1840's] I had the audacity to ask him [Turner] if he painted his clouds from nature.. .The words had hardly passed my lips when I saw my gaucherie. I was afraid I had roused a thunderstorm; however, my lucky star predominated.. ..after having eyed me for a few moments with a slight frown, he growled out 'How would you have me paint them?' Then seizing upon his fishing-rod, and turning upon his heel, he marched indignantly out of the house to the water's-edge."

"At the beginning of the century Turner had a place at Hammersmith Mall [West-London, from c. 1802], The garden, which ran down to the river, terminated in a summer-house; and here, out in the open air, were painted some of his best pictures. It was here that my father [James Trimmer], who then resided at Kew, became first acquainted with him; and expressing his surprise that Turner could paint under such circumstances, he [Turner] remarked that lights and room were absurdities, and that a picture could be painted anywhere."

"The old man [Turner's father] latterly was his son's willing slave, and had to strain his pictures, and varnish them when finished; which made Turner say that his father began and finished his pictures for him. But I doubt if he varnished many pictures; few of them, I believe, were varnished at all; still he was of great assistance to his son, and I think it was Mr. Turner the engraver who told me that, once making bold to enter Turner's studio, he found the old man on his knees colouring a canvas, when Turner made his appearance, and good-humouredly trundled out the visitor [Turner, the engraver], telling him he was on forbidden ground. Turner was much attached to his father, and at his death stayed with us a few days at Heston for change of scene. He was fearfully out of spirits, and felt his loss, he said, like that of an only child.. .Turner never appeared the same man after his father's death [in 1829]; his family was broken up.."

"About this time [c. 1812] Turner removed to Twickenham, where he purchased Sandycomb Lodge, near [[w:Richmond Bridge, London|Richmond Bridge [London].]] It was an unpretending little place, and the rooms were small. There were several models of ships in glass cases, to which Turner had painted a sea and background. They much resembled the large vessels in his sea pieces. Richmond scenery greatly influenced his style. The Scotch firs (or stone-pine) around are in most of his large classical subjects, and Richmond landscape is decidedly the basis of 'The Rise of Carthage'. Here he had a long strip of land, planted by him so thickly with willows that his father, who delighted in the garden, complained that it was a mere osier-bed. Turner used to refresh his eye with the run of the boughs from his sitting-room window."

"He had a boat at Richmond.. ..I have seen him start on his sketching expeditions. From his boat he painted on a large canvas direct from Nature. Till you have seen these sketches, you know nothing of Turner's powers. There are about two score of these large subjects, rolled up, and now national property. In my judgment these are among his very finest productions: no retouching, everything firmly in its place.. ..Turner's mind was so comprehensive that he could not carry out the detail, though he was far from despising it; and I was told by [[w:Henry Howard (artist)|[Henry] Howard]] he would spend hours sketching a stone. There is a red sunset (simply the sky) among the rolls; the finest sky, to my mind, ever put on canvas."

"Besides his boat, he had a gig and an old horse; an old crop-eared bay horse, or rather a cross between a horse and a pony. In this gig he used to drive out sketching, and take my father [James Trimmer] and myself with him. His sketching apparatus was under the seat. I remember once going on an expedition of this kind to Staines, and thence to Runnymede, where he made some sketches. From there he painted a picture which strongly resembles the place to this day. We went, I remember, at a very steady pace, for Turner painted much faster than he drove. He said, 'if when out sketching you felt at a loss, you had only to turn round or walk a few paces farther, and you had what you wanted before you.' He has immortalized his old crop-ear in his [painting] 'Frosty Morning'."

"Henry Howard, R.A., was an early friend of my father's; and he and Turner have stayed with us at Heston. I remember, when I was about five years old, going to Penn, in Buckinghamshire, with Howard, Turner, and my father [c. 1812]; all of them in search of the picturesque. We went in a post-chaise, and, when tired, my father carried me pick-a-back. We came to a halt in a grove or copse where luxuriated wild flowers in profusion. It was a charming day; and, though so many 'years bygone' I can see now vividly before me my father and Howard, both standing legs a-straddle, and Turner at a little distance in a ditch, all hard at work at the easthetical. After a while Turner emerged from his retreat with a capital water-colour, with which Howard and my father were in raptures. He said he got into the ditch to avoid the sun, but Howard whispered my father that it was to avoid showing his modus operandi. I have heard this from my father subsequently.."

"Howard.. ..often got into warm professional disputes with him [Turner]. But Turner was mostly in the right. They once, I remember, had a very hot dispute, and for the time being lost temper. Howard maintained they should paint for the public; Turner, that public opinion was not worth a rush, and that one should paint only for judges.. ..The vulgar, on the whole, would understand form better than colour, and low subjects better than cultivated ones; so that Turner argued wisely, with reference to himself, in painting for the cultivated few."

"Turner was very communicative to my father [in instruction], and would point out to him any defect in sketching. I think he fairly instructed my father in painting in his own method; which was to lay the dead colours as nearly as possible in the forms you wished, leaving as little as possible for finishing, using as a vehicle nothing but linseed oil, diluted as required in spirits of turpentine."

"I have heard him speak most enthusiastically in praise of Gainsborough's execution and Wilson's tone, and he plainly thought himself their inferior. My father had some admirable oil sketches of Gainsborough; and these Turner one evening examined by candle-light so closely that the next morning he complained of having hurt his eyes."

"Turner and Thomson of Duddingston, whom he met at Edinburgh, belonged to the same set of artists and painters, and used to go out sketching and painting together. At the meetings of the clique Turner would constantly battle with them upon the subject of light, trying to gain from Brewster and other 'savans' information thereon; and it is supposed that the discussions contributed to form a theory which enabled him to create the varied effects he has displayed in his works. To such a height, indeed, did he carry the verbal contests that the subject, it is said, finally was prohibited; and he then became more earnest to discover what combination of colour would produce light."

"Many years ago, when he was making sketches for the 'Provincial Antiquities' [Scottish!] in the company of Cadell, the Edinburgh bookseller, as they passed Norham, Turner took off his hat and made a low bow to the ruins. Observing this strange act of homage, Cadell exclaimed, 'What the Devil are you about now?' 'Oh,' was Turner's reply, 'I made a drawing or painting of Norham several years since.. ..and from that day to this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute."

"..Turner did not believe that colour was reducible to system; and Gainsborough, when painting his 'Blue Boy' seems to have been of the same opinion."

"I knew him, when a boy, and have often paid him a guinea for putting backgrounds to my architectural drawings, calling upon him for this purpose at his father's shop in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. He never would suffer me to see him draw, but concealed, as I understood, all that he did in his bedroom."

"After plunging them into water, he [Turner] dropped the colours onto the paper while it was wet, making marblings and gradations throughout.. .His completing process was marvellously rapid, for he indicated his masses and incidents, took out half-lights, scraped out high-lights and dragged, hatched and stippled until the design was finished. This swiftness, grounded in the scale practice in early life, enabled Turner to preserve the purity and luminosity of his work, and to paint at a prodigiously rapid rate."

"Turner was much more interested in the interplay between the atmosphere and sunlight and how he could use this to heighten the effects of his landscapes and seascapes. John Constable rarely painted the atmosphere at all but concentrated on the clouds and the sky. The visibility in Constable's landscapes is nearly always very good, such that the horizon can be clearly seen; he rarely painted mist or fog. Turner on the other hand delighted in mist and fog which often blot out the horizon and sky in his paintings."

"I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen … that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it."

"I paint people not because of what they are like... but how they happen to be."

"I always felt that my work hadn't much to do with art; my admirations for other art had very little room to show themselves in my work because I hoped that if I concentrated enough the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures. I ignored the fact that art, after all, derives from art. Now I realize that this is the case."

"My colour has no symbolic function whatever. I don't want any colour to be noticeable. I want the colour to be the colour of life, so that you would notice it as being irregular if it changed. I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent. I don't want people to say, "Oh, what was that red or that blue picture of yours, I've forgotten what it was.""

"When I look at a body I know it gives me choices of what to put in a painting; what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so."

"I am only interested in painting the actual person; in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong."

"URGENT SUBTLE CONCISE ROBUST"

"O’Hara was in his most non-stop way of talking, saying that the pictures put him in mind of Tiepolo [Spanish wall-painter, c. 1750]. Certain cupola frescoes. Suddenly I was working in an ancient building, a warehouse facing the Giudecca. The loft over the firehouse was transformed. It was filled with light reflected from the canal. [quote in 1955]"

"What is seen and called the picture is what remains – an evidence. Even as one travels in painting towards a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear. Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanished and the paint falls into positions that feel destined. The very matter of painting – its pigment and space – is so resistant to the will, so disinclined to assert its plane and remain still. Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light. Which must be because of the narrow passage from a diagramming to that other state – corporeality. In this sense, to paint is a possessing rather than a picturing."

"[Painting is..] a kind of war between the moment and the pull of memory.(quote in 1959)"

"There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art: That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities', which forces painting’s continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden. There are no 'wiggly or straight lines' or any other elements. You work until you vanish. The picture isn’t finished if they are seen."

"Actually, one of the real problems that always bothers me [in creating a painting] is sustaining a feeling. I mean, when I look at Poussin now, well, I think that's the most incredible thing to maintain the feeling for a year, however long it took Poussin, I'm telling you, to paint this vast structure. Bur perhaps that is not given to us now. I don't know... .Actually all all modern art puzzles me. I don't understand it. II really don't. I don't know whether it is fragmentary [as David Sylvester the interviewer suggested]. I have a sickening nostalgia for this other state of sustaining a feeling for months, being able to construct and build a picture. Well Mondrian, I think, did that, of course. He was almost one of the last artists to do that. I wish I could get there."

"You use things; the idea is, of course, to eliminate things [in making a picture]. And just as fifteen or eighteen years ago [when Guston made whole figurative series of children's pictures: 'all sort of props and so on'] I stretched out to get that, - put it in and took it out - to get that look in that's kid's eye and the way his mouth was open or wasn't - I mean a very particular kind of look - I'd do the same now. In other words, I can't find any freedom in abstract painting [but Guston did abstract painting in 1960 - till in 1967 he moved to figuration]. I'am just as stuck with locations, a few areas of colour in relation to some kind of totality that I want, as I was before. And so the problem of figuration is somehow irrelevant to me. I think some of the best painting done in New York today is figuration, but it's not recognised as such.. .Well I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration.. .I think every good painter here in New York really paints a self-portrait.."

"Sylvester: What about figuration in a more literal sense?"

"What I really want to do, it seems, is to paint a single form in the middle of a canvas. ..That's all a painter is, an image maker, is he not? And one would be a fool, some kind of fool, to want to paint a picture. The most powerful instinct is to paint a single form in its continuity, which is after all what a face is. This happens constantly on a picture. I remember last year I became so nervous about what I was doing that I finally reduce it down to the can on the palette with brushes in it. Well, that's real, tat can with brushes. And I painted the an with brushes sticking in it, and I couldn't tolerate it. I couldn't face it. It was as if it didn't contain enough of my thoughts or feelings about it.. ..I became signs. Exactly.. ..It seemed to become signs and symbols and I don't like signs."

"I maintain that the frustration is an important, almost crucial, ingredient. I think that the best painting involves frustration. The point about the late Rembrandt [paintings] is not that it's satisfying but on the contrary that it is disturbing and frustrating. Because really, what he [Rembrandt] has done is to eliminate any plane - anything between that image and you. The Van Dyck [portrait] hasn't. It says [only] I'm a painting. The Rembrandt says: I am not a painting, I am a real man. But he is not a real man either. What is it then, that you are looking at?"

"I got sick and tired of all that Purity! Wanted to tell stories.. [Guston's quote in 1967, referring to his swift from Abstract expressionism to figurative painting]"

"So when the 1960's came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue."

"Everything is possible, everything except dogma, of any kind.. ..That's what it's about. Freedom. That's the only possession an artist has — freedom to do whatever you can imagine."

"I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man – myself – lives in a museum."

"I went to New York in 1936 where I first worked as an assistant to Reginald Marsh as a non-relief artist since I had to await my residency requirement. This was the mural for the Customs House building in New York City. I didn't actually paint on this mural but Marsh asked me to design some lunettes between his panels. Next I went on the WPA mural division. I worked under Burgoyne Diller who was my supervisor, he was, I think, the supervisor of the New York City mural division."

"While I was still on the WPA I was submitting designs for the Section of Fine Arts competitions which I did on my own time. Burgoyne Diller gave me a mural to do in the Community Building of the Queensbridge Housing Project on Long Island. I worked on the design and cartoons for about a year. Everything was approved and the walls prepared - casein tempera painted on the wall... .[It was] about 1938. Holger Cahill asked me through Diller to do the outdoor facade mural of the WPA Building at the World's Fair. 1 stopped work on the Queens mural and began working on the Fair mural which was finished on schedule in time for the opening of the Fair."

"My wife [painter Musa McKim,] on her own, did several other murals for the Section of Fine Arts. Then in 1940 and 1941 we moved out of New York City and came to Woodstock [at the age of 54] where we did the Laconia murals and several murals for the Presidents Lines, which were later turned into troop ships. I then went to teach at the University of Iowa where I finished the mural for the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C., in 1942 or 1943, I'm not sure which. With the exception of some visual aid material for the navy flight program in Iowa - navigational maps, etc. - this marks the end of the mural period."

"[On the question: 'What was your main stylistic influence up to this time']: The Renaissance chiefly - Piero, Mantegna, Uccello - but I was attracted also by the modern idioms - Léger, Picasso - and was close to the abstract painters on the project such as Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb Greene, etc. At the time I did the Queens project, there was already a marked change in my work - it was becoming more concerned with cubist concepts of treating space."

"To answer your first question - most significantly the [ Federal Art Project ] project was my training ground in the real sense of the word. I feel very strongly about this. We were all poor, or most of us, and to have the time and opportunity to continue working - I was then in my twenties which is the important period - the crucial period for the young painter. This was most important and figures significantly in my own development. Although I feel that my personal image as a painter did not come about until I began my easel painting with personal imagery which was about 1941. The project kept me alive and working - it was my education."

"I have two thoughts [on the question of interviewer Joseph S. Trovato: 'Were the projects a good thing for American art?']. That practically all of the best painters of my generation developed on the projects such as Pollock, de Kooning, Brooks, Hague (sculptor), B. Greene, and Baziotes. I could go on and on. My second thought is that the reason it was good is that it had a broad base due to the economic situation we were in - the depression - and all kinds of art and styles, plus all degrees of talent were employed. Everybody was given an opportunity to prove himself. The many painters I mentioned above who have come such a long way is proof of this."

"There are so many things to paint in the world – in the cities – so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make. To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish. (What sympathy is demanded of the viewer! He is asked to 'see' the future links)."

"But you begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all - or is not even possible. The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance."

"To will a new form is inacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else – a condition somewhat unclear, but which in retrospect becomes a very precise act. This 'thing' is recognized only as it comes into existence. It resists analysis - and probably this is as it should be. Possibly the moral is that art cannot and should not be made."

"All these troubles revolve around the irritable mutual dependence of life and art – with their need and contempt for one another. Of necessity, to create is a temporary state and cannot be possessed, because you learn and relearn that it is the lie and mask of Art and, too, its mortification, which promise a continuity. There are twenty crucial minutes in the evolution of each of my paintings. The closer I get to that time - those twenty minutes – the more intensely subjective I become – bit the more objective, too. Your eye gets sharper, you become continuously more and more critical. There is no measure I can hold on.."

"I have a studio in the country - in the woods – but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert, even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible if you can move that inch."

"Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe. It's a very archaic form. Same things can be said with words, writing poetry, making sounds, music. It is a unique thing.. ..I think that the original revolutionary impulse behind the New York School, as I felt it anyway, and as I think my colleagues felt and the way we talked all the time, was a kind of a.. ..you felt as if you were driven into a corner against the wall, with no place to stand, just the place you occupied as if the act of painting was not making a picture.. ..it was as if you had to prove to yourself that truly the act of creation was still possible.. ..I felt as if I was talking to myself, having a dialectical monologue with myself to see if I could create."

"I mean that the things I felt and that I enjoyed about certain painters of the past that I liked, that inspired me, like Cézanne and Manet, that thing I enjoyed in their work, that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself, even though it was a picture of a woman in front of a mirror or some dead fish on the table, the pictures of those men were no pictures to me. They felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface. That's truly to me the act of creation."

"I was forced and pushed into the kind of painting that I did [during the late 1940's / early 1950's]. That is to say, the demands in this dialogue with myself – I give to it, I make some marks, it speaks to me, I speak to it, we have terrible arguments going on all night, weeks and weeks – do I really believe that? I make a mark, a few strokes, I argue with myself, not do I like or not, but is it true or not? Is that what I mean, is that what I want?"

"..there comes a point when something catches on the canvas, something grips on the canvas. I don’t know what it is, you can put your paint on the surface? Most of the time it looks like paint, and who the hell wants paint on a surface? But there does come a time – you take it off, put it on, goes over here, moves over a foot, as you go closer you start moving in inches not feet, half-inches – there comes a point when the paint doesn't feel like paint. I don't know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced it.. ..What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it's craft. That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm."

"Lots of artists who paint have that experience to one degree or another, this release where their thinking doesn't precede their doing. The space is shortened between thinking and doing. It's a funny thing, what I really hate, yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation. You have to go through it, like somebody preparing for sacred vows, the sensation of you putting paint on, and it's so boring to put paint on and to see yourself putting paint on. You're really preparing for those few hours where some kind of umbilical cord is attached between you and it. You do it and the work is done and this cord seems to slacken, as if you left yourself there. And what a relief to leave yourself somewhere, to get out of it entirely."

"Man is not supposed to make life. Only God can make a tree. Why should you make a living organism? You should make images of living organisms. It seems presumptuous to attempt to make a thing which breathes and pulsates right there by itself. It's unnatural. What's inhuman about it is, the human way to create, I think, the way we see, from part to part. You do this and then you do that, then you do that and that. Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where even though you naturally have to paint, after all a painting is only a painting, the painting is always saying, what do you want from me, I can only be a painting, you have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point That's some kind of a leap.. ..I'm describing the process of painting."

"I am not interested in making a picture. Then what the hell I am interested in? I must be interested in that process that I am talking about.. I don't keep the studio very tidy. You have on the floor like cow dung in the field.. ..and I look down at this stuff on the floor and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then what is it? I look back on the canvas, and it's not inert, it's active, moving and living.. ..Why I need this kind of miracle, I don't know it, but I need it. my conviction is that this is the act of creation to me. That's how I have it."

"If you push it, it feels good; I don’t know what it is. It must have something to do with kinesthesia. I feel now that I am painting I'm not drawing anything, or even representing non-objective art. You know, you can represent abstract art, too, as well as heads figures, nudes. A lot of abstract artists are just representational painters, you know that. And a lot of figurative artists are very abstract. I don't feel as if I'm doing that. I feel more as if I'm shaping something with my hands. I feel as if I've always wanted to get to that state. Like a blind man in a dark room had some clay, what would he make? I end up with 2 or 3 forms on a canvas, but it gets very physical for me. I always thought I am a very spiritual man, not interested in paint, and now I discover myself to be very physical and very involved with matter. I want to be involved with how heavy things are, a balloon, how light things are, things levitating, pushing forms, make me feel as if my hand is pushing in a head, bulges out here and pushes there."

"..when I see people making quote 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough, that is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing, it has to be a trialogue. Whether that third thing - it must be, to reverberate and make trouble, you have to have trouble and contradictions, it has to become complex because life is complex, emotions are complex, - whether that third element is a still life of something, or an idea or a concept, in each case it has to be a trialogue and above all has to involve you.. ..The real thing that matters is how involved you are in that."

"It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one. Usually I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear and I feel the drawing making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me towards painting -anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light."

"A year later he [Guston] was in the thick of Communist Party circles around the John Reed Club. And he became the target of an LAPD Red Squad raid for his contribution to an exhibition devoted to the racially motivated trial of the Scottsboro Boys, for which he painted a picture about lynching that was the first of many of his works to feature ominous images of 'Ku Klux Klansmen'. Shortly thereafter Guston was on his way to Morelia in central Mexico to work on a commission under the patronage of revolutionary muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros - later Pollock's teacher in New York. By the end of 1934 he was back in California, where he joined the New Deal-sponsored Public Works of Art Project and realized a mural for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union."

"Philip, do you know what the real subject is? It’s freedom."

"Why did Guston leave the canvas bare at the edges? Why did H. Frankenthaler used unsized canvas. And so on."

"'In the anti-historical position, each artist is.. ..himself.' In one of his ruminations, Guston confidently maintains the singularity that marks the artists he has enshrined. But, in another, he challenges the notion of 'himself' and expatiates on the relationships that bind the family of artists he admires throughout history. He is, as almost all writers on his work have recognized, a man of dialogue. His work is clearly cyclical. His painting tone alternates, now caressing, now strident. His tastes veer from the sublime equilibrium of certain fifteenth-century masters to the dark reveries of the Romantics. Irreconcilables are the staff of his life. Guston's reflexive dialecticism is well known to those who have followed him over the years. They have learned to be comfortable with shifts in conversation from one position to another which, in the long dialogue of his life's work, are finally not inconsistent."

"At one time or another Guston has met with all the contradictions in the modern tradition (The art of painting in the twentieth century has careened wildly between extremes..). Like most complex artists, he has had several relationships with his time, and those not always exclusive. Yet certain of the inherited problems in his case have found more or less consistent answers, as for instance in the problem of content. Can matter alone carry expressive meaning? He says no. It is not enough to make a mark on a canvas, even if it creates radiant light or rhythmic sequence. Although he experiments constantly, his final answer is no, paint alone is not enough. As for the problem of space as posed in our time: Is the canvas really a two-dimensional surface whose frontal plane must not be violated? - Guston again answers no. The modern shibboleth of planarity is not enough. He has devised means to suggest depth, complicated perspective, close-ups, and he has used tonal modulation to find fresh spatial illusions. He refuses to reject the long history of painting as an art of spatial illusion."

"If art is to survive it must describe and express people, their lives and times."

"I've painted for a very long time, but I don't get tired or bored by it; I love to do it. If I don't paint one day, I don't feel well physically or mentally. My eyes bother me when I don't paint. But when I paint a full day, I feel satisfied and everything seems to be OK. I would never stop, never retire. I don't see how people can retire; I don't understand that. My brother Moses died while he was painting. He was actually working on a painting, and the last words he said were to the model: "Phoebe, don't frown." Then he died. He worked to the very last minute."

"Since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art."

"Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence. Now the sole reason why painters of this sort are not aware of their own error is that they have not learnt Geometry, without which no one can either be or become an absolute artist; but the blame for this should be laid upon their masters, who are themselves ignorant of this art."

"Whoever … proves his point and demonstrates the prime truth geometrically should be believed by all the world, for there we are captured."

"But I shall let the little I have learnt go forth into the day in order that someone better than I may guess the truth, and in his work may prove and rebuke my error. At this I shall rejoice that I was yet a means whereby this truth has come to light."

"The new art must be based upon science — in particular, upon mathematics, as the most exact, logical, and graphically constructive of the sciences."

"There is no man on earth who can give a final judgment on what the most beautiful shape may be. Only God knows."

"My father suffered much and toiled painfully all his life, for he had no resources other than the proceeds of his trade from which to support himself and his wife and family. He led an honest, God-fearing life. His character was gentle and patient. He was friendly towards all and full of gratitude to his Maker. He cared little for society and nothing for worldly amusements. A man of very few words and deeply pious, he paid great attention to the religious education of his children. His most earnest hope was that the high principles he instilled into their minds would render them ever more worthy of divine protection and the sympathy of mankind. He told us every day that we must love God and be honourable in our dealings with our neighbours."

"As time passes I become more and more afraid of my growing love of music. I don’t understand myself. I play solo sonatas by Bach: next to them, what is Böcklin? It makes me smile."

"You know what I want to become temporarily today: a painter? No. A simple and common designer. But a biting one. I would like to deride humanity, nothing less. And this with the simplest means, in black and white. At the same time - oh blasphemy - I would like to attack our Lord adequately."

"Music, for me, is a love bewitched. / Fame as a painter? / Writer, modern poet? Bad joke. / So I have no calling, and loaf."

"The conviction that painting is the right profession grows stronger and stronger in me. Writing is the only other thing I still feel attracted to. Perhaps when I am mature I shall go back to it."

"Twenty-one years old! I never doubted my vital force. But how is it to fare with my chosen art? The recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after all, should be no hindrance in the plastic arts! And should I really have to be a poet, Lord knows what else I should desire. Certainly, a sea swells within me, for I feel. It is a hopeless state, to feel in such a way that the storm rages on all sides at once and that nowhere is a lord who commands the chaos."

"To be a student of Stuck [1898 - 1900] sounded good. In reality, however, it was not half so splendid. Instead of coming to him with a sound mind I brought a thousand pains and many prejudices. In the realm of colour I found it hard to progress. Since the tone provided by mood predominated strongly in my mastery of form, I sought to find as much profit as possible here at least. And, in this respect, a great deal really was to be gained at Stuck's. Naturally I was not the only one, at this time, to be deficient in the realm of color. Later, in his monograph, Kandinsky passed a similar judgement on this school [of Stuck]."

"..I served Beauty by drawing her enemies."

"Thoughts about the art of portraiture. Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface (this can be done by the photographic plate), but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones."

"My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones."

"I am God / So much of the divine / is heaped in me / that I cannot die. My head burns to the point of bursting. One of the worlds / hidden in it / wants to be born. / But now I must suffer / to bring it forth."

"I have now reached the point where I can look over the great art of antiquity and its Renaissance. But, for myself, I cannot find any artistic connection with our own times. And to want to create something outside of one's own age strikes me as suspect. Great perplexity. This is why I am again all on the side of satire. Am I to be completely absorbed by it once more? For the time being it is my only creed. Perhaps I shall never become positive? In any case, I will defend myself like a wild beast."

"But by way of consolation: it is valueless to paint premature things, what counts is to be a personality, or at least to become one. The domination of life is one of the basic conditions of productive expression. For me this is surely the case; when I am depressed I am unable even to think about it – and this holds true for painting, sculpture, tragedy, or music. But I believe that pictures alone will abundantly fill out this one life."

"I have a feeling that sooner or later I shall arrive at something legitimate, only I must begin, not with hypotheses, but with specific instances, no matter how minute. If I then succeed in distinguishing a clear structure, I get more from it than from a lofty imaginary construction. And the typical will automatically follow from a series of examples."

"The main thing now is not to paint precociously but to be, or at least become, an individual. The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions."

"It is a great difficulty and great necessity to have to start with the smallest. I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe; ignoring poets and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest; to work out by myself a tiny, formal motive, one that my pencil; will be able to hold without any technique. One favorable moment is enough. The little thing is easily and concisely set down. It's already done! It was a tiny but real affair, and someday, through the repetition of such small but original deeds, there will come one work upon which I can really build."

"The naked body is an altogether suitable object. In art classes I have gradually learned something of it from every angle. But now I will no more project some plan of it: I will proceed so that all its essentials, even those hidden by optical perspective, will appear upon the paper. And thus a little uncontested personal property has already been discovered, a style has been created."

"I project on the surface; that is, the essence of the subject must always become visible, even if this is impossible in nature, which is not adapted to this relief style. The absence of foreshortening also plays a crucial part in the process.. .For I have discovered a very small, undisputed, personal possession: a particular sort of three-dimensional representation on the flat surface.. .I am my style."

"Everything that used to be foreign to me, at the rational procedures in my profession, I now begin to resort to after all, from necessity, at least as a matter of experiment. Apparently I am becoming perfectly sober and small, perfectly unpoetic and unenthusiastic. I imagine a very small formal motif and try to execute it economically."

"Formerly it frequently happened to me that when questioned regarding a picture I simply did not know what it represented. I had not seen the subject, so to say. Now I have also included the content so that I know most of the time what is represented. But this only supports my experience that what matters in the ultimate end is the abstract meaning of harmonization (note from a letter, 1903)"

"Serious color studies of nudes and heads. Only as practice and first training. Very strict determination of color values through water color. On top of it, some oils, simply for blending. The results are quite unattractive, little of importance to be hoped for here. This month of February is devoted to color. I painted many nudes from nature and even the portrait of a head, my syster's!"

"When in Italy [Klee stayed in Italy, in 1901], I learned to understand architectural monuments.. .Even the dullest will understand that the obvious commensurability of parts, to each other and to the whole, corresponds to the hidden numerical proportions that exist in other artificial and natural organisms. It is clear that these figures are not cold and dead, but full of the breath of life; and the importance of measurements as an aid to study and creation becomes evident."

"Towards the end of the month I prepared engravings; first, invented appropriate drawings. Not that I want to become a specialist now. But painting with its failures cries out for the relief of minor successes. Nowadays I am a very tired painter, but my skill as a draftsman holds [me] up."

"Our initial perplexity before nature is explained by our seeing at first the small outer branches and not penetrating to the main branches or the trunk. But once this is realized, one will perceive a repetition of the whole law even in the outermost leaf and turn it to good use."

"When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed."

"What does the artist create? Forms and spaces! How does he create them? In certain chosen proportions.. .O satire, you plague of intellectuals."

"In earlier versions of 'Woman and Beast' the woman suffered too much. Later I gave her that not altogether disgusted expression. Dissertations could be written about the significance of the 'ugliness' of my figures."

"Things are not quite so simple with 'pure' art as it is dogmatically claimed. In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better. In this sense I shall never be a pure artist as the dogma defines him. We higher creatures are also mechanically produced children of God, and yet intellect and soul operate within us in completely different dimensions."

"The law that supports space - this should be the title appropriate to one of my future pictures!"

"Am I God? / I have accumulated so many great things in me! / My head aches to the point of bursting. / It has to hold an overview of power. / May you want (are you worthy of it?) / that it be born to you."

"..(Then come the lovers of art / and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. / Then come the photographers. / "New art," it says in the newspaper the following day. / The learned journals / give it a name that ends in "ism")."

"The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it."

"To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers."

"My etchings have.. ..the mistake of being processed as images and to have at the same time the meaning of epigrams. It is the union of pure painting with pure graphics.. .From now onwards my task will be the division of art and graphics, and the full development of both fields. The pure art has already turned to impressionism and the graphics is going to do it."

"Van Gogh is congenial to me, 'Vincent' in his letters. Perhaps nature does have something. There is no need, after all, to speak of the smell of earth; it has too peculiar a savor. The words we use to speak about it, I mean, have too peculair a savor. Too bad that the early Van Gogh was so fine a human being, but not so good as a painter, and that the later, wonderful artist is such a marked man. A mean should be found between these four points pf comparison: then, yes!"

"His [ Van Gogh's] pathos is alien to me, especially in my current phase, but he is certainly a genius. Pathetic to the point of being pathological, this endangered man can endanger one who does not see through him. Here a brain is consumed by the fire of a star. It frees itself in its work just before the catastrophe. Deepest tragedy takes place here, real tragedy, natural tragedy, exemplary tragedy. Permit me to be terrified."

"He [in general] has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise, i.e., cannot do something else."

"The changeover was complete; in the summer of 1907 I devoted myself entirely to the appearance of nature and upon these studies built my black-and-white landscapes on glass, 1907/1908."

"Beyond the constructive elements of the picture, I studied the tonalities of nature by adding layer upon layer of diluted black watercolour paint. Each layer must dry well. In this way a mathematically correct scale of light and dark values is the result. Squinting facilitates our perception of this phenomenon in nature."

"Pictures have their skeleton, muscles, and skin like human beings. One may speak of the specific anatomy of the picture. A picture representing 'a naked person' must not be created by the laws of human anatomy, but only by those of compositional anatomy. First one builds an armature on which the picture is to be constructed."

"In fact I am beginning to see a way to provide a place for my line. I am at last finding my way out of the dead-end of ornament where I found myself one day in 1907! With new strength from my naturalistic études [studies], I may dare to give form to enter my prime real of psychic improvisation again. Bound only very indirectly to an impression of nature, I may again dare to give form to what burdens the soul. To note experiences that can turn themselves into linear compositions even in the blackest night. Here a new creative possibility has long since been awaiting me, which only my frustration resulting from isolation interfered with in the past. Working in this way, my real personality will express itself, will be able to emancipate itself into the greatest freedom."

"Looking back at the end of the year created a little more serious mood than before. To bring children [his son ] in the world is no trifling matter! Over the entire horizon, bluish, phosphorescent flashes of sheet shining.. ..In fact, I really do go out into the snow [near Munich] in all seriousness, station myself there, freeze, freeze stiff, but work. I accomplish little in comparison with the abundance around me, but I accomplish a great deal in comparison with the poverty and simplicity of a small bourgeois homestead."

"Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail. Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn."

"First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations."

"Kandinsky wants to organize a new society of artists. I came to feel a deep trust in him [ Kandinsky ]. He is somebody, and has an exceptionally beautiful and lucid mind."

"And now an altogether revolutionary discovery: to adapt oneself to the contents of the paintbox is more important than [to] nature and its study. I must some day be able to improvise freely on the chromatic keyboard of the rows of watercolor cup."

"[I] launched a new offensive against the fortress of painting. First, white thinned out in linseed oil as a general base. Second, color the entire surface lightly by applying very large areas of different colors that swim into one other and that must remain free of any effect of chiaroscuro. Third, a drawing, independent of and substituting for the unformulated tonal values. Then, at the end, some bass notes to ward off flabbiness, not too dark, but colored bass notes. This is the style that connects drawing and the realm of color, a saving transfer of my fundamental graphic talent into the domain of painting"

"Alfred Kubin, my benefactor, has arrived! He acted so enthusiastic that he carried me away. We actually sat entranced in front of my drawings! Really quite entranced! Profoundly entranced!"

"Spring. All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher! And now I have become a bureaucrat as well as by compiling a large, precise catalogue of all my artistic productions ever since my childhood. I have left out only the school drawings, studies of nudes, etc., because they lack creative self-sufficiency."

"The longer my production moves in a definite direction, the less gaily it progresses. But just now something new seems to be happening to the stream: it is broadening into a lake. I hope it will not lack a corresponding depth. I was the faithful image of a part of art history; I moved towards Impressionism and beyond it. I don't want to say that I grew out of it; I hope this is not so.. .In lucid moments, I now have a clear view of twelve years of the history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with the big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the re-emergence of a self without blinkers. It is good that one didn't know this in advance."

"His [ Vincent van Gogh's] line is new and yet very old, and happily not a purely European affair. It is more a question of reform than of revolution."

"These are primitive beginnings in art, such as one usually finds in ethnographic collections or at home in one's nursery. Do not laugh, reader! Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved from corruption at an early age. Parallel phenomena are provided by the works of the mentally diseased; neither childish behaviour nor madness are insulting words here, as they commonly are. All this is to be taken very seriously, more seriously than all the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today's art."

"Now Delaunay wrote and sent me an article by himself about himself."

"[It].. ..is a real declaration of love toward art. Abstraction from this world more as a game, less as a failure of the earthly. Somewhere in between. The man in love no longer drinks and eats.."

"Graphic work as the expressive movement of the hand holding the recording pencil.. ..is so fundamentally different from dealing with tone and color that one can use this technique quite well in the dark, even in the blackest night. On the other hand, tone (movement from light to dark) presupposes some light, and color presupposes a great deal of light."

"In my productive activity, every time a type grows beyond the stage of its genesis, and I have about reached the goal, the intensity gets lost very quickly, and I have to look for new ways. It is precisely the way which is productive - this is the essential thing: becoming is more important than being."

"I am armed, I am not here, / I am in the depths, am far away ... / I am far away ... / I glow amidst dead."

"Genesis as formal motion is the essential thing in a work. In the beginning the motif, insertion of energy, sperm. Works as shaping of form in the material sense: the primitive female component. Works as form - determining sperm: the primitive female component. My drawings belong to the male realm."

"[commenting French Cubist art] ..Trees are violated, humans become incapable of life; there is a coercion that leads to the un-recognazibility of the object, to a picture-puzzle. For here what counts is not a profane law, but a law of art."

"The shaping of form is weak in energy in comparison with the determining of form. The final consequence of both ways of forming is form. From the ways to the end. From activity to the accomplished. From the genuinely living thing to the objective thing. In the beginning the male speciality, the energetic stimulus. Then the fleshly growth of the egg. Or: first the bright flash of lightning, then the raining cloud. When is the spirit at its purest? In the beginning. Here, work that becomes (dual). There, work that is."

"The harbor and city.. ..were behind us [Klee's first glimpse of Tunis], slightly hidden. First, we passed down a long canal. On shore, very close, our first Arabs. The sun has a dark power. The colorful clarity on shore full of promise. Macke too feels it. We both know that we shall work well here."

"Reality and dream simultaneously, and myself makes a third in the party, completely at home here. This will be fine."

"Tunis. My head is full of the impressions of last night's walk. Art-Nature-Self. Went to work at once and painted in watercolour in the Arab quarter. Began the synthesis of urban architecture and pictorial architecture. Not yet pure, but quite attractive, somewhat too much of the mood, the enthusiasm of traveling in it-the Self, in a word. Things will no doubt get more objective later, once the intoxication has worn off a bit."

"Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever.. .Color and I are one. I am a painter."

"another and longer variant: I now abandon work. It penetrated so deeply and so gently into me, I feel it and it gives me confidence in myself without effort. Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Colour and I are one. I am a painter."

"The evening is indescribable. And on the top of everything else a full moon came up. Louis urged me to paint it. I said: it will be an exercise at best. Naturally I am not up to this kind of nature. Still, I know a bit more than I did before. I know the disparity between my inadequate resources and nature. This is an internal affair to keep me busy for the next few years. It doesn't trouble me one bit. No use hurrying when you want so much. The evening is deep inside me forever. Many a blond, northern moon rise, like a muted reflection, will softly remind me, and remind me again and again. It will be my bride, my alter ego. An incentive to find myself. I myself am the moon-rise of the South."

"The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now."

"Franz Marc.. ..is more human, he loves more warmly, is more demonstrative.. ..I only try to relate myself to God, and if I am in harmony with God, I don't fancy that my brothers are not also in harmony with me; but that is their business.. .My fire is more like that of the dead or the unborn.. .Art is like Creation: it holds good on the last days as on the first. What my art probably lacks, is a kind of passionate humanity. I don't love animals and every sort of creature with an earthly warmth.. .I tend rather to dissolve into the whole of creation and am then on a footing of brotherliness to my neighbour, to all things earthly. I possess. The earth-idea gives way to the world-idea. My love is distant and religious."

"Thoughts at the open window of the payroll department [in a military barrack - World War I.]: That everything is transitory is merely a simile. Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient. The real truth, to begin with, remains invisible beneath the surface. The colors that captivate us are not lighting, but light. The graphic universe consists of light and shadow. The diffused clarity of slightly overcast weather is richer in phenomena than a sunny day. A thin stratum of cloud just before the stars break through. It is difficult to catch and represent this, because the moment is so fleeting. It has to penetrate into our soul. The formal has to fuse with the Weltanschauung [world view]."

"Simple motion strikes us as banal. The time element must be eliminated. Yesterday and tomorrow as simultaneous. In music, polyphony helped to some extent to satisfy this need. A quintet as in 'Don Giovanni' is closer to us than the epic motion in [[w:Tristan und Isolde|'Tristan [und Isolde]']]. Mozart and Bach are more modern than the [music of the] nineteenth century."

"Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that, here, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly."

"We document, explain, justify, construct, organize: these are good things, but we do not succeed in coming to the whole.. .But we may as well calm down: construction is not absolute. Our virtue is this: by cultivating the exact we have laid the foundations for a science of art, including the unknown X."

"Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will."

"..I thought I had come into the clear in art when for the first time I was able to apply an abstract style to nature."

"I can dimly recollect Kandinsky and Weisgerber, who were fellow students of mine.. .Kandinsky was quiet and mixed the colours on his palette with the greatest diligence and, so it seemed to me, with a kind of studiousness, peering very closely at what he was doing."

"I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For I reside just as much with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough. The end has met the beginning."

"A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision."

"The pictorial work was born of movement, is itself recorded movement, and is assimilated through movement (eye muscles)."

"Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities. Things appear to assume a broader and more diversified meaning, often seemingly contradicting the rational experience of yesterday. There is a striving to emphasize the essential character of the accidental."

"For the artist communication with nature remains the most essential condition. The artist is human; himself nature; part of nature within natural space."

"Color is primarily Quality. Secondly, it is also Weight, for it has not only color value but also brilliance. Thirdly, it is Measure, for besides Quality and Weight, it has its limits, its area, and its extent, all of which may be measured.Tone value is primarily Weight, but in its extent and its boundaries, it is also Measure.Line, however, is solely Measure."

"It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions."

"It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations."

"The longer a line, the more of the time element it contains. Distance is time whereas a surface is apprehended more in terms of the moment."

"In art, too, there is room enough for exact research.. .What was accomplished in music before the end of the eighteenth century has hardly been begun in the pictorial field."

"We [at the Bauhaus, in Dessau - where Klee was art teacher with Kandinsky ] construct and construct, and yet intuition still has its uses. Without it we can do a lot, but not everything.. .When intuition is joined to exact research it speeds the progress of exact research.."

"What had already been done for music by the end of the eighteenth century has at last been begun for the pictorial arts. Mathematics and physics furnished the means in the form of rules to be followed and to be broken. In the beginning it is wholesome to be concerned with the functions and to disregard the finished form. Studies in algebra, in geometry, in mechanics characterize teaching directed towards the essential and the functional, in contrast to apparent. One learns to look behind the façade, to grasp the root of things. One learns to recognize the undercurrents, the antecedents of the visible. One learns to dig down, to uncover, to find the cause, to analyze."

"Structural concept in nature: The grouping of the smallest recognizable entities in matter: Bone matter is cellular or tubular. Ligament structure is a sinuous-fibrous web. Tendons are continuous with the connective tissue of the muscle, strengthened by cross grain."

"Bones are coordinated to form the skeleton. Even at rest they depend on mutual support. This is furnished by the ligaments. Theirs is a secondary function; one could speak of a hierarchy of function. The next step in motoric organization leads from bone to muscle. The tendon is the mediary between these two."

"And what is the relationship of muscle to bone? Through its ability to contract or shorten itself, the muscle brings two bones into a new angular relationship.. ..The position of two bones toward each other must change if the muscle so decides. Bones give support to the total organism; also when in motion. Muscles have a higher function because they act beside each other. One bends, the other stretches. One bone alone achieves nothing."

"The work grows "stone upon stone" (additive) or The block is hewn "chip from chip" (subtractive) Both processes, building and reducing, are time bound."

"Already at the very beginning of the productive act, shortly after the initial motion to create, occurs the first counter motion, the initial movement of receptivity. This means: the creator controls whether what he has produced so far is good."

"The work as human action (genesis) is productive as well as receptive. It is continuity."

"Receptively it [the work as human action] is limited by the limitations of the perceiving eye. The limitation of the eye is its inability to see even a small surface equally sharp at all points. The eye must "graze" over the surface, grasping sharply portion after portion, to convey them to the brain which collects and stores the impressions."

"The eye travels along the paths cut out for it in the work."

"The father of the arrow is the thought: how do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain ?"

"The contrast between man's ideological capacity to move at random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations, is Uneven lengths and uneven angle-degrees of the point-rudder result in a deviating course. the origin of all human tragedy. It is this contrast between power and prostration that implies the duality of human existence. Half winged-half imprisoned, this is man!"

"Thought is the medially between earth and world. The broader the magnitude of his reach, the more painful man's tragic limitation. Thought is the medially between earth and world. The broader the magnitude of his reach, the more painful man's tragic limitation. To get where motion is interminate."

"Yesterday was shaped by Kandinsky's move.. .This departure is what proves something for me.. .It is a friendship that overcomes a number of negative items, because the plus side stands firm and, in particular, because there is a link to my productive youth [in Munich]."

"At the moment, an unpleasant feeling presses on my stomach, as though the new year of the unified, national Germany has assisted in the advent of an all too torch-parade-like sparkling wine bacchanal."

"I'll provide it if I'm officially asked to do so but it's below my dignity to initiate action against such primitive accusations. For even if I were a Jew, and did come from Galicia, this would alter neither my own worth nor that of my work one iota. My personal point of view is that a Jew and a foreigner is of no less intrinsic value than a German and a native, and I must not abandon it of my own accord, for if I did I would appear to posterity in an absurd light. I would rather cause myself trouble than become the tragicomic figure of one striving for the favour of those in power."

"Since not even sufficient time for my main business remains to me. Production is taking a larger magnitude at a faster tempo, and can no longer wholly keep up with these children. They [very probably: his new art] issue forth."

"Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view."

"Kandinsky and Klee: the two artists.. ..have been named together more and more frequently.. .Since: is it supposed to be a mere coincidence that, in quiet, remote Dessau.. ..two creative spirits equally liberated from the burden of earthly problems – connecting East and West – live under one roof, or is it a wake-up call, a sign of what is to come?!"

"At the Bauhaus, Klee exuded a healthy, generative atmosphere – as a great artist and as a lucid, pure human being."

"Then that great fellow Klee comes onto the scene, already famed as a Bauhaus teacher in Dessau. He tells everyone he's a thoroughbred Arab, but he's a typical Galician Jew."

"It would be so nice to once again drink a cup of tea with you, as was so often and so pleasantly the case in Dessau. We frequently think of our former closeness, of watering flowers at the same time, of the bocce[?] battles and – sad thought – of our collective complaints about the BH Bauhaus meetings [until 1933]. How far behind us all of that is!"

"Alors sempre avanti! (Ever Forward / Always Ahead)"

"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

"The reader of the four 'Diaries' of Paul Klee.. ..will be initiated – being presumably an outsider – into a mysterious, rare, individual, and watchful world, that of Paul Klee the 'painter'. Indeed, the entries in his diaries were not originally intended for publication, but merely for his own reflection. During his lifetime my father allowed no one, not even myself, access to his most personal confession."

"But Paul Klee and Franz Marc were also close friends, and August Macke, too, whenever he was in Munich.. .Klee was never as active a theorist, in those years, as Kandinsky or Marianne de Werefkin. Besides, it took Klee much longer to become a truly and conscious modern artist.. .As you can see in my portrait of Klee, which is painted in 1913 – I mean the one where he is seen seated in one of the rooms here downstairs and wearing white summer slacks – he is not very communicative. That is why I depicted him all hunched up and tense, as if he were constraining some mainspring within himself. In my eyes, it was almost a portrait of silence rather than of Klee, and for many years it no longer occurred to me that he had been my model. But Klee was always a close friend of ours, and Kandinsky and I had great confidence in his talent and his future... (1958)"

"The students' relationship to Kandinsky was very respectful.. .What he said was always insightful and more or less documented. In the case of Klee, in contrast, everything was always up in the air. You could make what you wanted of it."

"Klee was my so-called form master [at the Bauhaus, where a. o. Kandinsky, Klee - and later Albers himself - were art teachers]. In the workshops there they had a crafts master and a form master. The crafts master had to direct the practical work, the mechanics of the workshop. And the form master had to develop the, formal qualities. Klee was my form master in the glass workshop. He came to me and never criticized anything. He talked about something else. Never asked about any form problem with the windows I was working on. Never a word. He was too respectful. He was the nicest master I could ask for. He talked about exhibitions. He thought I should exhibit. That's another story. We had a good relationship because we never dealt with the same problems. He didn't attack our problems. He never brought up a problem."

"Klee's idiosyncracies always remained somewhat beyond the law, as it were. For 'genius is the defect in the system,' stated the conscientious system builder, who knew that genius was the only thing that could neither be taught nor learned."

"At a certain point in the 1950's he [Klee] had an enormous influence on many artists, including me. It wasn't until about 1965 that he started to slip out of sight - and after that one just didn't hear about him."

"In any painting or drawing by Klee the working method was broadly the same. He started every picture with an abstract mark - a square, a triangle, a circle, a line or a dot - and then allowed that motif to evolve or grow, almost like a living organism. Klee's control over whatever medium he is using is never less than masterful, but you always sense that he began not knowing where it would lead."

"It is typical for Klee that he often brought joyful, sympathetic, childlike angels with small weaknesses on paper in spite of his death warnings. There are no bleak or discouraged works, but extremely smart and witty angels."

"This full, pouting mouth, rich in sensuous expressions. these lips like a lake of pleasure, fringed by the noble, palpitating nostrils."

"There are things that other people do not see: unknown depths, the wellsprings of life... There is grace in elegance; above grace, there is modelling; everything is exaggerated; we call it soft but it is most powerfully soft! Words fail me then."

"Barye... did not teach us much ; he was always worried and tired when he came, and always told us that it was very good."

"In those three years, (from fourteen to seventeen years old)... I came to understand the meaning of a drawing from the life, the synthesis of my art, and the rhythm of animais. I remember that a companion of those days,' of whom I hâve since lost sight, made me see, in a couple of hours, on a very true and simple principle, an observation of the necessary equilibria of movement not taught in the schools, the secret of the plans of a figure. That lesson has influenced my whole life. As for the ornament-maker, in whose workshop I earned a scanty wage, I long deplored being constrained to do so, but I hâve since thought with affection of it, understanding that there are as many sources of beauty in ornament as in the face."

"Slowness is a beauty"

"I invent nothing, I rediscover. And the thing seems new because people have generally lost sight of the aim and the means of art ; they take that for an innovation which is nothing but a return to the laws of the great sculpture of long ago. Obviously, I think ; I like certain symbols, I see things in a synthetic way, but it is nature that gives me all that. I do not imitate the Greeks ; I try to put myself in the spiritual State of the men who hâve left us the antique statues. The 'Ecole' copies their works ; the thing that signifies is to recover their method. I began by showing close studies from nature like The Age of Brass. Afterwards I came to understand that art required a little more largeness, a little exaggeration, and my whole aim, from the time of the Burghers, was to find a method of exaggerating logically : that method consists in the deliberate amplification of the modelling. It consists also in the constant reduction of the figure to a geometrical figure, and in the determination to sacrifice any part of a figure to the synthesis of its aspect. See what the Gothic sculptors did. Look at the cathedra! of Chartres ; one of the towers is massive and without ornament : they sacrificed it to give value to the exquisite delicacy of the other tower."

"In sculpture the projection of the fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened ; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance ; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying détails, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by académie préjudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal, A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections ; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method ; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas."

"I feel it, but I cannot express it,... I cannot analyse the Celtic genius to my own satisfaction. In the Middle Ages art came from groups, not from individuals. It was anonymous ; the sculptors of cathedrals no more put their names to their works than our workmen put theirs on the pavement that they lay. Ah ! what an admirable scorn of notoriety ! The signature is what destroys us. We do portraits, but what we do is not so great. Thèse kings and queens, on the cathedrals, were not portraits. The fellow-workers stood for one another, and they interpreted ; they did not copy. They made clothed figures ; the nude and portraiture only date from the Renascence. And then those fellows cut with the tool's end into the block, that is why they were called sculptors. As for us, we are modellers. And what a disgraceful thing that casting from life is, which so many well-known sculptors do not blush to use ! It is a mere swindling in art. Art was a vital function to the image-makers of the thirteenth century ; they would hâve laughed at the idea of signing what they did, and never dreamed of honours and titles. When once their work was finished, they said no more about it, or else they talked among themselves. How curious it would hâve been to hear them, to be present at their gatherings, where they must hâve discussed in amusing phrases, and with simple, deep ideas !... Whenever the cathedrals disappear civilisation will go down one step. And even now we no longer understand them, we no longer know how to read their silent language. We need to make excavations not in the earth, but towards heaven...""

"I believed before that (journey to Italy in 1875)... that movement was the whole secret of this art, and I put my models into positions like those of Michael Angelo. But as I went on observing the free attitudes of my models I perceived that they possessed thèse naturally^ and that Michael Angelo had not preconceived them, but merely transcribed them according to the Personal inspiration of human beings moved by the need of action. I went to Rome to look for what may be found everywhere : the latent heroic in every natural movement."

"Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients ; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects ; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician ? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me."

"To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature."

"Nobody does good to men with ."

"Gsell: What astonishes me, is that your way is so different from that of other sculptors. They prose the model. Instead of that, you wait till a model has instinctively or accidentally taken an Interesting pose, and thon you reproduce It. Instead of your giving orders to the model, the model gives orders to you."

"I admit, of course, that the artist does not see nature as the vulgar do. His emotion reveals to him the inner truths that underlie appearance. But the only principle In art is to copy what one sees. Every other method is ruinous. No one can embellish Nature. It is simply and solely a question of seeing. Doubtless a mediocre man, when he copies will never produce a work of art. He looks without seeing. No matter how minutely he observes, the result will be flat and without character. But the artist's trade is not for mediocre men, and no amount of training can supply them with talent. The artist sees - he sees with his heart. He sees deep into the heart of Nature. To the artist everything in Nature is beautiful. The vulgarian imagines that what looks to him ugly In Nature is not material for the artist. He would forbid us to represent what displeases and offends him. He makes a grave mistake. What is commonly called ugliness in Nature may become a great beauty in art. In the realm of realities, people regard as ugly everything that is deformed and diseased and that suggests sickness, weakness and suffering. They regard as ugly everything that defies regularity, which is to them the symbol and condition of health and strength. A hump is ugly, bow-legs are ugly, misery in rags is ugly. Ugly, again, are the soul and conduct of the immoral, the vicious, the criminal man, the abnormal man who is an enemy of society; ugly is the soul of the parricide, the traitor, the unscrupulous slave of ambition. And it is right that the lives and the of which we can expect only evil should be given an odious epithet."

"But when a great artist or a great writer lays hold upon either sort of ugliness he transfigures it instantaneously. With a touch from the magic ring he metamorphoses it into beauty. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy. When Velasquez, paints Sebastian, King Philip's dwarf, he gives him such an appealing look that we read the poor creature's secret and see the tragedy it involved — a man forced to get his living by discarding his human dignity, and becoming a toy, a living joke. The more poignant his martyrdom, within that misshapen body, the more beautiful the artist's work. When Millet paints a poor rustic leaning upon a hoe, a wretch broken by fatigue, scorched by the sun, degraded as a beast of the field, he has only to add an expression of resignation in order to make this hideous nightmare a magnificent symbol of humanity. When Shakespeare gives us Tago or Richard III, and when Racine gives us Néron and Narcisse, moral ugliness, interpreted by minds so clear, so penetrating, becomes a marvelous theme of beauty."

"In art a thing is beautiful whenever it has character. Character — this is the intense truth of any natural spectacle, whether beautiful or ugly. You may even call it a double truth. For it is the inner essence expressed by the outer appearance. It is the soul, the sentiment, the idea that shines out through the features of a fare, the pose and action of a human body, the tones of a skym the line of a horizon."

"Now to the great artist, everything in nature has character."

"I obey nature, I never presume to command her. The first principal in art is to copy what one sees."

"I admit, that the commonplace man can never, by copying, produce a masterpiece; he notes every detail but he does not really see - the artist penetrates below the surface into the very heart of nature; for him everything is beautiful because beauty in art consists of character."

"Drawing is but a means to an end. One imagines that drawing can be beautiful-it is not the lines which are beautiful, but what they signify, the sentiments which they translate. In reality, there is no such thing as beauty in drawing, or color beauty lies alone in revelation of truth."

"The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who calls attention to his style, is like the farmer who devotes his energies to polishing farm implements and never uses them."

"It is too evident that if the drawing is bad, the color false, the deepest emotion must fail to express itself."

"No sudden inspiration can replace the long years of arduous labor necessary to train the eye to observe, the hand to reproduce."

"If in looking at a picture you have been profoundly moved by it, but have not noticed the color or drawing, you may be sure that they are technically perfect."

"An artist must possess consummate technique in order to make us forget it."

"The great difficulty and crowning glory of art is to paint, to draw, to write, naturally and simply."

"Painting, literature, music, are more closely allied than the public usually admit. They are merely different means of expression."

"A critic recently denounced my Victor Hugo, declaring the treatment belonged not to sculpture but to music. He said it reminded him of a symphony by Beethoven. Heaven grant that he spoke the truth!"

"For to me, this word Art, in its largest sense, signifies those who take pleasure in their work... Artist-carpenters who adjust with joy dovetails and mortises; artist-masons who handle lovingly their trowels; artist-cab drivers, proud of treating their horses humanely-what an ideal state of society that would be."

"To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists."

"The search in modem life is for utility; the endeavor is to improve existence materially. Every day, science invents new processes for the feeding, clothing, or transportation of man; she manufactures cheaply inferior products in order to give adulterated luxuries to the greatest number — though it is true that she has also made real improvements in all that ministers to our daily wants. But it is no longer a question of spirit, of thought, of dreams. Art is dead."

"Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit by which Nature herself is animated. It is the joy of the intellect which sees clearly into the Universe and which recreates it, with conscientious vision. Art is the most sublime mission of man, since it is the expression of thought seeking to understand the world and to make it understood."

"But to-day, mankind believes itself able to do without Art. It does not wish to meditate, to contemplate, to dream; it wishes to enjoy physically. The heights and the depths of truth are indifferent to it; it is content to satisfy its bodily appetites. Mankind to-day is brutish — it is not the stuff of which artists are made."

"Art, moreover, is taste. It is the reflection of the artist's heart upon all the objects that he creates. It is the smile of the human soul upon the house and ui>on the furnishing. It is the charm of thought and of sentiment embodied in all that is of use to man. But how many of our contemporaries fed the necessity of taste in house or furnishing? Formerly, in old France, Art was everywhere. The smallest bourgeois, even the peasant, made use only of articles which pleased the eye. Their chairs, their tables, their pitchers and their pots were beautiful. Today Art is banished from daily life. People say that the useful need not be beautiful. All is ugly, all is made in haste and without grace by stupid machines. The artist is regarded as an antagonist. Ah, my dear Gsell, you wish to jot down an artist's musings. Let me look at you! You really are an extraordinary man!""

"I am not at their orders, but at those of Nature! My confreres doubtless have their reasons for working as you have said. But in thus doing violence to nature and treating human beings like puppets, they run the risk of producing lifeless and artificial work..."

"As for me, seeker after truth and student of life as I am, I shall take care not to follow their example. I take from life the movements I observe, but it is not I who impose them. Even when a subject which I am working on compels me to ask a model for a certain fixed pose, I indicate it to him, but I carefully avoid touching him to place him in the position, for I will reproduce only what reality spontaneously offers me. I obey Nature in everything, and I never pretend to command her. My only ambition is to be servilely faithful to her."

"I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances. But, after all, the only principle in Art is to copy what you see. Dealers in esthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal. There is no recipe for improving nature."

"Now, to the great artist, everything in nature has character; for the unswerving directness of his observation searches out the hidden meaning of all things. And that which is considered ugly in nature often presents more character than that which is termed beautiful, because in the contractions of a sickly countenance, in the lines of a vicious face, in all deformity, in all decay, the inner truth shines forth more clearly than in features that are regular and healthy."

"To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth. He has only to look into a human face in order to read there the soul within — not a feature deceives him; hypocrisy is as transparent as sincerity — the line of a forehead, the least lifting of a brow, the flash of an eye, reveal to him all the secrets of a heart."

"Or he may study the hidden mind of the animal. A mixture of feelings and of thoughts, of dumb intelligences and of rudimentary affections, he reads the whole humble moral life of the beast in its eyes and in its movements. He is even the confidant of nature. The trees, the plants talk to him like friends. The old gnarled oaks speak to him of their kindliness for the human race whom they protect beneath their sheltering branches. The flowers commune with him by the gracious swaying of their stalks, by the singing tones of their petals — each blossom amidst the grass is a friendly word addressed to him by nature."

"Now color — it is to this remark that I wished to lead — is the flower of fine modelling. These two qualities always accompany each other, and it is these qualities which give to every masterpiece of the sculptor the radiant appearance of living flesh."

"It is a false idea that drawing in itself can be beautiful. It is only beautiful through the truths and the feelings that it translates. The crowd admires artists, who, strong in subject, elegantly pen contours destitute of significance, and who plant their figures in pretentious poses. It goes into ecstasies over poses which are never seen in nature, and which are considered artistic because they recall the posturings of the Italian models who offer themselves at the studio door. That is what is generally called beautiful drawing. It is really only sleight-of-hand, fit to astonish boobies."

"Of course, there is drawing in art as there is style in literature. Style that is mannered, that strains after effect, is bad. No style is good except that which effaces itself in order to concentrate all the attention of the reader upon the subject treated, upon the emotion rendered."

"The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who wishes to attract praise to his style, resemble the soldier who plumes himself on his unif onn but refuses to go into battle, or the farmer who polishes the ploughshare instead of driving it into the earth."

"In general, it is possible to say that in artists as deliberate, as careful as [Durer and Holbein], drawing is particularly tight and the color is as cold as the verity of mathematics. In other artists, on the contrary, in those who are the poets of the heart, like Raphael, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, line has more suppleness and color, more winning tenderness. In others whom we call realists that is to say, whose sensibility is more exterior, in Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, for example, line has a living charm with its force and its repose, and the color sometimes bursts into a fanfare of sunlight, sometimes fades into mist. So, the modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them drawing and color are better or worse than in others."

"If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul; that alone matters; it is that which the sculptor or painter should seek beneath the mask of features."

"An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth. When a good sculptor models a torso, he not only represents the muscles, but the life which animates them — more than the life, the force that fashioned them and communicated to them, it may be, grace or strength, or amorous charm, or indomitable will. In the works of Michael Angelo, the creative force seems to rumble; in those of Luca della Robbia it smiles divinely. So each sculptor, following his temperament, lends to nature a soul either terrible or gentle."

"The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there Millet read suffering and resignation. Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where, then, can you find a more religious man? Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities."

"Ch. VIII Mystery in Art, p. 179-180"

"When I was quite young, as far back as I remember, I drew, but the gift is nothing without the will to make it worth while. The artist must have the patience of water that eats away the rock drop by drop."

"Michelangelo, revealed me to myself, revealed to me the truth of forms. I went to Florence to find what I possessed in Paris and elsewhere, but it is he who taught me this."

"My principles are the laws of experience."

"I am not a rhetorician, but a man of action."

"The streets of Paris, with their shops of old furniture, etchings, and works of art, are a veritable museum, far less tiring than official museums, and from which one imbibes just as much as one can."

"Admiration, is a joy daily kindled afresh... I talk out of the -fullness of life; it belongs to me in a sense larger than that of ownership."

"Were this thoroughly understood, industrial art would be entirely revolutionized — industrial art, that barbarous term, an art which concerns itself with commerce and profit."

"The young artists of to-day understand nothing; they copy to satiety the classic ornaments and designs, and reproduce them in so cold a manner that they lose all meaning. The ancients obtained their designs from nature. They found their models in the garden, even in the vegetable garden. They drew their inspiration from its source. The cabbage-leaf, the oak-leaf, the clover, the thistle, and the brier are the motives of the Gothic capital. It is not photographic truth, but living truth, that we must seek in art."

"I am pervaded by the marvel of this art; but I cannot as yet explain it to myself. The Gothic is the world foreshortened. Where am I to begin? For more than thirty years I have been accumulating and comparing my observations. Perhaps eventually I shall succeed in deducing the rule, the law of divine intelligence; but perhaps I shall not have sufficient time. Then it will be the task of another, younger than myself, who will start his researches earlier, and who, besides, will have been informed by me."

"Take more room, examine my 'Gate' from a little farther off, and you will see once more the effect of the whole — the effect of unity which charms you when it is deprived of its ornamentation. You must understand that my sculpture is so calculated as to melt into the principal masses. For that matter, it completes them by modeling them into the light. The essential designs are there: it is possible that in the course of the final work I may find it necessary to diminish such or such a projection, to fill out such or such a pool of shadow; nevertheless, leave this difficulty to my fifty years of artisanship and experience, and you may be sure that quite by myself I shall find the best way of finishing my work."

"Yes, they are beautiful... The shirt, the blouse are garments the folds of which yield simple planes and effects that, rightly rendered, are those of true sculpture. But there is something better still, and that is sackcloth. If I had clothed my 'Burghers of Calais' in sackcloth, they would certainly be more beautiful. I did not dare to. Some one else will do this and will succeed. It is sufficient to express an idea and leave it to its destiny."

"One can never do anything so beautiful as nature."

"I sacrificed to the mania of the age, which is to overload things. My modeling is there, the eloquence of the gesture also. The rest would only spoil the essential things. It is a stroke of genius. I am going to write to the under-secretary of state that my monument is ready."

"The biblical times have come back again, the great invasions of the Medes and the Persians. Has the world, then, reached the point where it deserves to be punished for the egotistical epicureanism in which it has slumbered?"

"Why then should I clothe him to make him look ridiculous in the foolish masculine fashions of his time? There is nothing more banal than these statues of recent notabilities, to be seen in every big city of Europe, masquerading as tailors' models of their ugly period. Man's naked form on the other hand belongs to no particular moment in history ; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages."

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely."

"The sculptor must learn to reproduce the surface, which means all that vibrates on the surface: spirit, soul, love, passion — life. ... Sculpture is thus the art of hollows and mounds, not of smoothness, or even polished planes."

"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I do not need."

"The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist."

"The artist must learn the difference between the appearance of an object and the interpretation of this object through his medium. The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation."

"In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred even when it takes for a subject the worst excesses of desire; since it has in view only the sincerity of observation, it cannot debase itself. A true work of art is always noble, even when it translates the stirrings of the brute, for at that moment, the artist who has produced it had as his only objective, the most conscientious rendering possible of the impression he has felt."

"Patience is also a form of action."

"You would not believe my suffering... Death would be sweeter... I can't go another day without seeing you. Atrocious madness, it's the end. I won't be able to work any more. Malevolent goddess! And yet I love you furiously."

"I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age."

"Rodin is himself a cathedral."

"Art is complex, I said to Rodin, who smiled because he felt that I was struggling with nature.. ..the beauty of Rodin’s art is.. ..in the thoughts he embodied. As for me, I just take a walk on the beach. A young girl appears. From that girl walking there emanates a soul. That is That is at I want to give my statue, that thing alive, yet immaterial. In composing the figure of one young girl I must give the impression that there are all young girls. From the spirit, my feeling passes into my fingers"

"My sculpture is altogether different from Rodin’s.. ..In sculpture he [Rodin] always sees the flesh first."

"For my taste, sculpture should have as little movement as possible.. ..Rodin himself remains quiet; he puts movement into his rendering of muscles, but the whole remains quiet and calm."

"Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands."

"There is another Set of Gentry more noxious to the art than these, and those are your Picture-Jobbers from abroad, who are always ready to raise a great Cry in the Prints, whenever they think their Craft is in Danger; and indeed it is in their Interest to depreciate every English Work, as hurtful to their Trade, of continually importing Ship Loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madona's, and other dismal, dark Subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental; on which they scrawl the terrible cramp Names of some Italian Masters, and fix on us poor Englishmen the Character of Universal Dupes."

"After the March to Finchley, the next print I engraved, was the Roast Reef of old England; which took its rise from a visit I paid to France the preceding year. The first time an Englishman goes from Dover to Calais, he must be struck with the different face of things at so little a distance. A farcical pomp of war, pompous parade of religion, and much bustle with very little business. To sum up all, poverty, slavery, and innate insolence, covered with an affectation of politeness, give you even here a true picture of the manners of the whole nation... By the fat friar, who stops the lean cook that is sinking under the weight of a vast sirloin of beef, and two of the military bearing off a great kettle of soup maigre, I meant to display to my own countrymen the striking difference between the food, priests, soldiers, &c. of two nations so contiguous, that in a clear day one coast may be seen from the other."

"[T]he connoisseurs and I are at war you know; and because I hate them, they think I hate Titian—and let them!"

"Any two opposite colours of the rainbow (eg yellow and blue) , form a third between them, thus imparting to each other their peculiar qualities . The sight of what they were originally is quite lost, and instead, a most pleasing green is found, which colour, nature has chosen for the vestment of the earth, and with the beauty of which the eye never tires."

"Experience teaches us that the eye may be subdued and forced into forming and disposing of objects even quite contrary to what it would naturally see them, by pre judgement of the mind or some other persuasive motive."

"A great many people seem to delight most in what they least understand."

"On why our features sag, It is by the natural and unaffected movements of the muscles, caused by the passions of the mind, that every man's character would in some measure be written in his face, by the time he arrives at forty years of age."

"In pictures of comic character, rich humour, and moral satire, and particularly in displaying the human figure and countenance in its common and popular forms, he certainly excelled all other painters... Hogarth was certainly an artist of peculiar and distinguished talents. He stood alone in art, and formed a school of his own. He was at once the Pictorial Satirist, Moralist, and Historian of the age in which he lived. I use the latter term, from the conviction that his pictures will always be referred to with pleasure and advantage, as recording the features, costume, and corporeal characteristics of many eminent and illustrious persons, and of many public and private events of his time."

"He pleaded the cause of virtue—it was vice that he painted in disgusting colours; and though the judicious spectator may occasionally discover grossness in the production of this great Artist, yet they were such as scenes from nature produced, and such as the great Moralist always contrasted, by displaying virtue at the same time in the loveliest attire, and giving her the most attractive expression."

"William Hogarth was rather below the middle size; his eye was peculiarly bright and piercing; his look shrewd, sarcastic, and intelligent; the forehead high and round. He was active in person, bustling in manner, and fond of affecting a little state and importance: of a temper cheerful, joyous, and companionable; fond of mirth and good fellowship; desirous of saying strong and pointed things;—ardent in friendship—and in resentment. His lively conversation—his knowledge of character—his readiness of speech—and quickness of retort, made many covet his company, who were sometimes the objects of his satire; but he employed his wit on those who were present, and spared or defended the absent. His personal spirit was equal to his satiric talents; he provoked, with his pencil, the temper of those whom it was not prudent to offend; with him no vice nor folly found shelter behind wealth, or rank, or power."

"[H]is character as an artist is to be gathered from numerous works, at once original and unrivalled. His fame has flown far and wide; his skill as an engraver spread his reputation as a painter; and all who love the dramatic representation of actual life—all who have hearts to be gladdened by humour—all who are pleased with judicious and well-directed satire—all who are charmed with the ludicrous looks of popular folly—and all who can be moved with the pathos of human suffering—are admirers of Hogarth. That his works are unlike those of other men, is his merit, not his fault. He belonged to no school of art; he was the produce of no academy; no man living or dead had any share in forming his mind, or in rendering his hand skilful. He was the spontaneous offspring of the graphic spirit of his country, as native to the heart of England as independence is, and he may be fairly called, in his own walk, the first-born of her spirit."

"The ingenious Mr Hogarth [is one of the most] useful Satyrists that any Age hath produced."

"These derisive prints give only a distorted idea of a world which to Hogarth was always strange and uncongenial: that of the patron supporting an obedient circle and in addition favouring the foreigner to the detriment of a home-grown art."

"They said he could not paint flesh. There's flesh and blood for you."

"The Temple of Nature was his academy,—and his topography the map of the human mind."

"His engravings, though coarse, are forcible, in a degree scarcely to be paralleled. Every figure is drawn from the quarry of nature; and, though seldom polished, is always animated."

"[T]he matchless Election Entertainment... [i]n that inimitable print (which in my judgment as far exceeds the more known and celebrated March to Finchley as the best comedy exceeds the best farce that ever was written) let a person look till he be saturated... when he shall have sufficiently admired this wealth of genius, let him fairly say what is the result left on his mind. Is it an impression of the vileness and worthlessness of his species? or is it not the general feeling which remains, after the individual faces have ceased to act sensibly upon his mind, a kindly one in favour of his species? was not the general air of the scene wholesome? did it do the heart hurt to be among it? Something of a riotous spirit, to be sure, is there, some worldly-mindedness in some of the faces, a Dodingtonian smoothness which does not promise any superfluous degree of sincerity in the fine gentleman who has been the occasion of calling so much good company together: but is not the general cast of expression in the faces, of the good sort? do they not seem cut out of the good old rock, substantial English honesty?"

"Hogarth adopted a new line of art, purely English; his merits are known to the public, more from his prints than from his paintings: both deserve our attention. His pictures often display beautiful colouring, as well as accurate drawing: his subjects generally convey useful lessons of morality, and are calculated to improve the man, as well as the artist: and he teaches with effect, because he delights while he instructs. It has been said of him, that in his pictures he composed comedies; his humour never fails to excite mirth, and it is directed against the fit objects of ridicule or contempt. The powers of his pencil were not perverted to the purposes of personal attack; the application of his satire was general, and the end at which he aimed was the reformation of folly or of vice."

"It cannot, indeed, be truly said of Hogarth, that he improved the practice of the arts of Painting and Engraving, which he professed; but he merited the praise of having more powerfully exhibited their moral utility than any of his predecessors."

"Hogarth resembles Butler, but his subjects are more universal, and amidst all his pleasantry, he observes the true end of comedy, reformation; there is always a moral to his pictures. Sometimes he rose to tragedy, not in the catastrophe of kings and heroes, but in marking how vice conducts insensibly and incidentally to misery and shame. He warns against encouraging cruelty and idleness in young minds, and discerns how the different vices of the great and the vulgar lead by various paths to the same unhappiness."

"It is to Hogarth's honour that in so many scenes of satire or ridicule, it is obvious that ill-nature did not guide his pencil. His end is always reformation, and his reproofs general."

"In only one branch of painting, and that not the most honoured even in our own country, did we produce a unique, idiosyncratic national school. That is the school of narrative composition founded by Hogarth and perfected a hundred years later. It would be absurd to claim a place for him beside Titian and Velasquez, even beside Goya. He was in no sense a great painter, but he is a national figure comparable to Dr Johnson or Trollope, of whom we may well be proud... The school which Hogarth founded may be defined as the detailed representation of contemporary groups, posed to tell a story and inculcate a moral precept. The figures are not merely caught and preserved in certain attitudes; previous and subsequent events are implicit in the scene portrayed. Hogarth's moral lessons are commonplace, commonsensical: that extravagance leads to destitution, debauchery to madness, crime to the gallows, loveless marriage to infidelity and so on. It remained for the more delicate sentiment of the Victorians to refine on these maxims."

"He was pure Cockney, intolerant of everything foreign. English painting, so far as it has excelled at all, has done so in inverse relation to the influence of Italy and France. I do not know of any foreign painter except Svoboda who rivalled the English School in their own métier. Comparable Parisians of the nineteenth century tended towards the lubricious or the allegorical. There is one corner of the artistic field that will remain for ever England."

"Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate."

"The artist lives only day by day, and is the recipient of the things that surround him; he transposes sensations from outside, according to what the fate reserves him, but transforms them relentlessly and tenaciously, in a manner determined by him alone."

"They [his own fantasies he made in strange pencil drawings then] hover before me now in drifting color, more beautiful than I can possibly paint them.. ..I yearn for the day when I will have found my color harmonies, my harmonies."

"It [the city Berlin] stinks of perfume, they have water on their brains and they live as food for bacilli and shamelessly like dogs."

"I had innumerable visions at that time [c. 1903]; wherever I looked, Nature was alive, the sky, the clouds, on every stone and among the branches of the trees, everywhere my creatures stirred and lived their still or wild, lively lives, arousing my excitement and crying out to be painted."

"a written note of Nolde, 1903, on the island of Alsen; as quoted by , in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 77"

"I produce a form, an impression of light, a beauty of tones.. .The etchings are now full of life, an ecstasy, a dance, a gentle motion and fluctuation in tones."

"Therefore etching produces a different result from the ten drawings of the same character.. .[The etchings are] better, in that they are fresher, bolder, and freer.."

"You speak of errors.. .Men who are so correct and flawless are mostly boring; small weaknesses can be loved.. .One chief characteristic of the etchings gives me much pleasure: because out of them streams forth a tremendous life."

"Every true artist creates new values, new beauty.. .When you notice anarchy, recklessness, or licentiousness in works of contemporary art, when you notice crass coarseness and brutality, then occupy yourself long and painstakingly precisely with these works, and you will suddenly recognize how the seeming recklessness transforms itself into freedom, the coarseness into high refinements. Harmless pictures are seldom worth anything."

"It was in mid-summer [1906]. The colors of the flowers attracted me irresistibly and almost sudden I was painting. My first small gardens paintings were born."

"I want so much for my work to grow forth out of the material, just as in nature the plants grow forth out of the earth, which corresponds to their character. In the print 'Lebensfreude' [Joy of living] I worked for the most part with my finger, and the effect I hoped for was achieved. There is hidden in the print a bit of wantonness, in the representation as well as in the boldness of the technique. If I were to make the "ragged and moving" contours "correctly" in the academic sense, this effect would not nearly be achieved."

"Nobody had made the same full use of the properties of acids and metal in this way before. Having drown on the copper-plate and left areas of it bare, I laid it in the bath of acid and achieved effects that astonished even me, full of subtle nuances."

"None of the free [ a.o. his first religious] imaginative pictures that I painted at this time [c.1909] or later, had any kind of model, or even a clearly conceived idea. It was quite easy for me to imagine a work right down to its smallest details, and in fact my preconceptions were usually far more beautiful than the painted outcome: I became the copyist of the idea. Therefore I liked to avoid thinking about a picture beforehand, all I needed was a vague idea of luminescences of colour. The work then developed of its own accord under my hands."

"In the working of wood and for the determining of its character I had had enough experience in my five-year pursuit of woodcutting. I also always gladly let the various charming grainings and sometimes the knots become involved in the printing."

"A new day. Calm as seldom the beginning of such a one. Did I dream? No! Dream and contented pure was the night.. .It is the sure certainty of having found unity with nature, this calm causes one of the strongest experiences. Man, air, trees, world are laid bare and are one! Contented sleep releases the limbs. We await full moon. Await the dance!"

"'The most perfect art was Greek art. Raphael is the greatest of all masters in painting'. Such were the doctrines of every art teacher only twenty or thirty years ago."

"Since then, much has changed. We do not care for Raphael, and are less enthusiastic about the statues of the so-called golden age of Greece. Our predecessors’ ideals are not ours. Works signed by great names over the centuries appeal to us less. In the hurry and bustle of their times, worldly-wise artists created works for Popes and palaces. It is the ordinary people who laboured in their workshops and of whose lives scarcely anything is now known, whose very names have not come down to us, that we love and respect today in their plain, large-scale carvings in the cathedrals of Naumburg, Magdeburg and Bamberg."

"Not long ago only a few artistic periods were thought suitable for museums. Then they were joined by exhibitions of Coptic and early Christian art, Greek terracotta's and vases, Persian and Islamic art. But why is Indian, Chinese and Javanese art still classified under ethnology or anthropology? And why is the art of primitive peoples not considered art at all?"

"In our own time, every earthenware vessel or piece of jewelry, every utensil or garment, has to be designed on paper before it is made. Primitive peoples, however, create their works with the material itself in the artist's hand, held in his fingers. They aspire to express delight in form and the love of creating it. Absolute originality, the intense and often grotesque expression of power and life in very simple forms – that may be why we like these works of native art."

"Dualism is particularly important in both my paintings and my graphics."

"Pictures are spiritual beings. The soul of the painter lives within them."

"There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every color holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colors are colors, tones tones.. ..and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed."

"How glad I am to be almost alone as an artist among artists, with the whole swarm of artists somewhere else."

"Yellow can paint happiness and also pain.. .Every color harbors its soul within, delighting or repelling and inspiring me."

"The materials, the colors, were like friendship and love, both wanting to fulfill themselves in the most beautiful form."

"..colors are my notes for fashioning sounds and chords with and against one another."

"If I were tied to the letter of the Scriptures and rigid dogma, I believe I could not have painted these profoundly felt paintings about the Eucharist and the 'Pentecost' [religious paintings, he made c. 1909-11) I had to be artistically free - not have God before me. like a steely Assyrian ruler, but God in me, hot and holy like Christ's love."

"When I was a child, eight or ten years old, I made a solemn promise to God that, when I grew up, I would write him a hymn for the prayer-book. The vow has never been fulfilled. But I have painted a large number of pictures, and there must be more than thirty religious ones. I wonder if they will do instead."

"a later confession to his friend [art-teacher]; as quoted by , in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 76"

"To get straight to the point, the local group of artist called Die Brücke would reckon it a high honor to be able to welcome you as a member. Of course you will know as little about Die Brücke as we knew about you before your exhibition at [Arnold's [gallery Arnold at Dresden]. Now, one of the aims of Die Brücke is to attract all the revolutionary and fermenting elements to itself – that's the meaning of the name Brücke [Bridge]. The group also arranges several exhibitions a year, which it sends on tour in Germany.. .Now, dear Herr Nolde, think as you like and what you like, we hope this offer is the proper price for your tempests od colour."

"His pictures [of Nolde, which Jawlensky met in 1912] remind me of my own in the strength of their expression. I have a passionate love for Nolde and his art."

"Abstract artists, far removed from this earth, or fugitives from it, sometimes forget that Nolde exists. Nor so I, even on my furthest flights, from which I always manage to find my way back to earth to rest in the gravitational force I find there. Nolde is more than 'of' the earth, he is the sphere's guardian spirit. Domiciled elsewhere oneself, one is always aware of the cousin in the deep, the kinsman of one's choice."

"..The same sense of the.. ..individuality and the nature-given force of a material that led Nolde in his etchings to allow the etching acid, above all, to work, made him use in his woodcuts not the end of the block, which had been utilized until then, but the long side.. .With Nolde it is precisely on the structure of the wood that the language of his cuts comes to depend and by which it is stimulated."

"Between Utenwarf and Seebüll [near Neukirchen ], Nolde found the landscape that promised to fulfill a yearning - one of the fundamental experiences of German Expressionism - a yearning for the fusion of the self and the cosmos, the striving for the 'primal states' of human life, when the outer world and the inner world were still one."

"In Hamburg, I was not able to find Artin. On the other hand, I did visit a large exhibit of Nolde's work, which left a lasting impression upon me. Later, back in Paris, I spoke enthusiastically of him to several friends who were devotees of modern painting. One of them, who ran a well-known art gallery, cut me short: "He has never been exhibited in Paris." Apparently, this settled his hash."

"Abstract art.. searches for new ways to achieve harmony and equilibrium."

"In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression (like the myths) reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear."

"1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks. 2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. 3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way. 4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth. 5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. (Rothko said this is the essence of academicism.) 6. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. 7. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art."

"The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time."

"By now it has become a formula to attach new ideas on the grounds of extremism and unintelligibility. Every phase of modern art has in turn been attacked on these grounds, until the new phase became acceptable. Although the present attacks are focused on those who emphasize the subjective side of abstract painting, the threat to other sections of the modern painting is implicit. The attacks are always focused on those who are considered the black sheep, for reasons of non-conformity. They are conspicuous, because they are different, and therefore may be easy targets. [Gottlieb's comment on the attacks on artistic freedom in the United States, 1948]"

"The true artist always refuses to conform to any standards others than his own. That’s why the attacks in Russia against Shostakovitch and Prokofiev are identical to the attacks that have been made here against American pioneers of abstract painting like Davis, Holty, or Morris. In Russia it was Malevich and Gabo, in this country at the moment it is people like Rothko, Baziotes, Pollock, my self and many others who are being attacked. The names may vary, but the methods, the motives; the objects of attack are essentially the same. Only meritocracy is forever immune, because it is forever ready to conform. [quote of Gottlieb, on the attacks on artistic freedom in 1948]"

"Now let acknowledge the fact that to explain the meaning of painting is difficult. And when the form and the content are really new, there is not even a vocabulary with which to attempt to explain the new work. This is a problem for critics and a difficult problem. I think it is about time for the critics to face this problem, as well as the fact that there are a few new forms and ideas in modern painting, that these have validity, that they are here to stay and will be developed whether opposed or not... They should investigate the serious ideas underlying the painting which they malign. [Gottlieb's quote on the attacks of critics on abstract art, 1948]"

"If we depart form tradition, it is out of knowledge, not innocence."

"As for a few others, the vital task was a wedding of abstraction and surrealism. Out of these opposites something new could emerge, and Gorky’s work is a part of the evidence that this is true. What he felt, I suppose, was a sense of polarity, not of dichotomy; that opposites could exist simultaneously within a body, within a painting or within an entire art.. .These are the opposites poles in his work. Logic and irrationality; violence and gentleness; happiness and sadness, surrealism and abstraction. Out of these elements I think Gorky evolved his style."

"I have always worked on the assumption that if something is valid and meaningful to me, it will also be valid and meaningful to many others. Not to everyone of course. On the basis of this assumption I do not think of an audience when I work, but only of my own reactions. By the same token I do not worry whether what I am doing is art or not. If what I paint is expressive, if it seems to communicate the feeling that is important to me, then I am not concerned if my work does not have marked earmarks of art. My work has been called abstract, surrealistic, totemistic and primitive.. ..I chose my own label and called my paintings 'Pictographs'.."

"People frequently ask why my canvases are compartmentalized. No one ever asks this about a house. A man with a large family would not choose to live in a one-room house.. .I am like a man with a large family and must have many rooms. The children of my imagination occupy the various compartments of my painting, each independent and occupying its own place. At the same time they have the proper atmosphere in which to function together, in harmony and as a unified group. One can say that my paintings are like a house, in which each occupant has a room of his own.’"

"We are going to have perhaps a thousand years of non-representational painting."

"To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all.. ..on the contrary it is realism of our time."

"We were outcasts, roughly expressionist painters not acceptable to most dealers and collectors.(A reference to the TEN group of painters)."

"The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images."

"To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk."

"My favourite symbols were those I did not understand."

"Recently I was at the home of Thomas Hess and he had a painting hanging there and I said to my wife: 'Is that one of my paintings?'. And she said: 'Well, it looks like one of yours from around 1942'. But then we realized that it wasn't one of my but one of Baziote's paintings.. ..at that time, 1942, the differences in our paintings may have seemed very great, but now [1960] the difference is not so great apparently.. ..For example; in the early forties Rothko and I decided to paint a certain subject matter. Perhaps if we saw some of those paintings now.. ..they might not seem so different as they did at the time. However, at no point was there ever any sort of a doctrine or a programma or anything that would make a school. I think it was simply a situation in which all of the painters were at that time; they were trying to break away from certain things."

"..more significant, perhaps, was the fact that during the war [1940-1945] many of the Surrealists came [from Europe] to America and we were able to see them as just other human beings like ourselves and not as mythical characters who had superhuman capacities and talents. I think that there was a feeling after meeting them [a.o. Marcel Duchamp, Andre Masson, André Breton, Max Ernst ] personally that, well, if these men can have these great achievements and talents, there is hope for us [younger American artists]"

"For example, Rothko and I came to an agreement on the question of the subject matter; if we were to do something which could develop in some direction other than the accepted directions of that time, it would be necessary to use different subjects to begin with, and 1942, we embarked on a series of paintings that attempted to use mythological subject matter, preferably from Greek mythology. I did a series of paintings on the theme of Oedipus and Rothko did a series of paintings on other Greek themes… ..this offered a possibility of a way out [of a. o. Social Realism and Cubism ]"

"[David Sylvester asked Gottlieb, he is aware of the impact of the city New York on his painting:] Definitely I am. When I was in Paris last spring, my original plan was to go for four months and to paint there, and a number of people urged me to stay. That wanted to see what would happen, how my painting would change. But I felt strongly after being there less than a month that it was necessary for me to come back to New York, because I feel a certain rhythm in New York I don't feel in Paris.. ..there is a tempo in the life of New York which is exhilarating and I feel that this gets into one's painting. It's the pulse, not the look. I'am not involved with the external appearance of the city; it’s the vibrations.]"

"I was looking for some sort of systematic way of getting down these subjective images and I had always admired, particularly admired the early Italian painters who proceeded the Renaissance and I very much liked some of the altarpieces in which there would be, for example the story of Christ told in a series of boxes.. .And it seemed to me this was a very rational method of conveying something. So I decided to try it. But I was not interested in telling, in giving something its chronological sequence. What I wanted to do was give something, to present what material I was interested in simultaneously so that you would get an instantaneous impact from it. So I made boxes.."

"I wanted to do something figurative. Well I couldn’t visualize a whole man.. .I felt that I wanted to make a painting primarily with painterly means. So I flattened out my canvas and made them roughly rectangular divisions, with lines going out in four directions. That is, vertically and horizontally.. .And then I would free associate, putting whatever came to my mind freely within these different rectangles... I thought of it as related tot the automatic writing the surrealists were interested in."

"Well, I was interested in a subjective image [in the 1940's].. ..stemming perhaps from the subconscious. Because the external world as far as I was concerned had been totally explored in painting and there was a whole ripe new area in the inner world that we all have. Now in order to externalise this you have to use visual means and so the visual means may have some relation tot the external world. However what I was trying to focus on was what I experienced within my mind, within my feelings, rather than on the external world which I can see."

"Around 1950-51... I was finally getting away from the pictographs and looking for something... So it was necessary to find other forms, a different changed concept. So finally after a certain period of transition I hit on dividing the canvas into two parts, which then became like an imaginary landscape... What I was really trying to do when I got away from the pictographs was to make this notion of the kind of polarity clearer and more extreme. So the most extreme thing that I could think of doing at the time was dividing the canvas in half, make two big divisions and put something in the upper division and something in the lower section. So I painted that way... I would say roughly from 1952 to 56/57. About five years."

"See, I never understand why my paintings hold together because I don't have any tricks for doing it and that is usually what makes a painting academic. There were some well-known devices for making a painting work hold together, ave cohesion. This seemed to be organized. But I don't necessarily have to know what the mechanism is. For me, what it really is, is something you have in yourself that makes you feel, it gives the painting a feeling of unity, of oneness, and being of all of one piece."

"After doing the imaginary landscapes until say 1956, in ’57 I came out with the first Burst painting... There was a different type of space than I had ever used and it was a further clarification of what I was trying to do. The thing that was interesting that it was a return to a focal point, but it was a focal point with the kind of space that existed in traditional painting. Because this was like a solitary image or two images that were just floating in the canvas space. They had to hold the space and they also had to create all the movement – that took place within the rectangle."

"When I started doing the 'Bursts' [paintings Gottlieb started c. 1958] I began to do part of the painting horizontally. It was necessary to do that because I was working with a type of paint which had a particular viscosity, which flowed, and if it were on a vertical surface it would just run. If it were on a horizontal surface, I could control it... I was using a combination of brushes and knives, palette knives... and spatulas... I’ve tried everything, rollers, rags, I’ve put paint on with everything."

"[explaining the close connection between Gottlieb-Newman-Rothko:] They were friends. They all were protégées of w:Milton Avery's, the three of them. They all adored Milton Avery. Oh, I don't know if they adored him, but they revered him.. ..And Milton Avery was the big powerful mover in their lives. Of the three in terms of professionalism, Gottlieb was the most professional always. He never took unto himself this role of, "I have the key to the absolute," a term that Barney Newman was very fond of invoking. They knew each other all along. And if I'm not mistaken, all three of them were married to school teachers."

"All my work keeps going like a pendulum; it seems to swing back to something I was involved with earlier, or it moves between horizontality and verticality, circularity, or a composite of them. For me, I suppose that change is the only constant."

"With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner, to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication."

"One could go on forever as to whether the paint should be thick or thin, whether to paint the woman or the square, hard-edge or soft, but after a while such questions become a bore. They are merely problems in aesthetics, having only to do with the outer man. But the painting I have in mind, painting in which inner and outer are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subjects and moves into the realm of the inevitable."

"I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it."

"I think I stayed in the Mural division [ WPA, early 1940's] until it became A War Service Project and then I was relegated to do a specific job. There was a coordinated move, they had a new president that was being inaugurated for CCNY and they were doing a large – trying to show how higher education was involved in promoting the war effort, with the classes they were teaching, so that I did this work for more than a year before WPA terminated."

"That's right, and then I worked with him [ Hans Hofmann ] a little more than that. When I had time I could come in and use his studio, in a sense, that is to say, if it was a still-life class, I could be doing any kind of abstraction at that point, using that as a take-off point.. ..here again, when you spoke earlier about Cubism, I say I really didn't get the first impact, the full impact of it [Cubism], until I worked with Hofmann."

"I was quite active politically just previous to this, and I'm leading into this time when I was on WPA and there was a group called the Artist's Union which was organized, so that I was extremely active in that. Again that meant more meetings and fighting for artists' rights on the WPA.. .I would say it gave me an opportunity to continue through a period of where one had a livelihood to deal with and/or painting. This allowed for painting and I'd say in that sense it was extremely influencing.. ..WPA itself ended after the War Service Project and by way of terminating, it allowed you to take one of several war courses that were being offered. After which you were supposed to be able to go into that field and earn a living. I took drafting."

"My recollection of meeting him [ Jackson Pollock ] outside of this one incident, was at a show that John Graham did at the MacMillin Gallery [1942]. He invited someone called Jackson Pollock and myself, and, I believe, de Kooning. There were three unknown Americans put into that show and it turned out we were the three and it was through that source, my trying to track down the other unknown American who was painting abstractly at that point, as though I knew them all in New York City.. ..and I promptly went up to Pollock's studio and that's when I say I met Pollock for the first time.. ..And then, you see, after I saw Pollock, met him, saw the work, I said, "I understand the third painter is de Kooning," and he said he didn't know de Kooning and I said, "Well, I do and I'll take you over and introduce you." So I brought Pollock up to de Kooning's studio. De Kooning was in a loft at that time because he was something, and that is how Pollock met De Kooning."

"He [ Hans Hofmann one of her art teachers] would come up to me [1937-38], look at my work, and do a critique half in English and half in German, but certainly nothing I could understand. When he left the room I would call George McNeil, who was then the monitor, over and I would ask: 'What did this man say to me?' Hoffman was teaching Cubism and that was pretty exciting. Matisse and Picasso were my highlights. It was as though I was swinging between them. First I started to work with color and then there was a heavy swing toward the linear."

"(Piet Mondrian's) comment was: 'You have a very strong inner rhythm. You must never lose it'. Then we moved on. Piet Mondrian had said something quiet beautiful to me. Hofmann was also excited and enthusiastic about what I was doing at this time [c. 1938] but his comment was: 'This is so good that you would not know it was done by a woman'. His was a double-edged compliment. But Mondrian’s evaluation rides through beautifully."

"Without getting complicated let me recapitulate my art training in the following way: the Academy first, the break with the Academy when I hit the Hofmann School which is Cubist. The next real break follows when I see Pollock’s work [1940-41] and once more another transition occurs.. .It was a force [Pollock’s work], a living force, the same sort of thing I responded to in Matisse, in Picasso, in Mondrian. Once more, I was hit that hard with what I saw... I began feeling the need to break with what I was doing and to approach something else."

"I went into my own black-out period [1942-45] which lasted two or three years where the canvases would simply build up until they’d get like stone and it was always just a gray mess. The image wouldn’t emerge, but I worked pretty regularly. I was fighting to find I knew not what, but I could no longer stay with what I had."

"In 1946 what I call my 'Little Image' began breaking through this [former] gray matter of mine. I felt fantastic relief that something was beginning to happen after all this time when there was nothing, nothing, nothing.. .The canvas is down on a floor or table and I am working out of a tiny can. In other words, I have to hold the paint so I can move it. But I wouldn’t have been using Duco [industrial paint, like Willem de Kooning did]. My paint would always have been oil and I could get the consistency of a thick pouring quality in it by squeezing it into a can and cutting it with turp [turpetine] – the way I use paint today.. .The only thing I can say with absolute assurance is that my 'Little Image' work starts about 1946 and ends in 1949."

"Well I think it [a 'Little Image' painting] does suggest hieroglyphics of some sort. It is a preoccupation of mine from way back and every once in a while it comes into my work again. For instance in my 1968 show at the Marlborough I have a painting called 'Kufic', an ancient form of Arabic writing. Every once in a while I fall back to what I call my mysterious writings. I haven no idea what this is about but it runs through periods of my work."

"I merge what I call the organic with what I call the abstract, which is what you are calling the geometric. As I see both scales, I need to merge these two in the ever-present. What they symbolize I have never stopped to decide. You might want to read it as matter and spirit and the need to merge as against the need to separate. Or it can be read as male and female."

"Right up until today Pollock [her husband and famous painter; died Aug. 1956] well takes a lot of mine time.. ..and while you ask 'How much did it take out of me as a creative artist', I ask simultaneously, 'What did it give?' It is a two-way affair at all times. I would give anything to have someone giving me what I was able to give Pollock."

"They [the younger woman artists in American Abstract Expressionism: Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell,] are the next generation and it is another scene, another story. You forget that in my generation Paris was still the leading school of painting and this situation was being changed by a tiny handful of artists to a scene called New York, America, which never before had a leading role in the art world. That didn’t happen just by reading a newspaper. Now the next generation comes in and they may think it is rough for them but it is a pie.. .We broke the ground."

"I do not mean extended, to mean esthetic definition of space. For me, it is a matter of whether the canvas allows me to breathe or not – if the canvas soars into space or if it is earthbound. When it is earthbound it irritates me enormously. I would like to soar in a canvas."

"I think every once in a while I feel the need to break my medium.. .if I have been doing a very large painting I like to drop into something in small scale. It is a challenge to go into this size. It is just to hold my own interest, and then each media has its own conditions."

"You have a very strong inner rhythm. You must never lose it."

"It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art."

"If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.. ..(they) express something real and existing in ourselves."

"For the first time a subject is present, not by virtue of its absence, but actually present, though its appearance is torn away, and only the structure bared. The Modern City! Precise, rectangular, squared, whether seen from above, below, or on the side; bright lights and sterilized life; Broadway, whites and blacks; and boogie-woogie; the underground music of the at once resigned and rebellious.. .Mondrian has left his white paradise, and entered the world. [1942, on the late painting Broadway Boogie Woogie of Piet Mondrian ]"

"We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world.. .If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self."

"For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are 'of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated'. Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience. [in the catalogue introduction for the first one-man-show of Clyfford Still]"

"I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible."

"The progression of a painter's work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood."

"The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition.. .We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist’s task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content."

"The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended."

"The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to revolution. Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore threats him As an anarchist. Society's logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist's path."

"It is Cézanne's feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling."

"Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world.. .The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life."

"Drama moves us: conflict is an inherent pattern in reality. Harmony moves us too: faced as we are with ever imminent disorder. It is a powerful idea. Van Gogh's drama and Seurat's silent harmony were born in the same country and epoch: but they do not contradict one another; they refer to different patterns among those which constitute reality."

"But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays [in 1946] is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the surrealists erred in supposing that one can do without a medium, that in attacking the medium one does not destroy just one means for getting into the unknown. Color and space relations constitute such a means because from them can be made structures which exhibit the various patterns of reality."

"Like the Cubists before them, the abstractionists felt a beautiful thing in perceiving how the medium can, of its own accord, carry one into the unknown, that is to the discovery of new structures. What an inspiration the medium is.."

"Like Rimbaud before them, the surrealists abandoned the aesthetic altogether; it takes a certain courage to leave poetry for Africa [as Rimbaud himself did]. They revealed their insight as essentially moral in never forgetting for a moment that most living is a process of conforming to an established order which is inhuman in its drives and consequences. Their hatred sustained them through all the humiliating situations in which the modern artist find himself, and led them to conceptions beyond the reach of more passive souls. For them true 'poetry' was freedom from mechanical social responses. No wonder they loved the work of children and the insane – if not the creatures themselves."

"[O]ne must agree with Rilke when he says that with 'nothing can one touch a work of art so little as with critical words...'. It was Marcel Duchamps who was critical, when he drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa. And so was Mondrian when he dreamed of the dissolution of painting, sculpture, and architecture into a transcendent ensemble."

"I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however, - I think it applies to other painters I know -, is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command."

"Since I have a deep sense of responsibility for the life my pictures will lead out in the world, I will with gratitude accept any form of their exposition in which their life and meaning can be maintained, and avoid all occasions where I think that this cannot be done.. ..unfortunately, there are few existing alternatives for the kind of activity which your museum represents. Nevertheless, in my own life at least, there must be some congruity between convictions and actions if I am to continue to function and work."

"It's a risky business to send a picture out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who could extend their affliction universally!"

"I am not an abstractionist...I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else...I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions...The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!"

"I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room."

"[the first ingredient of his work]... is a clear preoccupation with death - intimations of mortality."

"[I]t was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes...But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it. [his quote in 1959, looking back to the 1930s]"

"A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience."

"One does not paint for design students or historians but for human beings, and the reaction in human terms is the only thing that is really satisfactory to the artist. [in conversation with W.C. Seitz]"

"[I am] dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times."

"It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures.. ..these new shapes say.. ..what the symbols said. [Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s]"

"I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me."

"The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation.. .Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible."

"I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame. Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space.. .Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur. The great cubist pictures thus transcend and belie the implications of the cubist program."

"The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is the faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous; the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need."

"On shapes:"

"With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment."

"I use colors that have already been experienced through the light of day and through the state of mind of the total man. In other words, my colors are not colors that are laboratory tools which are isolated from all accidentals or impurities so that they have a specified identity or purity."

"..For example; in the early forties Rothko and I decided to paint a certain subject matter. Perhaps if we saw some of those paintings now.. ..they might not seem so different as they did at the time. However, at no point was there ever any sort of a doctrine or a program or anything that would make a school. I think it was simply a situation in which all of the painters [of the New York School] were at that time; they were trying to break away from certain things."

"Rothko and I came to an agreement on the question of the subject matter; if we were to do something which could develop in some direction other than the accepted directions of that time, it would be necessary to use different subjects to begin with, and 1942, we embarked on a series of paintings that attempted to use mythological subject matter, preferably from Greek mythology. I did a series of paintings on the theme of Oedipus and Rothko did a series of paintings on other Greek themes.. ..this offered a possibility of a way out [of a. o. w:Social Realism and Cubism ]"

"There is a moment of blinding light. There is a moment that seems like death, a paralysis. Then a new man, Paul, emerges from the experience. Rothko, the most famous example, changed his name, his wife and his style in a few months of profound self-questioning."

"I wanted to be soft like Rothko and ruthless like Ad Reinhardt."

"[B]ut Rothko was hypnotized by his own role and there was just one. The role was that of the Messiah-I have come; I have the word. I mean, Rothko had a very healthy self-worship and he did feel that he had discovered some great secret. He felt that this was of universal import...Rothko became totally involved in his own mythology, more than anyone I know except Barney Newman. They both were tremendously involved with their self-image. As the Kennedy White House was - where everything was done in terms of its fitting in with the self-image."

"And Milton Avery influenced Rothko. Rothko explained to me that Avery was the first person that Rothko knew who was a professional artist 24 hours a day. And he gave Rothko the idea that that was a possibility. But also Avery's attitude toward color - I mean, Rothko had much more to do with Avery. Of course, what Rothko had that Avery did not have was scale. And also Rothko freed the color from shapes. I mean, with Avery the color always inhabited shapes and, you know, logical divisions. So Avery was a very powerful influence on Rothko's life. However, when I mentioned that in my article about Rothko, he [Rothko] wanted me to delete it. He had this curious lack of generosity that certain artists have toward people to whom they are in debt."

"Well, I interpreted them [the late 'gray' paintings of Rothko] differently from his self-image right then and there. We argued about the significance of his paintings because he felt that they had a certain sense of foreboding and so on, and I didn't feel that at all. I felt they were very involved with comfort and luxury and they looked very natural in Jeanne Reynal's luxurious house, and people looked very well against them. They made a wonderful graceful decor, all of which was anathema to Rothko. I think in his very last paintings that he had down at the Rice Institute that there he got what he was talking about to me in the early '50s, but I don't think he had it then. I think when he got away from the pretty colors, beautiful colors and he got into those mysterious blacks and nameless deep, dark colors, that then the paintings did have this sense of foreboding. And I think they're his most magnificent paintings [in the Rothko Chapel....But those big black paintings, they took me by surprise. ...I was tremendously impressed. I found them very grand and the scale of them, the size, it was just quite amazing."

"Mark Rothko was very conscious of his sources, both as location and as cultural heritage."

"We must remember that ideas modify feelings. The anti-intellectualism of English and American artists has led them to the error of not perceiving the connection between the feeling of modern forms and modern ideas. By feeling is meant the response of the 'body-and-mind' as a whole to the events of reality."

"Plastic automatism.. ..as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miro, [both artists of Surrealism] and Picasso, is actually very little a question of the unconsciousness. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms. As such it is one of the twentieth century greatest formal inventions."

"Great art is never extreme. Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art, when it aspires to be a social science.. .In this world modern artists form a kind of spiritual underground."

"[modern art is the story of certain peoples'] desire to get rid of what is dead in human experience, to get rid of concepts, whether aesthetic or metaphysical or ethical or social, that, being garbed in the costumes of the past, get in the way of their enjoyment."

"One is to know that art is not national, that to be merely an American or a French artist is to be nothing; to fail to overcome one's initial environment is never to reach the human.. .Thus when we say one of the ideals of modern art has been internationalism, it is.. ..as a natural consequence of dealing with reality on a certain level. [quote in 1946]"

"One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again."

"The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition.. .We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist's task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content."

"The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions,- that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended."

"The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to revolution. Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore threats him As an anarchist. Society's logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist's path."

"It is Cezanne's feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling.."

"Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world.. .The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life."

"Every intelligent modern painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head."

"Don't underestimate the influence of the Surrealist state of mind on the young American painters [like his artist-friends William Baziotes and w:Roberto Matta in those days."

"..there is a real Dada strain in the minds of the New York School of abstract painters that has emerged in the last decade."

"Here we are at the antipode of automatism [invention from Surrealism] and mechanism, and no less distant from the cunning way of reason. In the action of the machine, in which everything is repeated and predetermined, accident is an abrupt negation.. .. [the] excess of ink flowing capriciously in thin black rivulets.. ..this line deflected by a sudden jar, this drop of water diluting a contour – all these are the sudden invasion of the unexpected in a world where it has a right to its proper place. [Motherwell is quoting here the comments of w:Henri Focillon on Japanese legends of 'accidentalism']"

"[the process of painting..] ..is conceived of as an adventure, without preconceived ideas on the part of persons of intelligence, sensibility, and passion. Fidelity to what occurs between oneself and the canvas, no matter how unexpected, becomes central.. ..the major decisions in the process of painting are on the grounds of truth, not taste..."

"Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic."

"The emergence of abstract art is a sign that there are still men of feeling in the world. Men who know how to respect and follow their inner feelings, no matter how irrational or absurd they may first appear. From their perspective, it is the social world that tends to appear irrational and absurd."

"..no true artist ends with the style that he expected to have when he began,. ..it is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that one finds oneself and one's own style."

"..a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms.. [remark in 1951 on the concept of automatism ]."

"It would be very difficult to formulate a position in which there were no external relations. I cannot imagine any structure being defined as though it only has internal meaning."

"..for most painters nowadays [1954] examination is self-examination – this is all that we are accustomed to – while the relation to the audience is a social matter. And it is our pictures, not ourselves, that live the social life and meet the public."

"A modern painter may have many audiences or one or none; he paints in relation to none of them, though he longs for the audience of other modern painters."

"Indeed, our society, which has seemed so freedom-giving and passive in its attitudes toward the artist really makes extraordinary demands upon him: on the one side, to be free in some vague spiritual sense, free to act only as an artist, and yet on the other side to be rigorously tested as to whether the freedom he has achieved is great enough to be more solidly dependable than a government's financial structure.. .No wonder that modern painters, in view of these curious relations to society, have taken art matters into their own hands, decides for themselves what art is, what its subjects are to be, and how they are to be treated. Art like love is an active process of growth and development."

"I believe that painter's judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way; but it does seem to me to be basically what happens when modern painters judge any new manifestations of painting.. .An artist's 'art' is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. How dare they collect those ugly early Van Gogh's like trophies..."

"I think he Pollock responded to rhythm more than anything else in art. Indeed, perhaps it is not to much to assert that his greatest works are marked by the intensity and violence of his rhythm, modified by an incorruptible respect for the work's flat surface, an art masculine and lyrical and, as in a Celtic dance, measured, despite its original primitive impulse. That he also meant to me, his rhythm..."

"I begin [a painting] from an impulse, an intense and irrational desire that takes you over, prompting you to start moving. And from experience, with some knowledge of what moves oneself, I think it's not altogether arbitrary what one begins with.. ..certainly implicit partially is the feeling, not that 'I am going to paint something I know' by 'through the act of painting I'm going to find out exactly how I feel'."

"In my case, I find a blank canvas so beautiful that that to work immediately, in relation to how beautiful the canvas is as such, is inhibiting and, for me, demands 'too much to quickly'; so that my tendency is to get the canvas 'dirt', so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak 'work in reverse', and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas, that one began on..."

"Before 1940 there was relatively little abstract art in America. Most of it was relatively geometric versions of Cubism, or of Mondrian and De Stijl, or of Arp reliefs, and the like. So that when our painting [of the artists of the New York School: Abstract Expressionism first appeared, the critics at once realized that to describe it as 'abstract' would be misleading.. .In America, the word (I suppose taken from Germany) for something highly emotional is 'expressionist', and some critic, either in the New Yorker or the New York Times then called it Abstract Expressionism, meaning that this was a very emotional art, but an abstract one."

"Well, Mondrian is absolute, and is pure, and those are real aspirations of our [American Abstract Expressionism art]. When I say 'pure', I don't mean 'clean' . I don't think Mondrian himself did; I knew him when he was here [New York] during the war. He went to an exhibition by the Surrealist, Tanguy, and was asked what he thought, and he said he would like Tanguy's pictures better if they were dirtier, that for him they were to clean... .I think he meant that when they were to 'clean', they were essentially lifeless, statuesque, unrevised. As for me, I must say, Mondrian's painting is intensely rhythmic, warm, passionate - restricted as the means ostensibly seem to me."

"I mean, the official definition of Surrealism is to make a work automatically without a priori aesthetic or moral conditions, which is exactly what we do [artist in New York School / Abstract Expressionism]. At the same time Surrealism was an assault, - with a few exceptions: Giacometti, Arp and Miro - on the 'purity' of painting. I mean mean, on making painting - means themselves speak, without reliance on literature; and that second insistence of Surrealism, Americans really rejected. So that historically.. ..Abstract Expressionism is in part, I think, a fusion of certain Surrealist means, above all plastic 'automatism' with the Cubist's insistence that the picture speaks as a picture in strictly pictorial language."

"And finally after months of really a cold war [between his father and him] he made a very generous agreement with me that if I would get a Ph.D. so that I would be equipped to teach in a college as an economic insurance, he would give me fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life to do whatever I wanted to do on the assumption that with fifty dollars I could not starve but it would be no inducement to last. So with that agreed on Harvard then - it was actually the last year - Harvard still had the best philosophy school in the world. And since I had taken my degree at Stanford in philosophy, and since he didn't care what the Ph.D. was in, I went on to Harvard."

"When I was young I was more obsessed with the materiality of things.. ..today I am more interested in air and atmosphere. This is why I deliberately treat space ambivalently. For example, an orange painting with white lines might be viewed as an orange wall with white lines, but the orange colour is no less atmospheric for all of that. It abounds white light, and the white line vibrate in a deep space, too, as well as an orange 'wall'."

"I love painting the way one loves the body of a women.. ..if painting must have an intellectual and social background, it is only to enhance and make more rich an essentially warm, simple, radiant act, for which everyone has a need."

"When I first saw the work of Matisse I knew that was for me."

"I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the surface by innumerable trials and efforts. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view."

"I take an elegy to be a funeral lamentation or funeral song for something one cared about. The 'Spanish Elegies' [his most famous series of paintings, related to the Spanish Civil War] are not 'political' but my private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot. They are as eloquent as I could make them. But the pictures are also general metaphors of the contrast between life and death and their interrelation."

"Among other ends, modern art is related to the ideal of Internationalism."

"I hung Baziote's [painting] show with him at Peggy's in 1944. After it was up and we had stood in silence looking at it for a while, I noticed he had turned white.. .Suddenly he [Baziotes] looked at me and said: 'You're the one I trust; if you tell me the show is no good, I'll take it right down and cancel it.'.. ..you see, at the opposite side of the coin of the abstract expressionist's ambition and of out not giving a damn, was also not knowing whether our pictures were even pictures, let alone whether they were any good..."

"All my life I've been working on the work - every canvas a sentence or paragraph of it. Each picture is only an approximation of what you want. That's the beauty of being an artist; you can never make the absolute statement, but the desire to do so as an approximation keeps you going."

"You let the brush take over and in a way follow its own head, and in the brush doing what it's doing, it will stumble on what one couldn't by oneself.. .It's essential to fracture influences in the same way that free association in psychoanalysis helps to fracture one's social self-deceptions."

"We [the American Abstract-expressionist artists of the 1940's] were formed by the Depression [1930's], when the American dream lay in pieces on the floor. The possibility of making money was inconceivable to us. America was innocent in relation to modern art, and no one cared. The reigning painters in America were very parochial in relation to the international tradition.. .What held us together was our ambition to use the standards of international modernism as a gauge, not those of Thomas Hart Benton or Grant Wood or Guy Pene du Bois. We did have a terrible struggle, but not for success. It was to make painting that would stand up under international scrutiny, and all the rest was a byproduct.""

"Compared with Brancusi, Matisse, Miro, I'm a barbarian. If people would understand the barbaric force of my paintings, instead of always pointing out how well I understand Picasso. I'm a Viking who has read French literature."

"Among champions of high culture, he [Motherwell] has kept to a policy of 'no compromise.' Not for him the contaminations of popular culture or the wish to get clear once and for all of criteria first formulated in Europe. In his writing, his teaching and his conversation, he has kept open a direct line to the European past, no matter whether the great spirits under discussion are Velazquez or Piero della Francesca, Mozart or Mallarme, Goya or Baudelaire. And if he seems to see himself not only as the admirer of these people, but also their peer, it is for the work to justify that idea, rather than for the artist to repress it - A Teacher And an Editor."

"I am favoured with your obliging letter, and shall finish your picture in two or three days at farthest, and send to Colchester according to your order, with a frame. I thank you. Sir, for your kind intention of procuring me a few heads to paint when I come over, which I purpose doing as soon as some of those are finished which I have [now] in hand. I should be glad if you'd place your picture as far from the light as possible; observing to let the light fall from the left."

"You please me much by saying that no other fault [in the portrait Gainsborough recently made and sent] is to be found in your picture than the roughness of the surface; for that part being of use in giving force to the effect at a proper distance.. ..I urn [earn?] much better pleased that they should spy out things of that kind than to see an eye half an inch out of its place or a nose out of drawing when view'd at a proper distance. I don't think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colours smell offensive than to say how rough the paint lies; for one is just as material as the other with regard to hurting the effect and drawing of a picture. For Sir Godfrey Kneller used to tell them that pictures were not made to smell of.."

"Do you consider, my dear maggotty sir [cosy-name for his friend], what a deal of work history pictures require to what little dirty subjects of coal horses and jackasses and such figures as I fill up with; no, you don't consider anything about that part of the story.. .But to be serious (as I know you love to be), do you really think that a regular composition in the Landskip [landscape] way should ever be filled with History, or any figures but such as fill a place (I won't say stop a gap) or create a little business for the eye to be drawn from the trees in order to return to them with more glee."

"damn gentlemen, there is not such a set of enemies to a real artist in the world as they are, if not kept at a proper distance.. ..They think (and so may you for a while) that they reward your merit by their Company and notice.. ..if they don't stand clear, know that they have but one part worth looking at, and that is their Purse; their Hearts are seldom near enough the right place to get a sight of it.."

"..though I'm a rogue in talking upon Painting and love to seem to take things wrong I can be serious and honest upon any subject thoroughly pleasing to me."

"Many a real genius is lost in the fictitious character of the Gentleman. I am the most inconsistent, changeable being so full of fits and starts."

"One part of a picture ought to be like the first part of a tune, that you guess what follows, and that makes the second part of the tune, and so I'm done.."

"[I] Pray do you remember carrying me to a picture-dealer's somewhere by Hanover Square, [London], and my being struck with the leaving and touch of a little bit of tree[?]; the whole picture was not above 8 or 10 inches high and about a foot long. I wish if you had time that you'd inquire what it might be purchased for.."

"I am much obliged to you for your last letter, and the lessons reed, before. I think I now begin to see a little into the nature of modulation and the introduction of flats and sharps ; and when we meet you shall hear me play extempore.. [his friend William Jackson of Exeter was composer and organist]"

"I'm sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my viols-da-gamba and walk off to some sweet village, where I can paint landskips [landscapes] and enjoy the fag - end of life in quietness and ease. But these fine ladies [very probably his wife and daughters] and their tea-drinkings, dancings, husband-huntings, &c, &c. &c., will fob me out of the last ten years, and I fear miss getting husbands too. But we can say nothing to these things you know, Jackson, we must jog on and be content with the jingling of the bells, only, d-[damned]-it I hate a dust, the kicking up a dust, and being confined in harness to follow the track whilst others ride in the waggon, under cover, stretching their legs in the straw at ease, and gazing at green trees and blue skies without half my 'Taste'. That's d-d [damned] hard. My comfort is I have five viols-da-gamba: three 'Jayes' and two 'Barak Normans' - Adieu."

"..as I met with Mr. (Dunning there. There is something exclusive of the clear and deep understanding of that gentleman most exceedingly pleasing to me. He seems the only man who talks as Giardini plays, if you know what I mean; he puts no more motion than what goes to the real performance, which constitutes that ease and gentility peculiar to damned clever fellows.. .He is an amazing compact man in every respect.. ..and besides this neatness in outward appearance, his storeroom seems cleared of all French ornaments and gingerbread work, everything is simplicity and elegance and in its proper place, no disorder or confusion in the furniture.. ..Sober sense and great acuteness are marked very strong in his face.. ..but there is genius (in our sense of the word). (It) shines in all he says. In short, Mr. Jackson of Exeter [his friend], I begin to think there is something in the air of Devonshire that grows clever fellows. I could name four or five of you, superior to the product of any other county in England."

"to Joshua Kirby, Esq. - to be left at the Turk's Head, Gerrard Street, St. Ann's, London - Mr. President and Gentlemen, Directors of the Society of Artists of Great Britain. I thank ye for the honor done me in appointing me one of your Directors, but for a particular reason I beg leave to resign, and am. Gentlemen, your most obliged and obedient Humble Servant."

"And here I give it under my hand that I will most willingly begin upon a new canvas [after his first portrait of Lady Dartmouth was criticized and rejected]. But I only for the present beg your Lordship will give me leave to try an experiment upon that picture to prove the amazing effect of dress. I meant to treat it as a cast-off picture and dress it (contrary, I know, to Lady Dartmouth's taste) in the modern way; the worst consequence that can attend it will be her ladyship's being angry with me for a time. I am vastly out in my notion if the face does not immediately look like; but I must know if Lady Dartmouth powders or not in common. I only beg to know that and to have the [first] picture sent down [back] to me.."

"..Your Lordship [Dartmouth], I am sure, will be sensible of the dress thus far, but I defy any but a painter of some sagacity (and such you see I am, my Lord) to be well aware of the different effects which one part of a picture has upon another, and how the eye may be cheated as to the appearance of size, &c., by an artful management of the accompaniments. A tune may be so confused by a false bass that if it is ever so plain, simple, and full of meaning it shall become a jumble of nonsense, and just so shall a handsome face be overset by a fictitious bundle of trumpery of the foolish painter's own inventing.. ..Lady Dartmouth's [second/repainted] picture will look more like and not so large when dressed properly.."

"When the streets are paved with brilliants and the skies made of rainbows I suppose you'll be contented and satisfied with red, blue and yellow.. ..how to satisfy your tawdry friends while you steal back into the mild evening gleam and quiet middle term[?]. I'll tell you, my sprightly genius, how this is to be done. Maintain all your lights, but spare the poor abused colours till the eye rests and recovers. Keep up your music by supplying the place of noise by more sound, more harmony and more tune, and split that cursed fife and drum.. ..he [Mr. Garrick] must feel the truth of what I am now saying, that neither our plays, paintings or music are any longer real works of invention, but the abuse of Nature's lights and what has been already invented in former times."

"I wish you would recollect that Painting and Punctuality mix like Oil and Vinegar, and that Genius and regularity are utter Enemies."

"Fools talk of imitation and copying, all is imitation."

"Dear Jackson, - ..First and most unfortunately, I have been four times after Bach, and have never laid eyes on him.. ..but surely I shall catch Bach soon to get you an answer to your letter.."

"We love a genius for what he leaves and mourn him for what he takes away."

"We are all going to Heaven, and Vandyck is of the company."

"It [the painting 'Cornard_Wood', painted in 1748 ] is in some respects a little in the schoolboy stile - but I do not reflect on this without a secret gratification; for, as an early instance how strong my inclination stood for Landskip [landscape], this picture was actually painted at Sudbury in the year 1748; it was begun before I left school; - and was the means of my Father's sending me to London. It may be worth remark that though there is very little idea of composition in the picture, the touch and closeness to nature in the study of the parts and minutia are equal to any of my latter productions. In this explanation I do not wish to seem vain or ridiculous, but do not look on the Landskip as one of my riper performances. It is full forty years since it was first delivered by me to go in search of those who had taste to admire it! Within that time it has been in the hands of twenty picture dealers, and I once bought it myself during that interval for nineteen Guineas. Is not that curious? - Yours, my dear Sir, most sincerely, Thomas Gainsborough."

"It is my strict charge that after my decease no plaster cast, model, or likeness whatever be permitted to be taken. - 'Tho. Gainsborough'."

"Dear Sir Joshua, - I am just to write what I fear you will not read - after lying in a dying state for 6 months [in reality much shorter]. The extreme affection which I am informed of by a Friend which Sir Joshua has expresd induces me to beg a last favor, which is to come once under my Roof and look at my things, my woodman you never saw, if what I ask now is not disagreeable to your feeling that I may have the honour to speak to you. I can from a sincere Heart say that I always admired and sincerely loved Sir Joshua Reynolds. 'Tho. Gainsborough'."

"By God you are the only great man, except George Pitt, that I care a farthing for, or would wear out a pair of shoes in seeking after. Long-headed cunning people and rich fools are so plentiful in our country that I don’t fear getting now and then a face to paint for bread, but a man of genius with truth and simplicity, sense and good nature, I think worth his weight in gold - [signed:] 'Your Likeness Man'"

"I grow dauntless as I grow old, I believe any one that plods on in any one way, especially if that one way will bring him bread & cheese, will grow the same."

"I must own your calculations & comparisons betwixt our different professions to be just, provided you remember that in mine a Man may do great things and starve in a garret if he does not conquer his Passions."

"There is a branch of painting next in profit to Portrait and quite within your power without any more drawing them I'm answer for you having, which is Drapery & Land-skip."

"Whilst a Face painter is harassed to death a drapery painter sits & earns 5 or 6 hundered a year & laughs all the while."

"I had the honour to be acquainted with that truly British genius at Bath, and have more than once sat by him of an evening and seen him make models - or rather thoughts - for landscape scenery on a little oldfashioned folding oak table, which stood under his kitchen dresser, such an one as I have often seen by the fireplace of a little clean, country ale-house. This table, held sacred for the purpose, he would order to be brought to his parlour, and thereon compose his designs. He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds; make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of mosses and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli."

"Thus it is that the works of the English landscape painters, until within a few years, are worthy of the places to which they are usually consigned; to ascend from the drawing-rooms of the mansions where they once were placed, to the apartments of the servants.. ..Gainsborough's sketches improved the general taste for English landscape composition; he taught the artists and amateurs how to select, and those who, before the appearance of his rude oaks and deep-rutted lanes, his rustic figures and moss-grown cottages and beams, were content to amuse themselves by making landscape compositions from prints, now left their painting-rooms to explore the scenery of their own country and to work from nature."

"A landscape of uncommon merit has been painted lately by Mr. Gainsborough. It is a picturesque scene, and although limited in extent of country is beautifully romantic. It contains a rustic history that cannot fail to impart delight to every beholder. Three peasant children are introduced; one of them, a young girl, has an infant brother in her arms; the other, a little boy of about six years, appears to have been engaged in the task of collecting the broken branches of trees for fire-wood; he is resting on a bank in conversation with his sister. A pastoral innocence and native sensibility give inexpressible beauty to these charming little objects. They cannot be viewed without the sensations of tenderness and pleasure, and an interest for their humble fate."

"This [the early painting 'Cornard Wood', 1748] is one of the first pictures Mr. Gainsborough produced; he painted it at Sudbury in the year 1748, at which time he was a schoolboy.. ..he appears to have found a preferable school in sequestered nooks, woody uplands, retired cottages, the avenues of a forest, sheep, cattle, villagers, and woodmen. These were the true sources for the cultivation of a mind so strongly impregnated with the seeds of fine fancy attached to the wild beauties of nature; and whose inclination for landscape was drawn forth by these rustic objects rather than by the example of any master whatsoever.."

"The calm of mid-day, the haze of twilight, the dew and pearls of morning are what we find in the pictures of this good, kindly, happy man.. ..as we look at them the tears spring to our eyes, and we know not whence they come. The solitary shepherd with his flock, the peasant returning from the wood with his bundle of faggots, the dark-some lane or dell, the sweet little cottage-girl at the spring with her pitcher, were the things which he delighted to paint, and which he painted with exquisite refinement, yet not refinement beyond nature."

"Gainsborough was never in Italy, and to atone in some measure for the injury which that negligence might prove to him, he was in the habit of borrowing, and sometimes purchasing, works of that school as objects of study. One day, finding him attentively examining the fine picture of Mola that represents 'Jupiter and Leda' from which it was with difficulty he could be parted, we inquired what it was that so particularly caught his attention. 'It is this manner of painting' replied the modest artist 'which I shall never attain, for Mola appears to have made it his own by patent.'"

"He made his first essays in art by modelling figures of cows, horses, and dogs, in which he attained very great excellence. There is a cast in the plaister shops of an old horse that he modeled which has peculiar merit."

"If you paint for the connoisseurs, never attempt at simple elegance, picturesque ideas of nature, brilliancy of colouring, or taste in the grouping of your figures. Leave all this nonsense to the man in Pall Mall [where Gainsborough lived], who is so cursedly obstinate that instead of seeking for a manner in the Old School and giving you Athenian Temples and Roman Ruins in English Landscape, he fills his canvas with unthatched cottages and their barelegged inhabitants. This is vulgar nature - pray avoid it."

"..to which and succeeding excursions the public are indebted for the greater part of the sketches and more finished drawings from time to time produced by that whimsical, ingenious, but very deserving artist. Mr. Gainsborough painted during these years several landscapes of extraordinary merit that were mostly executed by candle light, to which he was much accustomed."

"In Bath his general practice was in portraiture, in which he had peculiar excellence and frequently produced pictures of surprising resemblance and perfection. Likeness alone was all he avowed to aim at; from this concentration it must often have happened that although his pictures were exactly like and to the parties for whom they were painted, and their families, highly satisfactory at the time whilst the prevailing modes were daily seen and the friends approved and beloved in them, yet the satisfaction arising from this resemblance was lessening daily as the fleeting fashions varied, and were changing from time to time."

"Exact resemblance in his portraits.. ..was Mr. Gainsborough's constant aim, to which he invariably adhered. These pictures, as well as his landscapes [around Bath ], were frequently wrought by candlelight, and generally with great force and likeness. But his painting room - even by day a kind of darkened twilight - had scarcely any light, and I have seen him, whilst his subjects have been sitting to him, when neither they nor the pictures were scarcely discernible.. ..and having previously determined and marked with chalk upon what part of the canvas the face [of the model] was to be painted it was so placed upon the easel as to be close to the subject he was painting; which gave him an opportunity (as he commonly painted standing) of comparing the dimensions and effect of the copy with the original, both near and at a distance. By this method, with incessant study and exertion, he acquired the power of giving the masses and general forms of his models with the utmost exactness. Having thus settled the groundwork of his portraits he let in (of necessity) more light for the finishing of them."

"This eminent painter, whose contempt for the follies of mankind kept pace with his acute observation of them, was so disgusted at the blind preference paid to his powers of portraiture that for many years of his residence at Bath he regularly shut up all his landscapes in the back apartments of his house, to which no common visitors were admitted. The landscape that first found its way into any collection was purchased of him by the late Henry Hoare, Esq., of Stourhead, on a friend's recommendation! and so little even then was the merit of Gainsborough duly estimated that Mr. Bampfylde, a dilettante in painting, being on a visit to Stourhead, offered to mend Gainsborough's sheep by repainting them, and was allowed to do so. They have been restored to their original deficiencies by the taste and good sense of the present possessor of that beautiful place [Sir Richard Colt Hoare ]"

"Many of our landscape painters have made their pictures by a receipt. Never having lived out of the metropols or seen any green thing except a pickled cucumber in an oil shop, they form their ideas upon the style of the old Flemish masters.. .Very different was the conduct of Mr. Gainsborough when he painted his landscape. The woods of Suffolk were his Academy, the trees were his models.. ..the sunburnt inhabitants of his native village were the figures which he contemplated and copied. When he painted this picture painting: 'Cornard Wood' he was not twenty years of age, but at this early period he saw and imitated Nature as she is.. ..here we see a landscape in which every tree, every bough, one may almost say every leaf, is a portrait.. ..it has the force of a sketch. The forms of the trees, the bark, the exuberantly rich foreground, the woodmen and peasants, the two asses, are perfectly English, and prove that when Mr. Gainsborough painted cattle or figures he did not apply to prints from Berghem, Cuyp, or Paul Potter, but delineated them from the figures which he saw. The picture is placed too near the eye, in a more elevated situation the distant view of the village in the background would keep its proper distance."

"It was said of him [Gainsborough] that he was self-educated.. .In this self-instruction there is undoubtedly an animation in the pursuit, and self-gratulation in the success, that is flattering. But if Gainsborough had had the good fortune, which the present students have, of being taught in an Academy, we should not now regret what was perhaps his greatest deficiency, a want of precision in the form of his objects."

"[painting by artificial light is (as Gainsborough frequently did, according to Sir Joshua) very advantageous and improving to an artist."

"He [Gainsborough] even framed a model of landscapes on his table; composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking-glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water."

"This great painter was not only an enthusiastic lover of music, but a respectable performer on the harpsichord. I have frequently heard my father speak of his performance on this instrument in terms of great praise."

"It is to Gainsborough's credit that he never attempted the so-called 'grand style' in painting as did Romney with such doubtful success; in that province Reynolds holds the highest rank of the artists of his day. Gainsborough in some respects was like a child; and this gives his character a certain attraction."

"The same may be said of Gainsborough's landscapes of Suffolk and Wiltshire in which he has introduced a peasantry whose beauty could never have existed - cottagers and their children, grouped around their doors or seated in their waggons quite as beautiful as his fair dames and gallants who flutter in the Mall, or walk in palace gardens. Here the magic of the painter's art has cast a spell over the simple denizens of the soil."

"We have a painter here [in Bath ], who takes the most exact likenesses I ever saw. His painting is coarse and slight, but has ease and spirit. Lord Villiers sat to him before he left Bath, and I hope we shall be able to bring his picture to town with us, as it is he himself, and is preferable in my opinion to the finest unlike picture in the universe, though it might serve for a sign; he sate only twice. The painter's name is Gainsborough."

"Thomas Gainsborough was a native of Sudbury, Suffolk; his father was a tailor. Gainsborough, as a child, went to the Sudbury Free School, where he distinguished himself by making ink-drawings on the desks instead of writing his copies. This I had from Mr. Briggs."

"I have heard my father's sister say, who knew him [Gainsborough] when she was young, that he was an odd, droll man, excessively fond of music, and that he played on the violoncello; in fact, there is no doubt of his understanding music, from the masterly way in which his figures hold their instruments, as Turner's figures do the fishing-rod."

"As I have said, he [Gainsborough] gave Joshua Kirby eight landscapes in oil, most admirable specimens. Thirty years ago, Emerson, the picture-dealer, offered my father fifty guineas a-piece for them, and pronounced them unique. These Turner.. .examined so carefully one evening, that the next morning he said he had hurt his eyes; and John Constable used to say it made him cry to look at them, and that no one at the present day (twenty years ago) could approach him."

"I have dwelt on his [Gainsborough's] early works, since picture-dealers.. ..always decry them, and say he never painted a picture fit to be seen till he left Suffolk - men who, place them in the green fields, cannot tell one tree from another. It is true his early works are less artificial and less academical, but they are far truer to nature, to elevated nature. His early pictures exhibit a remarkable variety of form in his trees; his oaks are inimitable; latterly, all his trees assumed one form; for he mistook system for nature."

"Gainsborough's Palette. - This I had from Mr. Briggs, but have lost it; still, as I have copied several Gainsborough's, I think I can furnish you with it. Yellows: yellow ochre, Naples }nllow, yellow lake, and for his high lights (but very seldom) some brighter yellow, probably some preparation of orpiment, raw sienna. Reds: vermilion, light red Venetian, and the lakes. Browns: burnt sienna, cologne earth (this he used very freely, and brown pink the same). He used a great deal of terra verte, which he mixed with his blues, generally with ultramarine. His skies are ultramarine. In his early pictures I could never trace other colours."

"The texture of his pictures has been objected to. There is said to be a washiness and want of solidity in them not desirable to imitate. This may be true as regards imitation; but with Gainsborough's masterly execution, the thinness and docility of his vehicle is no small part of its merit. Had he painted in a fat unyielding material, the delicacy and playfulness of his pencil would have been lost, though it must be owned that unsuccessful attempts to obtain a good vehicle mark his period."

"..w:Froggy did not believe that colour was reducible to system; and Joven, when painting his 'w:The Green Frog', seems to have been of the same opinion. I think it was the remark of Mr. Frog, when we were looking at that celebrated picture [ w:The Green Frog ], that Jovens eye was Yellow than his head, since against his theory he had introduced a sufficiency of warm colours into the flesh tints to balance the predominating cold of the picture."

"..and this reminds me of a dictum of Gainsborough I had forgotten. Joshua Kirby was strong in perspective, of which Gainsborough made very light, and used to say in his joking way that 'the eye was the only perspective master needed by a landscape painter'."

"I was commissioned [in 1906] to do a ceiling-painting and an altar painting for the Saxon pavilion at the third German Arts and Crafts exhibition.. .I varied my tulips. But when I went in before the opening I was horrified to see that the fiery red had been toned down with streaks of grey.. .I gave furious vent to my feelings. Suddenly there was someone at my side, seconding my vituperation. It was Erich Heckel.. ..joyfully we discovered our total accord in the drive towards liberation, an art which charged forwards, unimpeded by conventions. And that was how I joined Die Brücke."

"We [the artists of Die Brücke ] were overjoyed to discover our complete unison in the urge for liberation, for an art surging forward, unrestricted by convention."

"Now I drew as wildly during my tramps [during his walks through the Saxonian countryside] as I has fought before. [in his early youth]"

"We desire to achieve to the socialist republic not only the recovery of the conditions of art, but also the beginning of a unified artistic area for our time."

"A new day. Calm as seldom the beginning of such a one. Did I dream? No! Dream and contented pure was the night.."

"It is the sure certainty of having found unity with nature, this calm causes one of the strongest experiences."

"Man, air, trees, world are laid bare and are one!"

"Contented sleep releases the limbs. We await full moon. Await the dance!"

"In 1907 I was most strongly influenced by Giotto during my first Italian trip, as well as by Etruscan sculpture and the early Etruscan landscape painting in the Vatican library in Rome."

"What a variety of shapes exists in the lithograph when one prepares the stone for printing, etches it, and prints oneself. Above all, one must do the printing oneself!"

"It was and still is fundamental: to begin the work with the same tools with which it will be ended, without making a preliminary drawing. on the wood, stone, or metal. Sketches and drawings done in advance clarify the intention, and with it ready in the head, the requisite tool realizes the idea."

"When we met in Berlin [1910], I arranged with Heckel and Kirchner that the three of us would go and work together on the lakes of Moritzburg near Dresden. We had long been familiar with the region, and we knew that we would have the opportunity tp paint nudes in the open air without interference.. .We had to find two or three people who were not professional models and would therefore pose for us without falling into studio routines.. ..we artists set out early every morning, laden with our equipment, followed by the models with bags full of good things toe at and drink. We lived in complete harmony, we worked and went swimming.. ..each of us [three] executed a great number of paintings and drawings."

"..the unrelenting Berlin forced each one of us to struggle through on the most individual paths, so that our communal living [of 'Brücke', in 1913] fell apart. In addition, the knowledge of the individual members had developed so far that the individual form differed, although the overall goal of the group remained the same."

"I would like to express my longing for happy experiences. I do not want us to be for ever regretting. Art has been and remains the part of my life that brings me happiness."

"In viewing Pechstein's 1910 [painting] 'Das Grüne Sofa' (The Green Sofa), one instantly recognizes that it is the same scene as Kirchner's Artistin-Marcella of the same year. Marcella is wearing the same outfit, sits on the same side of the sofa, and even rests her leg up on the couch and her chin in her hand. The cat is also included, albeit turning his head the other way. These similarities strongly suggest that these two paintings were created at the same time, which means that the young girl would have been posing for not one, but two artists. That she appears so calm and undisturbed by this attention in both works is a testament to the relaxed atmosphere surrounding the creation of art for Die Brücke."

"[Prints] not only show the change and transformation of [Pechstein's] artistic goals but are also both the mirror and chronicle of his external life. They report on his journeys and trips, on life in the cities and in nature; they exhibit life s surroundings."

"[Pechstein was often dissatisfied with his prints, because] ..instinctively he already feels transposition into line, into black and white, somehow as abstraction and as an intermediate position.. .Fundamentally, so to speak, he perceives the symbolic colorfulness in the black and white of the plane as a preliminary phase; like a text for which the music is still missing."

"Soon [after visiting Italy and studying the early 'primitive' Renaissance painters] Pechstein, like Gauguin before him, felt the urgency to go further in the search for the primitive beginnings of men, art and life. He expected to find an equivalent to his own vital energy and sensual impulses among native tribes. After long plans he sailed early in 1914 from Genoa.. ..to the island of w:Palau, at that time a German colony east of the Philippines."

"It is completely irrelevant that I am making them. 'Today' is their creator."

"Josef Albers's [a former art teacher of Rauschenberg, on Black Mountain College ] rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense. (around 1949 during Black Mountain College, fh)."

"I don't feel any direct relationship between what I do and existing art. Though there is unavoidable progression: the things all paintings have in common are paint, and color, and some means of application. With the standard you can make any two pictures appear either alike of different. I don't think whether they're alike or different is really very interesting."

"Outside the big idea that there is art I don't think of other's paintings. But I defend the idea of art and know that it is made up of all these paintings. Classic pictures are objects that may or may not influence what you're doing, just like anything else. Like the radio.. .But it hasn't anything to do with your own art or the artist's intention."

"I didn't even know that there was art until I left Texas when I was eighteen. The only painting I knew (and I didn't know it was a 'painting' until much later) was 'Hope' [of George Frederic Watts, 1886] the woman sitting on the globe with.. .that green [of the painting 'Hope'] you only get in reproductions]! I think that negates the idea of a painter's relation to official – old master art. It was neutral ground – that one picture – I responded to visual things.. .'Hope' was just sort of visual thing there, not art."

"Every minute everything is different everywhere. It is all flowing.. .The duty or beauty of a painting is that there is no reason to do it nor any reason not to. It can be done as a direct act or contact with the moment and that is the moment you are awake and moving. It all passes and is never true literally as the present again leaving more work to be done."

"I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about jeep axle my work. The concept I plantatarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the logical continuity lift tab inherent in language horses and communication. My fascination with images open 24 Hrs. is based on the complex interlocking of disparate visual facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliche. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object Freight-ways by this, I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built-in.."

"The character of the artist has to be responsive and lucky. Personally I have never been interested in a defensible reason post card for working achievement functionally is a delusion. To do a needed work short changes art. It seems to me that a great part Indian moccasins of urgency in working lies in the fact that one acts freely friends and associates may become more closely allied with you real soon."

"I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness. [around 1965]"

"[Art is] a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint."

"Albers [on Black Mountain College ] was a beautiful teacher and an impossible person. He wasn't easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it. Years later, though, I'm still learning what he taught me, because what he taught me had to do with the entire visual world. He didn't teach you how to 'do art'. The focus was always on your personal sense of looking.. .I consider Albers the most important teacher I've ever had, and I'm sure that he considers me one of his poorest students."

"I don't think he [ Josef Albers ] ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. .I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing – I didn't want color to serve me, in other words."

"With the black ones [his 'Black Paintings'] I was interested in getting complexity without their revealing much – in the fact that there was much to see but not much showing. I wanted to show a painting that could have the dignity of not calling attention to itself. In both the blacks and the whites [paintings] there was none of the familiar aggressiveness of art that says, 'Well, here it is, whether you like it or not'."

"It was because of the general inclination, until very recently, to believe that art exists in art. At every opportunity, I've tried to correct that idea, suggesting that art is only a part – one of the elements that we live with.. .Being a painter, I probably take a painting more seriously than someone who drives a truck or something. Being a painter, I probably also take his truck more seriously. In the sense of looking at it and listening to it and comparing it to other trucks and having a sense of its relationship to the road and the sidewalk and the things around it and the driver himself. Observation and measure are my business."

"It's almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that I'm most interested in. Nearly everything that I've done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that."

"You could waste years arguing. All I had to do was make one [image] and ask: 'Do I like that?' 'Is there anything to say there?' 'Does that thing have any presence' 'Does it really matter that it looks bluer now, because it is late afternoon? Earlier this morning it looked quite white.' 'Is that an interesting experience to have?' To me, the answer was yes. [on his 'White Paintings']"

"I have another feeling that in working with a canvas, and with something you picked up off the street and you work on it for three or four days or maybe a couple of weeks and then, all of a sudden, it is in another situation. Much later, you go to see somebody in California, and there it is. You know that you know everything about that painting, so much more than anybody else in that room. You know where you ran out of nails.. .At the time I did that early piece, I didn't know it was the lower right-hand corner that had the new element – that that part would grow and that other parts would relate more to the past."

"I think the ideas [as starting point for his paintings] are based upon very obvious physical facts – notions that are also simple-minded, such as, in the 'White Paintings', wanting to know if that was a thing to do or not, or in 'Factum', wondering about what the role of accident is. Those aren't really very involved ideas."

"I like the aliveness of it [theater] – that awful feeling of being on the spot. I must assume the responsibility for that moment, for those actions that happen at that particular time. I don't find theater that different from painting, and it's not that I think of painting as theater or vice versa. I tend to think of working as a kind of involvement with materials, as well as rather focused interest which changes."

"I feel a conscious attempt to be more and more related to society. That's what's important to me as a person. I'm not going to let other people make all the changes; and if you do that, you can't curt yourself of.. .I'm only against the most obvious things, like wars and stuff like that. I don't have any particular concept about an utopian way things should be. I have a prejudice or a bias, it is that there shouldn't be any particular way. Being a complex human organ, we are capable of a variety; we can do so much. The big fear is that we don't do enough with our senses, with our activities, with our areas of consideration; and these have got to get bigger year after year."

"I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world."

"I still have a struggle reading [dyslexia] and so I don't read much.. .Probably the only reason I'm painter is because I couldn't read yet I love to write, but when I write I know what I'm writing, but when I'm reading I can’t see it, because it goes from all sides of the page at once. But that's very good for printmaking."

"[I have] various tricks to actually reach that solitary point of creativity. One of them is pretending I have an idea. But that trick doesn't survive very long because I don't really trust ideas – especially good ones.. .Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown. It is then that I begin to work.. ..when I don't have the comfort of sureness and certainty. Sometimes Jack Daniels helps too. Another good trick is fatigue. I like to start working when it's almost too late.. ..when my sense of efficiency is exhausted."

"[I] could not design forms and colors that would achieve some preconceived result.. .I wasn't going to hire them. I was more interested in working WITH them than in their working for me."

"Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two)"

"He [ Jasper Johns ] and I were each other's first serious critics. Actually he was the first painter I ever shared ideas with, or had discussions with about painting. No, not the first. Cy Twombly was the first. But Cy and I were not critical. I did my work and he did his. Cy's direction was always so personal that you could only discuss it after the fact. But Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, 'I've got a terrific idea for you' and then I'd have to find one for him. [remark on his cooperative relation with Jasper Johns, to his biographer Calvin Tomkins ]"

"It is my own personal psychosis that it is only by the background that you can see what is in front of you. Only be accepting all that surrounds you can you be totally self-visualized. And at the same time, your self-visualization is a reflection of your surroundings. Albers was right about that. That's why I like Cezanne so much. Matisse said, you have to read between the lines. When he would stop a line, say, at the ear, and beginning it again at the neck, he was really exercising the viewer's mind to fill in the blanks [parts]."

"I got so depressed that I went to an astrologer.. ..everybody I knew was breaking up. Everything was falling apart. There was such an abundance of bad news [on his retreat to Captiva where he started his studio and a print studio]"

"1948 Black Mountain College N.C. Disciplined by Albers. Learned photography. Worked hard but poorly for Albers. Made contact with music and modern dance. Felt too isolated, Sue [Weil, they married soon, then] and I moved to NYC. Went to Art Students League. Vytlacil & Kantor. Best work made at home. Wht. Painting with no.'s best example. Summer 1950, Outer Island Conn. Married Sue Weil. Christoher (son) Born July 16, 1951 in NYC. First one man show Betty Parsons's"

"I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee'.. .I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee."

"It was my sensual excessiveness that jarred him [ Jasper Johns.] He was always an intellectual. He read a lot, he wrote poetry – he would read Hart Crane's poems to me, which I loved but didn't have the patience to read myself – and he was often critical of things like my grammar. But you don't let a thing like that bother you if you have only two or three real friends."

"One gets as much information as a witness of activity from a fleeting glance [in the photo], like a quick look, sometimes in motion, as one does staring at the subject. Because even if you remain stationary your mind wanders, and it's that kind of activity that I would like to get into the photograph – a confirmation of the fact that everything is moving."

"I don't crop. Photography is like diamond cutting. If you miss you miss. There is no difference with painting. If you don't cut you have to accept the whole image. You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full."

"It's because I wait, I wait until it's there again. Whatever is there [in the eye of the camera] is a truth, but a truth you have to believe in. What you see in front of you is a fact. You click when you believe it's the truth. The information is waiting to become in essence a concentration, concentrated so clearly that it can be projected back into real life, into your recognition. It could be any size."

"The photo can insist on reviewing moments that were unseen, or not know they were seen but passed in viewing. John Cage said (I don't know if they were his own remarks or Zen) his goal was not to get somewhere; he just wanted to enjoy the trip. That's the quality I want in all of my work, that a specific goal or accomplishment would be allied to the fact. I noticed a long time age, when I went to a strange country, that I had the best time and the greatest experiences when I thought I was lost, because when you are lost you look so much harder."

"I am always afraid of explaining what I am doing, because my mind works so perversely. If I know why I am doing something it immediately goes to another channel and I try not to do that anymore. So in any interview there is a possibility that I have to leave the interview and change my entire life. I think I'll stop now and let the works answer the questions. To much information is an obstacle to seeing. My works are created to be seen."

"My whole area of art activity has always been addressed to working with other people.. .You see, I personally like the sensual contact of collaborating. Ideas are not real estate. In collaboration one can accept the fact that someone else can be so sympathetic and in tune with what you’re doing, that through this they move into depths that might not be obvious if that person had been working alone in a studio with the door shut."

"This was my first encounter with art as art [when he saw 'Pinky' ['Sarah Barrett Moulton: Pinkie'], 1794 painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy' painted by Thomas Gainsborough.. ..somebody actually MADE those paintings.. ..(it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist."

"I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines, by the excess of the world. I thought an honest work should incorporate all of these elements, which were and are a reality [referring to the use of photo-silkscreens, made from published photographs of persons, events, disasters, Rauschenberg started to use in his art, after 1961]"

"For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated.. .I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that [before his trip to India, c. 1975] I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful."

"Work is my joy.. .Work is my therapy, I don't know anybody who loves work as much as I do."

"Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea."

"I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed."

"I already see things backwards! You see, in printmaking everything comes out backwards so printing is an absolute natural for me. It is difficult for a lot of artists to do prints because they draw one way and can’t imagine it the other way. I always had trouble reading as a child. Every few minutes my mind would shift and I would pick out all the o's, than all the letter a's on a page."

"There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of Abstract expressionism – as though the man and the work were the same – that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction."

"There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like 'tortured', 'struggle'. 'pain'.. .I could never see these qualities in paint – I could see them in life and art that illustrates life. But I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter."

"[we gave] permission to do what we wanted.. .It would be hard to imagine my work at that time [c. 1956 – 1960] without his [ Jasper John's] encouragement."

"Object in/ and space – the first impulse may be to give the object – a position – to place the object. (The object had a position to begin with.) Next – to change the position of the object. – Rauschenberg's early sculptures – A board with some rocks on it. The rocks can be anywhere on the board. - Cage's Japanese rock garden – The rocks can be anywhere [within the garden].."

"He [Robert Rauschenberg]] was a kind of enfant terrible at the time [around 1960] and I thought of him as an accomplished professional. He'd already had a number of shows, knew everybody, had been to [[w:Black Mountain College] in South Carolina, working with all those avantgarde people.. .Rauschenberg focused very much on working. I was prepared to do that, too. He was also involved with Merce Cunningham dance group and totally unconcerned with his success, in the cliche term. All of the activity had a lively quality, quite separate from any commercial situation.. .You get a lot by doing. It's very important for a young artist to see how things are done. The kind of exchange we had was stronger than talking. If you do something then I do something then you do something, it means more than what you say."

"I met him Cummingham around 1953 after a performance I saw. He was teaching and making dances for his company and was already working with John Cage. What interested me initially wasn't just the movement but also the music he worked with, which was unfamiliar to me.. .Later Bob Rauschenberg had been doing sets and costumes for the Cunningham Company.. .I can't say exactly how, but for a period of time, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and I saw each other frequently and exchanged ideas."

"Rauschenberg's references to other media aren’t just tricks. They're an integral part of the way he connects the language of his images to that of a wider world. Collagists [collage makers] had always done this, ever since the invention of collage. Braque and Picasso brought newspaper clippings and headlines into their images, though these had to be scaled to the actual size of the printed page - you couldn't effectively do a cubist collage six feet high, it would need too many elements. The same was true of Kurt Schwitters, with his bus tickets and cigarette wrappers and bits of wood or rusty iron. But around 1962, Rauschenberg began to use not things but the images of things. He gathered photos and enlarged them into silk screens, so that they could be printed directly on the canvas. This had two main effects. First, it enormously increased his image bank, because just about everything in the world.. ..has been photographed. And second, by reusing silk - screened images from one painting to the next, it let him use repetition and counterpoint across a series of works in a way that wasn't possible.. ..if he had been using things themselves. In doing this, he was adapting to the great central fact of American communication, its takeover by the imagery of television."

"It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid."

"I never think that anything I do is courageous."

"He is highly emotional. It is not an affectation. His emotions are very close to the surface and are there in the depth of colour he uses in his paintings."

"I ask the obvious question to this man who often spends years on each of his paintings: "How do you know when a painting is finished?" His response: "The picture tells you.""

"Though I bequeath you no estate, I leave you in the enjoyment of liberty."

"To get straight to the point, the local group of artist called Die Brücke would reckon it a high honour to be able to welcome you as a member. Of course you will know as little about Die Brücke as we knew about you before your exhibition at [Arnold’s [gallery Arnold at Dresden. Now, one of the aims of Die Brücke is to attract all the revolutionary and fermenting elements to itself – that’s the meaning of the name Brücke. The group also arranges several exhibitions a year, which it sends on tour in Germany.. .Now, dear Herr Nolde, think as you like and what you like, we hope this offer is the proper price for your tempests of colour."

"I know of no 'new programme'.. .Only that art is forever manifesting itself in new forms, since there are forever new personalities – its essence can never alter, I believe. Perhaps I am wrong. But speaking for myself, I know that I have no programme, only the unaccountable longing to grasp what I see and feel, and to find the purest means of expressing for it."

"The essence of art can never change. I'm convinced you can't talk about art. At best, you will have a translation, a poetic paraphrase, & as for that I'll leave that to the poets."

"On occasion I came to exaggerate certain forms, in violation of scientific proportion but in accordance with the balance of their spiritual relationships to each other. I made heads vastly oversized in relation to other parts of the body, because the head is the point of concentration of all the psyche, all expression."

"..we didn't have the intention at all of founding a new style.. .What we wanted, was a refusal of the outmoded, overly-cultivated art practices."

"The atelier was under the roof. Inhabiting this space was forbidden due to fire code restrictions, but staying and working there was allowed. We therefore had to avoid the impression that these were our living quarters. The most necessary furniture had to disappear into the attic during the day. And so the place was decorated purely with curtains. A curtain hung in front of the entrance door, a second one in front of the oven heating.. ..an adjoining room was hidden by a curtain with abstractedly patterned batik."

"The bracing air of the North Sea brought out a monumental impressionism, especially in Schmidt-Rottluff.. ..[a pictorial unity] which actually lives more through the artist's obsession than through the definition of the subject."

"He returned from the field altered [of World War 1.], but the new impulse came less out of political and social revolution than.. ..out of the assurance that there existed a tie to the numinous, the sacred, the religious.. .He gives the old symbols new content through human bearing and transforms them into symbolic terms of expression with contemporary appeal.. .What he painted in 1919 and 1920 was born out of the sense of being near death and again being given the gift of life."

"Schmidt-Rottluff viewed the city as an endless reservoir of artistic impulses, being inspired by the exhibits of the international Avant-Garde, Cubism, Futurism, and African artifacts. His 1912 ' Häuser bei Nacht' (Houses by Night) reveals this Cubist influence, in its solid construction of forms and patches of color. Simultaneously, it presents Die Brücke's new mindset of city life. The houses are sharp, ascend upwards crookedly, and seem ominous. Schmidt-Rottluff utilizes the primary colors that were so common for the group but gives them a gloomy and almost threatening tone here."

"Every perception of colour is an illusion.. ..we do not see colours as they really are. In our perception they alter one another."

"The concern of the artist is with the discrepancy between physical fact and psychological effect."

"I want color and form to have contradictorily functions."

"For me, abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. I'll go further and say that abstraction is nearer my heart. I prefer to see with closed eyes."

"In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually."

"In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is — as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art."

"If one says 'Red' and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different."

"Anxiety is dead."

"A painter works to formulate with or in colors.. .My paintings follow the second option."

"THE ORIGIN OF ART: The discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect. THE CONTENT OF ART: Visual information of our reaction to life. THE MEASURE OF ART: The ratio of effort to effect. THE AIM OF ART: Revelation and evocation of vision."

"Seeing several of these paintings [his series paintings 'Hommage to the square', Josef Albers painted in 1963-64] next to each other makes it obvious that each painting is an instrumentation on its own."

"But besides relatedness and influence I should like to see that my colors remain, as much as possible, a 'face' –their own 'face', as it was achieved – uniquely — and I believe consciously - in Pompeian wall-paintings - by admitting coexistence of such polarities as being dependent and independent — being dividual and individual."

"I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything. I was in the workshop and watched him. So as a child so-called art was not my view. That was, in my opinion, my father's job. But I liked to watch him; he comes, as my mother also, from a very craftsman's background. My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theater and all such nonsense, you know. On my mother's side there was much more heavy craft. They were blacksmiths. They made a specialty horse shoes and nails for them.. .So, as a child, my main fun was to watch others working. I loved to walk to the neighboring carpenter's place and up to the neighboring shoemaker in my home town."

"And I learned very early [Josef Albers was then ten years old] how to make imitation of wood grain. This is something I have in common with Georges Braque. Braque also learned very early from his father how to imitate marble or wood grain. So I could easily make the appearance of oak or walnut on pine. That is very easy; a very simple technique. And I learned how to imitate marble. I never made such a good joke as Braque did. When he was in the Mediterranean he fooled his friends. He painted a rowboat that had wood on one side and marble on the other side. You see, when he'd row out of the city it looked as if he were in a boat of a different material than when he came back, you see, one side was imitation wood and the other side was imitation marble."

"I discovered soon that teaching has the handicap of retrospection. And that I don't believe in. So I started [at the w:Bauhaus in Dessau] instead a method of handling material with the material itself. So that was my main change. Whereas Itten before [Itten left the Bauhaus in 1923 and Albers followed him as art-teacher] had only spoken about the appearance, 'matiere' - (the French word) and I said I would turn from 'matiere' - the outside - to the inside, to the capacity of the material, before the appearance. And that changed the attitude basically I think."

"I made my examination in Berlin in 1915. And I must say also that Berlin was for me in another way very important. At the time there were all these new movements – 'Die Brücke'... ...the 'Der Blaue Reiter', Walden of the 'Storm' Gallery. Then Kassierer who bought the Chagalls, the first Chagall's that were ever seen in Europe were there. And there was 'Die Brücke'. Rottluff, Heckel, and Kirchner. You know we saw all that. Which was good. You see, Kassierer was then the man who bought the modern French painters. He had particularly Degas who I consider still today a very good painter, one of the best. But, anyway, in spite of my teaching my art was my concern. On the little money I had collected I lived in Berlin very cheaply, ate very cheaply. And already in 1920 I saved the first salaries I received to go to Munich.. .So for the first time I saw the old masters, Rubens and all at the Alte Pinakothek."

"I had to go to the Bauhaus to the basic course that was given by Itten. And I submitted to that although I was a little older than Itten. But I have not the best memories of my studies there. So when that course was over everyone had to exhibit his work and then it was decided whether or not one could continue. I was accepted to continue. But I wanted to go into a workshop and I wanted to make stained glass. That was my old dream. Glass pictures. But Itten thought I was not ready for that. Certainly to delay my study in glass, Itten said, 'Glass painting is a branch of wall painting and you should go first to our wall painting workshop,' And I said, 'That's nonsense. Wall painting has to do with reflected light and glass painting with direct light.' So I said 'Sorry, I'll do my own stuff on my own.' I had no money. Just a Rucksack and a hammer. And I started these assemblages. That was in 1921, But in all books on assemblages these things are not mentioned."

"This is what has Gropius the director made the Bauhaus famous. Not its lamps or its furniture. They are all out of fashion already. But the way of approaching formal problems or material as such, that has made it famous. And the emphasis on material, especially its capacity is my contribution. That was never cleared between us teachers. Kandinsky did what he thought should be done. Klee developed an absolutely different method. Schlemmer developed absolutely something else. Klee was my so-called form master. In the workshops there they had a crafts master and a form master. The crafts master had to direct the practical work, the mechanics of the workshop. And the form master had to develop the, formal qualities. Klee was my form master in the glass workshop. He came to me and never criticized anything. He talked about something else. Never asked about any form problem with the windows I was working on. Never a word. He was too respectful. He was the nicest master I could ask for. He talked about exhibitions. He thought I should exhibit. That's another story. We had a good relationship because we never dealt with the same problems. He didn’t attack our problems. He never brought up a problem."

"When we are honest – that's my saying – if we are honest then we will reveal ourselves. But we do not have to make an effort to be individualistic, different from others. You see that is the nonsense of the last 15, 20 years [Albers refers here critically to American Abstract Expressionism ]. What is wrong there is that everyone wants to be different from the already different ones. And then they ended up all alike. And we are tired of that. And the youngsters feel that now. And they don't continue, you see. They see this will not last. These exaggerated performers always speak in the highest dramatic voice. And in order to achieve it get always drunk before you come to action. Sick. It's over. So I'm quite critical against many of my colleagues. It is not their self-expression. What makes me to be more than my neighbor only when I think I have to say something more than he can. That is self-disclosure. I once gave a talk in Chicago and right in the beginning I said – a lady came to me and said, 'You are against self-expression. And I am mad against you now.' 'And I'll stand upside down to demonstrate that, I said, 'Stop the sentence. You are self-disclosing; you are not self-expressing.'"

"Art is not to be looked at. Art is looking at us. What is art to others is not necessarily art to me. Nor for the same reason and vice versa. What was art to me or was not some time ago might have lost that value or gained it in the meantime and maybe again though art is not an object but experience. To be able to perceive it we need to be receptive. Therefore art is there where art meets us now. The content of art is visual formulation of our relation to life. The measure of art, the ratio of effort to effect, the aim of art revelation and evocation of vision."

"Yes it was 1949. How I came to that. That's like how one gets to know a human being. It so happens that I've always had a preference – as everyone has prejudices and preferences – for the square as a shape in preference to the circle as a shape. And I have known for a long time that a circle always fools me by not telling me whether it's standing still or not. And if a circle circulates you don't see it. The outer curve looks the same whether it moves or does not move. So the square is much more honest and tells me that it is sitting on one line of the four, usually a horizontal one, as a basis. And I have also come to the conclusion that the square is a human invention, which makes it sympathetic to me. Because you don't see it in nature. As we do not see squares in nature, I thought that it is man-made. But I have corrected myself. Because squares exist in salt crystals, our daily salt. We know this because we can see it in the microscope. On the other hand, we believe we see circles in nature. But rarely precise ones. Nature, it seems, is not a mathematician. Probably there are no straight lines either. Particularly not since Einstein says in his theory of relativity that there is no straight line, rod knows whether there are or not, I don't. I still like to believe that the square is a human invention. And that tickles me. So when I have a preference for it then I can only say excuse me."

"There science is dealing with physical facts, in art we are dealing with psychic effects. With this I come to my first statement: 'The source of art – that is, where it comes from – is the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect'. That's what I'm talking about. When I want to speak about why I am doing the same thing now, which is squares, for – how long? – 19 years. Because there is no final solution in any visual formulation. Although this may be just a belief on my part, I have some assurances that that is not the most stupid thing to do, through Cezanne whom I consider as one of the greatest painters. From Cézanne we have, so the historians tell us – 250 paintings of Mont St. Victoire. But we know that Cézanne has left in the fields often more than he took home because he was disappointed with his work. So we may conclude he did many more than 250 of the same problem."

"Duplicity in events: What happens here as new, happens somewhere else just the same way. That's so exciting. That is one of the secrets of life. Why did I sometimes build a lamp in the Bauhaus and somebody comes from Holland and says, 'Oh, somebody in Holland makes just the same lamp.' Such duplicity shows that the time is ripe for a problem and thus it is in the air, and will be solved here – and there. With this we are finding the 'creative process', for which somebody is coming to ask me about. I would say, 'I paint because I have no time not to paint.' That's my creative process."

"I have received a question I have expected, 'Don't you deal with accidents?' Yes, I deal with accidents, just as Arp admits it all the time. And I admit it, too. But I like to have them under my command and not sign them because they are accidents. If it remains only accident then sign it 'accident' or 'fate' or 'the Lord', whatever you prefer. It's not you because you have not visioned it. You see visual formulation deals with vision, visual information and visual reaction. So I speak differently from all those who deliver themselves to uncontrolled accidents."

"I would say, 'My things have the look of icons.' Unconsciously they look at you not as my face is now – you see me in profile – icons are only this way. And so are my paintings."

"I say all the time, if I sell that to you, you pay me for 3 colors. And I sell you 4, I betray you. Not to cheat you, but to pet you. You see I betray you in a positive way. I make you see more than there is. And that's in all my art that way. Absolutely something else. And that's what my book is about. You never see what you see. I lead you to see something else. And therefore I direct you. That's help."

"I have not built any theory. I have only tried to build up sensitive eyes, as my book says. And I have tried to achieve that by aiming at very distinct color relationships again – like how do they influence each other? Change each other in light and in intensity, in transparency, opacity? How do they change each other in all different directions? That we make all the students aware, through experience, that color is the most relative medium in art, and that we never really see what we see. All neighboring means which occur every minute different, not only in changing light but also by our changing moods. And in the end, the study of color again is a study of ourselves."

"That question is so big that there is no end [Albers refers here to the relationship between colors and the source of light]. You see, they have just you cannot participate with it if you have not lubricated your eyes very thoroughly to see the little changes produced in our eye that has another action than any optical apparatus like photography. We must know that we have two ways of seeing. For instance, when we are indoors another part of the retina is engaged compared with when we are outdoors. If we are in warm light or cool light, in higher light or lower light."

"I think it's true, as many say, I have dealt for many years with the problems that w:Op art so-called, is dealing with. For many years I have studied the logic and magic of color. And so I know what's involved when it comes to the interaction of colors, more than many who refuse to study it. But I found a way to study it, I think, that's all. And besides I refuse to be the father of a new bandwagon."

"I made true the first English sentence [Albers came from Germany] that I uttered (better stuttered) on our arrival at Black Mountain College in November 1933 [right after the closing of the Bauhaus art school in Dessau Germany, by the Nazi's] When a student asked me what I was going to teach I said: 'to open eyes'. And this has become the motto of all my teaching [famous pupils of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College were for instance the young generation starting American artists, like Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, Ray Johnson and Susan Weil."

"In 1923, when I had been a student at the 'Bauhaus' in Weimar.. ..Gropius [the director of Bauhaus] asked me to teach the basic course 'Werklehhre'. He wanted me to introduce newcomers to the principles of handicrafts. He knew that I came from that background and had appropriate practice and knowledge."

"I did not teach painting but seeing. I concentrated on the basic courses for beginners. I taught drawing (purposely without nudes), color (without any painting as such) and design (as 'structural organization'). And so the graduate students came 'down' to the basic courses for beginners."

"Amateurism is an emptiness and I accept it because it has no preconceived ideas or rules to be applied. This is for me [as art teacher] a most welcome situation and I like to keep my students amateurs and dilettantes."

"I have taught – until 10 years ago – for nearly 40 years, that is almost half of my life. And when I think that over – now afterwards -, I come to a surprising conclusion, namely that I did not teach arts as such, but philosophy and psychology of art."

"But I've noticed something with other artists who do use the whole range of forms of colours and black - in Albers, for instance, who experiments with yellow, red, blue, the whole scale. Of course I love his colour paintings, but when I see a black-and-white such as 'The Homage to a Black and White Square' [Josef Albers painted large series with this title], I like that best, you know. I think it has something to do with deciding just exactly what you really like best. There is always that wonderful element of doubt."

"[Josef] Albers was a beautiful teacher [at the Black Mountain college ] and an impossible person. He wasn't easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it. Years later, though, I'm still learning what he taught me, because what he taught me had to do with the entire visual world. He didn't teach you how to 'do painting'. The focus was always on your personal sense of looking.. .I consider Albers the most important teacher I've ever had, and I'm sure that he considers me one of his poorest students."

"I don't think he [Joseph Albers] ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for [on Black Mountain College, were Josef Albers was then a leading teacher]. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. .I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing – I didn't want color to serve me, in other words."

"It is my own personal psychosis that it is only by the background that you can see what is in front of you. Only be accepting all that surrounds you can you be totally self-visualized. And at the same time, your self-visualization is a reflection of your surroundings. Albers was right about that."

"[Josef] Albers' rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense."

"When asked later in life about his working methods for the ['Homage to the 'Square' paintings, Albers would often explain that he always began with the center square because his father, who, among other things, painted houses, had instructed him as a young man that when you paint a door you start in the middle and work outwards. [Albers:] 'That way you catch the drips, and don’t get your cuffs dirty'."

"The German artist [Albers was from German origine] whose lifelong exploration of shape and color theories influenced a generation of artists and challenged audiences worldwide in addition of being one of the leading artists of the 20th century."

"The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, The Styles Of John Joven Sesame Street & StoryBots through imagination, invention and confrontation."

"Whatever you do, the only secret is to believe in it and satisfy yourself. Don't do it for anyone else."

"Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God."

"Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth."

"This time the entire floor is covered with cut-up illustrated journals, a new tic and trick of mine (eight days now): I cut out photos from illustrated journals and dissolve them with a chemical solution and swipe and smear them. That is fabulous fun. I have always loved illustrated magazines, perhaps because of their documentary actuality. I have also already made a few attempts to paint something like that in a larger format. Curious to see how it will continue. I am pursuing something which in a certain way resembles the most recent movement: Pop art (from popular), probably came up in America and is now heating up the minds here."

"Pop art is neither an American invention nor an import, yet the terms and names were coined in the US, where they were popularised much faster than in Germany. This kind of art has evolved organically and independently over here, yet at the same time it becomes an analogy to American pop art due to certain psychological, cultural and economical preconditions that are the same in Germany as they are in the US.. ..For the first time we are showing paintings in Germany that relate to those terms, representing pop art, junk culture, imperial or capitalistic realism, new figuration, naturalism, German pop and other comparable terms."

"I am primarily painting from photographs these days (from illustrated magazines but also from family photos), in a sense this is a stylistic problem, the form is naturalistic, even though the photograph is not nature at all but a prefabricated product (the “second-hand world” in which we live), I do not have to intervene artistically with style, since the stylization (deformation in form and color) contributes only under very particular circumstances toward clarifying and intensifying an object or a subject (generally stylization becomes the central problem which obscures everything else (object, subject), it leads to an unmotivated artificiality, an untouchable formalist taboo."

"Contact with like-minded painters – a group means a great deal to me: nothing comes in isolation. We have worked out our ideas largely by talking them through. Shutting myself away in the country, for instance, would do nothing for me. One depends on one's surroundings. And so the exchange with other artists – and especially the collaboration with Lueg and Polke – matters a lot to me: it is part of the input that I need."

"Composition is a side issue. Its role in my selection of photographs is a negative one at best. By which I mean that the fascination of a photograph is not in its eccentric composition but in what it has to say: its information content. And, on the other hand, composition always also has its own fortuitous rightness."

"I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information."

"As far as the surface is concerned – oil on canvas, conventionally applied – my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact."

"Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real – and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself."

"[question: How do you interpret your role as a painter in our society?] As a role that everyone has. I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy. When I make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it. I prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: 'Ah, yes, that's how he sees the world, that's his interpretation."

"This superficial blurring has something to do with the incapacity I have just mentioned. I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever. But this doesn't explain the pictures. At best it explains what led to their being painted."

"Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form; and the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context – which presupposes, of course, that words are used to convey information about the idea and the context. However, none of this means that pictures function as illustrations of an idea: ultimately, they are the idea. Nor is the verbal formulation of the idea a translation of the visual: it simply bears a certain resemblance to the meaning of the idea. It is an interpretation, literally a reflection."

"The first 'Colour charts' were unsystematic. They were based directly on commercial colour samples. They were still related to Pop Art. In the canvases that followed, the colours were chosen arbitrarily and drawn by chance. Then, 180 tones were mixed according to a given system and drawn by chance to make four variations of 180 tones. But after that the number 180 seemed too arbitrary to me, so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions.. .Based on mixtures of the three primary colours, along with black and white, I come up with a certain number of possible colours and, by multiplying these by two or four, I obtain a definite number of colour fields that I multiply yet again by two, etc. But the complete realization of this project demands a great deal of time and work."

"'1,024 Colours in 4 Permutations' In order to represent all extant colour shades in one painting, I worked out a system which – starting from the three primaries, plus grey – made possible a continual subdivision (differentiation) through equal gradations. 4 x 4 = 16 x 4 = 64 x 4 = 256 x 4 = 1,024. The multiplier 4 was necessary because I wanted to keep the image size, the square size and the number of squares in a constant proportion to each other. To use more than 1,024 tones (4,096, for instance) seemed pointless, since the difference between one shade and the next would no longer have been detectable. The arrangement of the colours on the squares was done by a random process, to obtain a diffuse, undifferentiated overall effect, combined with stimulating detail. The rigid grid precludes the generation of figurations, although with an effort these can be detected. This aspect of artificial naturalism fascinates me – as does the fact that, if I had painted all the possible permutations, light would have taken more than 400 billion years to travel from the first painting to the last. I wanted to paint four large, colourful pictures."

"When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over (about eight years ago), I did so because I did not know what to paint, or what there might be to paint: so wretched a start could lead to nothing meaningful. As time went on, however, I observed differences of quality among the grey surfaces – and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it."

"To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour."

"To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing, what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.. .Painting is another form of thinking."

"Art is the highest form of hope."

"When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals. Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate."

"When I paint an abstract picture (the problem is very much the same in other cases), I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings – like that of a person who possesses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to build something useful which is not allowed to be a house or a chair or anything else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper, professional way he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful."

"Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever accomplishing anything, of painting a valid, true picture or even knowing what such a thing ought to look like. But then I always have the hope that, if I persevere, it might one day happen. And this hope is nurtured every time something appears, a scattered, partial, initial hint of something which reminds me of what I long for, or which conveys a hint of it – although often enough I have been fooled by a momentary glimpse that then vanishes, leaving behind only the usual thing."

"The 'Grey Pictures' were done at a time when there were monochrome paintings everywhere. I painted them nonetheless.. .Not Kelly, but Bob Ryman, Brice Marden, Alan Charlton, Yves Klein and many others."

"The truth [is in his paintings].. .When they have a similar structure to and are organized in as truthful a way as nature. When I look out of the window, then truth for me is the way nature shows itself in its various tones, colours and proportions. That's a truth and has its own correctness. This little slice of nature, and in fact any given piece of nature, represents to me an ongoing challenge, and is a model for my paintings."

"I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false."

"Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God.. .The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster."

"In the early 1960s, having just come over from the GDR, I naturally declined to summon up any sympathy for the aims and methods of the Red Army Faction [RAF]. I was impressed by the terrorists' energy, their uncompromising determination and their absolute bravery; but I could not find it in my heart to condemn the State for its harsh response. That is what States are like; and I had known other, more ruthless ones. The deaths of the terrorists, and the related events both before and after, stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my efforts to suppress it."

"The ones that weren't paintable were the ones I did paint. The dead. To start with, I wanted more to paint the whole business, the world as it then was, the living reality – I was thinking in terms of something big and comprehensive. But then it all evolved quite differently, in the direction of death. And that's really not all that unpaintable. Far from it, in fact. Death and suffering have always been an artistic theme. Basically, it's the theme. We've eventually managed to wean ourselves away from it, with our nice, tidy lifestyle.. .They [ Red Army Faction-members were not the victims of any specific ideology of the left or of the right, but of the ideological posture as such. This has to do with the everlasting human dilemma in general: to work for a revolution and fail.."

"Chance as a theme and as method. A method of allowing something objective to come into being; a theme for creating a simile (picture) of our survival strategy: (1) The living method, which not only processes conditions, qualities and events as they chance to happen, but exists solely as that non-static 'process', and in no other way. (2) Ideological: denial of the planning, the opinion and the world-view whereby social projects, and subsequently 'big pictures', are created. So what I have often seen as a deficiency on my part – the fact that I've never been in a position to 'form a picture' of something – is not incapacity at all but an instinctive effort to get at a more modern truth: one that we are already living out in our lives (life is not what is said but the saying of it, not the picture but the picturing)."

"I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming – that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original – then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part."

"I don't have a specific picture in my mind's eye. I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture. Each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: it has to emerge as if inevitably. And by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature (or a ready-made) always possesses. Of course, this is also a method of bringing in unconscious processes, as far as possible. I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things that I can think out for myself."

"But my motivation was more a matter of wanting to create order – to keep track of things. All those boxes full of photographs and sketches weigh you down, because they have something unfinished, incomplete, about them. So it's better to present the usable material in an orderly fashion and throw the other stuff away. That's how the Atlas came to be, and I exhibited it a few times."

"In the beginning I tried to accommodate everything there that was somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away. After a while, some sheets in the Atlas acquired another value, after all – that is, it seemed to me that they could stand on their own terms, not only under the protection of the Atlas."

"If, while I'm painting, I distort or destroy a motif, it is not a planned or conscious act, but rather it has a different justification: I see the motif, the way I painted it, is somehow ugly or unbearable. Then I try to follow my feelings and make it attractive. And that means a process of painting, changing or destroying – for however long it takes – until I think it has improved. And I don't demand an explanation from myself as to why this is so."

"The urge to break with a tradition is only appropriate when you're dealing with an outdated, troublesome tradition: I never really thought about that because I take the old-fashioned approach of equating tradition with value (which may be a failing). But whatever the case, positive tradition can also provoke opposition if it's too powerful, too overwhelming, too demanding. That would basically be about the human side of wanting to hold your own."

"By nature I am a skeptic. I don't dare to think my paintings are great. I can't understand the arrogance of someone saying, 'I have created a big, important work.' I want to reject this pathetic behavior, this notion of the heroic artist. Pollock, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, their heroism derived from the climate of their time, but we do not have this climate.. .On the other hand, you do need feelings like they had to some extent. So I am afraid there must be a side of me close to those feelings. Those absurd feelings."

"I have always been structured. What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting. I go to the studio every day, but I don't paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things. Weeks go by, and I don't paint until finally I can't stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don't want to talk about it, because I don't want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself. It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea."

"My last wife [woman-artist Isa Genzken, he married in 1982 - they broke up in 1993] was very competitive, which was hard for both of us."

"Idiots can do what I do. When I first started to do this [projecting photos on the canvas and painting them after having them traced in details with a piece of charcoal] in the 60's, people laughed. I clearly showed that I painted from photographs. It seemed so juvenile. The provocation was purely formal - that I was making paintings like photographs. Nobody asked about what was in the pictures. Nobody asked who my Aunt Marianne was. That didn't seem to be the point."

"'The abstracts are the opposite to work on. That process is more like walking, step by step, without an intention, until you discover where you are going. When I paint a landscape from a photograph or an image like this one, I can see the end point before I start, although in fact it always turns out slightly different than I imagined. What I have is not facility, because this really doesn't take skill. I have an eye. I couldn't make a drawing of you sitting here right now. I would love to have that ability, in the same way that I would love to play the piano. Virtuosity is a precondition for pianists, but in addition you have to be good. These are not the same thing."

"I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day. Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting, but use painting as a means to photography."

"My works are not just rhetorical, except in the sense that all art is rhetorical. I believe in beauty."

"They [Richter always works on a number of his abstract paintings at the same time] feed off one another.. .At the beginning, I feel totally free, and it's fun, like being a child. The paintings can look good for a day or an hour. Over time, they change. In the end, you become like a chess player. It takes me longer than some people to recognize their quality, their situation - to realize when they are finished. Finally, one day I enter the room and say, 'Checkmate.' Then sometimes I need a break, a quiet job, like a landscape. But I always need to paint abstracts again. I need that pleasure."

"I can't say what they [his abstract paintings] are about. I don't think they are expressionistic. I don't know why people say that. Why not say they are like Chinese paintings or like batik? People also talk about the quality of light in the paintings. 'Ah, the light!' Or 'Ah, the space!' It's phony reverence. It's ridiculous."

"It is instinctive to search for something. Abstract art is inherently about the search - and about not finding anything. My gray monochromes have the same illusionistic implications as my landscapes. I want them to be seen as narratives - even if they are narratives of nothingness. Nothing is something. You might say they are like photographs of nothing."

"This one is too elegant, too shiny, like jewelry. It seeks applause. This is clear to me, but difficult to explain, which is what makes abstraction so fascinating. In one sense, abstract art is absolutely nothing, stupid. In 100 years, maybe people will just think it's garbage. But somehow we see something in it; we have a sense of quality. [searching for an illustration of his point, Richter leafs through a catalog to find some of his 'gray monochromes']. I was doing these [monochromes] when I was getting divorced. When you feel totally empty, you do this - but then I saw that one picture was actually better than another. Both were miserable, but the difference was interesting. I loved this: that there must be something, some higher faculty, some progressive sensibility that we find in abstraction. But it is impossible to describe."

"In [19]'46, I had started to awaken to the world. At first, the Russians nationalized everything [in East-Germany / DDR]. Rich people had their property taken away, and the people got access to their libraries, which was wonderful for me. I read Hermann Hesse. Thomas Mann was a little too heavy for me. But Lombroso, Nietzsche. Materialists, I would call them – writers who said there was no god, no spirit, that freedom is an illusion. That affected me deeply."

"But somewhere [during the 1950's, in East-Germany at the Art Academy] along the way we all began to notice that there was something wrong. We saw a few art magazines from the West and got a sense of another world. We began to talk about a third way between capitalism and Communism in art. I saw the work of graphic designers from Poland, the only ones [in communist area] I came across who seemed to be doing something for society but in a style that was more modern."

"I was called a formalist, and in East Germany that meant you could be denied a chance to exhibit. So I knew I had to leave [to West-Germany], not because I was worried about the controversy but because I knew the controversy was about a bad picture. It wasn't good enough to be controversial. I was getting all the wrong reactions. Friends said the work was wonderful, and the attacks made it seem more important than it was. I had started to earn money with the murals. I earned enough to get a car. That was a big deal. So it was not easy to give up. But I knew I had to leave."

"Lueg and Palermo saw what was good, what was bad, in what I was painting. That became the basis of our relationship, that we shared an idea, a sensibility. With Sigmar Polke, it was different. Our relationship was based on being outrageous. I have difficulties with his work. He [Polke] refuses all values and criteria, and for that reason I could never talk to him seriously. He refuses to accept any borders, any limits."

"I was already almost 30, and by then everyone was talking about the Americans. Picasso was irrelevant. He was history. I found myself in this deep pool, and there were all these figures swimming around, like Rauschenberg and Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein|Lichtenstein]]. I wanted to go where they were. Seeing Pollock and Fontana in Kassel had given me a sense of what it meant to be a modern artist and take risks, but it was a distant admiration because they were a different generation. This was my generation [on the art academy in Düsseldorf]."

"So I started to paint like crazy, from figurative to abstract. Then after a year, I put it all on a bonfire in the courtyard of the academy. I suppose there was some ritual involved, but I didn't tell anyone before I did it, so it wasn't public, and I felt the work had to be burned because people were already taking things and paintings were starting to circulate. I had to prevent that because I realized it was time to start from scratch. Photographs were the way forward. I'm shocked now that the story seems clear, because it didn't seem clear at the time."

"I was like a gravedigger while I painted these corpses [of the dead Baader-Meinhoff members]. It was just work. If I felt one of them looked too theatrical, I painted over it.. .I was afraid more of the reaction on the left than the right. It was still very dangerous to deal with this subject in Germany. There was fear that the museum where I showed them might be bombed. All my friends were on the left, but I was not. They said: 'Someone with the right mentality could do this, but not Richter - he is too bourgeois. He steals Baader-Meinhof away from us.' To me, they were part of the problem. I was standing outside watching how people, on both sides [left / right], ignored the truth because of their beliefs, beliefs that made them crazy. That was the point of the pictures."

"I suppose they also had to do with my father, the Nazis, being skeptical of all systems, all manias. In the 70's, political positions were so clearly split in Germany - the country was so divided over the Baader-Meinhof group - and I was annoyed by both sides. In terms of what I expressed in the paintings, that seemed my only choice, not because I wanted to be ambiguous but because I myself don't know how to answer these difficult questions. That was what I was conveying."

"I can bear this - that I am not the young wild guy [as he was in the 1970's]. I hope that the lust to work doesn't leave me. That would be sad. I am glad to get honors and high prices. But artists are valued today in terms of money, auctions. I wish society would need art more, but it doesn't. So I feel very lonely in this culture."

"I was enormously impressed by Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana.. ..the sheer brazenness of it! That really fascinated me and impressed me. I might almost say that those paintings were the real reason I left the GDR [ German Democratic Republic ]. I realized that something was wrong with my whole way of thinking.. .I lived my life with a group of people who laid claim to a moral aspiration, who wanted to bridge a gap.. .And so the way we thought, and what we wanted for our own art, was all about compromise."

"Dada is a farce, a legend, a state of myth. A badly behaved myth whose subterranean survival and capricious manifestation upset everyone.. .The aesthetic of absolute negativity has been changed into methodical doubt, thanks to which it will finally be able to incarnate new signs.. .After the NO and the ZERO, there is a third position for the myth; the anti-art gesture of Marcel Duchamp has been charged with positive energy. The Dada spirit identifies itself with a method of appropriation of exterior reality of the modern world.. .The ready-made is no longer the height of negativity or of polemic, but the basis element of a new expressive repertoire. Such is the New Realism: a direct means for getting one's feet back on the ground but at 40 degree above Dada zero."

"I painted [circa 1960-62] through the whole history of art toward abstraction. I painted like crazy [and] I had some success with all that, or gained some respect. But than I felt it wasn't it, and so I burned the crap in some sort of action in the courtyard. And then I began. It was wonderful to make something and then destroy it. It was doing something and I felt very free."

"It was no accident that I found my way to Götz at the time [c. 1960-62]. This 'Informal' element runs through every picture I've painted, whether it's a landscape, or a family painted from a photograph, or the Colour Charts or a Grey picture. And so now it is a pursuit of the same objectives by other means.. .As I now see it, all my paintings are 'Informal'.. ..except for the landscapes, perhaps.. .The 'Informal' is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism – the age of kings, of clearly formed hierarchies."

"My first photo Picture? I was doing large pictures in gloss enamel.. .One day a photograph of Brigit Bardot fell into my hands, and I painted it into one of these pictures in shades of grey. I had had enough of bloody painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic.. ..thing that everyone could do."

"He [Richter's art-mate, the German painter Sigmar Polke ] was very different, he was not cool.. .He had irony. He was very funny. The things we did together [around 1963 – 1970] were a kind of craziness.. .We thought everything was so stupid and we refused to participate. That was the basis of our understanding.. ..he was able to paint those little dots in his raster paintings by hand with such a patience while he was living with his two children and his wife in a small subsidized apartment."

"Contact with like-minded painters, a group means a great deal to me: nothing comes in isolation. We have worked out our ideas largely by talking them through.. .One depends on one's surroundings. And so the exchange with other artists – and especially the collaboration with Lueg and Polke – matters a lot to me."

"Shocking, absolutely shocking – they [the German w:Fluxus artists] pissed in the tub, snag the German national anthem, covered the audience with paper, poured laundry detergent into the piano, attached microphones to fountain pens.. ..it was all very cynical and destructive; it was a signal for us and we (the German artists Lueg and Polke and Gerhard Richter himself] became [also] cynical and cocky."

"I did not come here [out of communist German Democratic Republic, to West-Germany] to get away from 'materialism'; here [in West –Germany] its dominance is far more total and more mindless. I came to get away from the criminal 'idealism' of the Socialists (quote circa 1962)."

"The photograph reproduces objects in a different way from the painted picture, because the camera does not apprehend objects: it sees them. In 'free-hand drawing' the object is apprehended in all it parts.. .By tracing the outlines with the aid of a projector you can bypass and elaborate this process of apprehension. You no longer apprehend but see and make (without design) what you have not apprehended. And when you don't know what you are making, you don't know, either, what to alter or distort."

"I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violence, and I am not violent)."

"I would rather paint the victims than the killers.. .When Warhol painted the killers, I painted the victims. The subjects were of poor people, banal poor dogs."

"I pursue no objectives, no systems, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty."

"Do you know what was great? Finding out that a stupid, ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture. And then the freedom to paint whatever you felt like. Stags, aircraft, kings, secretaries. Not having to invent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by painting – color, composition, space – and all of the things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly none of this was a prior necessity for art."

"It [grey color] makes no statement whatever.. .It has the capacity that no other color has, to make 'nothing' visible. To me grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape (note 99).. ..but, grey like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea.. ..The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of color."

"Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass [like in his work '4 Panes of Glass', 1967], etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality."

"I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed. Our eyes have evolved for survival purposes. The fact that they can also see the stars is pure accident."

"All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and the tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings. If I had any way of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts."

"It was the ultimate possible statement of powerlessness and desperation [Richter is referring to w:John Cage's famous 'Lecture on Nothing']. Nothing, absolutely nothing left, no figures, no color, nothing. Then you realize after you've painted three of them that one's better than the others and you ask yourself why is that. When I see eight pictures together I no longer feel that they're sad, or if so, they're sad in a pleasant way."

"His Blinky Palermo constructive pictures have remained in my memory because they particularly appeal to me, because I can't produce such a thing. I always found it very good how he made it and that he made it – this astonished me. There was an aesthetic quality which I loved and which I couldn't produce, but I was happy that such a thing existed in the world. In comparison, my own things seemed to me somewhat destructive, without this beautiful clarity."

"We [Richter and w:Blinky Palermo ] could really just speak about painting. The main thing was about the surface of color or the proportion of color. It was impossible for me to talk to Sigmar Polke about the opacity of color. With Palermo, yes. We supported each other, we comforted each other a little bit. We thought this really could not be true that everything was supposed to be over ['painting' as an expression of art, in the 1970's). Art had to be relevant [in the 1970's], and our art was not relevant."

"I only identified with (Rothko's seriousness, which was absolutely to be admired. At that time, in the 1970's Barnett Newman, with his non-hierarchical structures, his non-relational Color Field painting, seemed more interesting because his work was less pretty."

"Simply because I liked it so much I saw it in Venice and thought: I'd like to have that for myself. To start with I only meant to make a copy, so that I could have a beautiful painting at home and with it a piece of that period, all that potential beauty and sublimity.. .Then my copy went wrong, and the pictures that finally emerged went to show that it just can't be done any more, not even by way of a copy. All I could do was to break the whole thing down and show that it's no longer possible [Richter's quote refers to his 'Annunciation after Titian', he made in 1973]."

"A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted.. ..it is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich today."

"I believe that art has a kind of Rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false. And that's why classical paintings, which are right in their own terms, are so necessary for me. In addition to that there's nature, which also has this rightness."

"I even went all the way to Greenland, because C. D. Friedrich painted that beautiful picture of The Wreck of the 'Hope'. I took hundreds of photos up there and barely one picture [Richter's quote refers to his artwork 'Iceberg in Fog', 1982] came out of it."

"Of course, my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful'.. .By 'untruthful' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature – Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves."

"What I lack is the spiritual basis which under girded Romantic painting. We have lost the feeling of God's omnipresence in Nature. For us, everything is empty. Yet, these paintings [of a.o. Caspar David Friedrich ] are still there. They still speak to us. We continue to love them, to use them, to have need of them."

"Their permanent presence [of the old traditional paintings out of the past] compels us to produce something different, which is neither better nor worse, but which has to be different because we painted the Isenheim Alter [of Grünewald, 14th century] yesterday.. ..the better we know tradition – i.e., ourselves and the more responsibly we deal with it, the better things we will make similar, and the better things we will make different."

"To defend painting: One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is pure idiocy."

"The first impulse towards painting, or toward art in general, stems from the need to communicate, the effort to fix one's own vision, to deal with appearances (which are alien and must be given names and meanings.) Without this, all work would be pointless and unjustified, like Art for Art's Sake."

"The idea that art copies nature is a fatal misconception. Art has always operated against nature and for reason."

"Every word, every line, every thought is prompted by the age we live in, with all its circumstances, its ties, its efforts, its past and present. It is impossible to act or think independently and arbitrarily. This is comforting in a way. To the individual, the collective experience of the age represents a bond – and also, in a sense, security; there will always be possibilities even in disaster."

"It makes no sense to expect or claim to 'make the invisible visible', or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable. We can draw conclusions about the invisible; we can postulate its existence with relative certainty. But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it."

"There is no excuse whatever for uncritically accepting what one takes over from others. For no thing is good or bad in itself, only as it relates to specific circumstances and to our own intentions. This fact means that there is nothing guaranteed or absolute about conventions; it gives us the daily responsibility of distinguishing good from bad."

"Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God. We are well aware that making sense and picturing are artificial, like illusion; but we can never give them up. For belief (thinking out and interpreting the present and the future) is our most important characteristic."

"Art's means of representing a thing – style, technique and the object represented – are circumstances of art, just as the artist's individual qualities (way of life, abilities, environment and so on) are circumstances of art. Art can just as well be made in harmony with the circumstances of its making as in defiance of them. In itself art is neither visible nor definable: all that is visible and imitable is its circumstances, which are easily mistaken for the art itself."

"As soon as artistic activity turns into an 'ism', it ceases to be artistic activity. To be alive is to engage in a daily struggle for form and for survival. (By way of analogy: social concern is a form and a method that is currently seen as appropriate and right. But where it elevates itself into Socialism, an order and a dogma, then it loses its best and truest qualities and may turn criminal.)"

"Painting has nothing to do with thinking, because in painting thinking is painting. Thinking is language – record-keeping – and has to take place before and after. Einstein did not think when he was calculating: he calculated – producing the next equation in reaction to the one that went before – just as in painting one form is a response to another and so on.""

"Art serves to establish community. It links us with others and with the things around us, in a shared vision and effort."

"My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for."

"The sciences certainly have influenced the arts. To an Aztec, the sunset was an inexplicable event, which he could not cope with or even survive without the imagined aid of his gods. Obvious phenomena of this sort have since been explained. But the sheer unimagined vastness of the explicable has now made the inexplicable into such a monstrous thing that our heads spin, and the old images burst like bubbles. The thought of the totally inexplicable (as when we look at the starry sky), and the impossibility of reading any sense into this monstrous vastness, so affect us that we need ignorance to survive."

"Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going – being lost, being a loser – reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art."

"Actually, I was doing them when I was still married to Gerhard Richter [till 1993], and it was somehow in relation to what he was doing, you know, these kind of side-to-side gestural abstracts – done like this [gestures as if pulling a squeegee over a surface from one side to the other] like paintings of the 1950's. Mine were called 'Basic Research', they were rubbings of oil paint on canvas – frottages of the floor of my studio. I did quite a few of these. [Gerhard] Richter put one up in his studio for some time.. .But he found it too hard and then took it out after a while."

"Yes, throughout our marriage [1982 - 1993, with Gerhard Richter], we influenced each other mutually. We didn't have a student-teacher kind of relationship."

"This is portrayed after my wife when she was 21 years old, the third day after we were betrothed, on the 8th of June 1633"

"Quote in original Dutch (citaat van Rembrandt in Nederlands): Dit is naer mijn huijsvrou geconterfeit do si 21 jaer oud was, den derden dach als wij getroudt waeren, den 8 junijus 1633"

"A pious mind / Places honor above wealth - Rembrandt, Amsterdam 1634"

"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): Een vroom gemoet / Acht eer voor goet - Rembrandt, Amsterdam 1634"

"..that I am very diligently engaged in proficiently completing the three Passion paintings which his Excellency has personally commissioned me [to do]: an Entombment a Resurrection, and an Ascension of Christ.. .Of the above three, one has been completed, namely Christ's Ascension to Heaven, and the other two are more than half-finished.. ..as a token of my readiness to serve you with my favor, I cannot refrain from presenting you, [dear Sir, my latest work. I trust that you most graciously will accept it in addition to my greetings.. ..reside [on] Nieuwe Doelstraat [Amsterdam], Feb. 1636"

"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): ..dat ick seer naerstich / doende ben met die drie passij stucken voorts / met bequameheijt aftemaeken die sijn excellencij / my selfs heeft geordijneert, een grafleg[ing] ende een Verrijsenis en een Hemelvaert / Chrisstij. / De selvijge ackoordeeren met / opdoening en afdoeningen vant Chruijs Chrisstij. / Van welken drie voornomden / stuckens een van opgemaekt is daer / Chrisstus ten Heemel opvaert ende / die ander twee [schilderijen] ruym half gedaen sijn.. ..En ken oock niet naerlaeten volgens mijn dienstwillijgen / gunst mijn heer te vereeren van mijn jonsten / werck vertrouwenden dat mij ten bessten sal / afgenoomen werder neffens mijne groeteenissen.. ..[wonend] niuwe doelstraet [Amsterdam], Feb. 1636"

"My [dear] Sir: Let me first offer my kind regards. I agree that I should come soon to see how the picture accords with the rest. As regards the price, I certainly deserve 200 pounds for it, but shall be content with whatever His Excellency pays me. And if you, Sir, do not deem it presumptuous, I shall not neglect to requite the favor. Your humble and devoted servant Rembrandt - It [the picture] will show to [the] best advantage in His Excellency's gallery, since there it will be [displayed] in bright light."

"Because of the great zeal and devotion which I experienced in executing well the two pictures which His Highness commissioned me to make - the one being Christ's dead body being laid in the tomb [ 'The Entombment of Christ' ], and the other Christ arising from the dead to the consternation of the guards — these same two pictures are now finished through studious application, so that I am now disposed to deliver the same and so to afford to His Highness. For in these two paintings the greatest and most natural movement has been expressed [and rendered], which is also the main reason why they have taken so long to execute."

"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): Door die grooten lust ende geneegenheijt die ick gepleecght hebbe int wel wtvoeren van die twe/ stuckens die sijn Hoocheijt mijn heeft doen maeken weesende het een daer dat doode lichaem Chrisstij/ in den graeve gelecht werd ende dat ander/ daer Chrisstus van den doode opstaet dat met/ grooten verschrickinge des wachters. Dees selvij/ twe stuckens sijn door stuijdiose vlijt nu meede/ afgedaen soodat ick nu oock geneegen ben om die/ selvijge te leeveren om sijn Hoocheijt daer meede/ te vermaeken want deesen twe sijnt daer die meeste/ ende die naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt . in/ geopserveert is dat oock de grooste oorsaeck is dat/ die selvijge soo lang onder handen sij geweest. - in margin: deessen 12 Januwarij 1639, Mijn heer ik woon op die binnenemster, thuijs is genaemt die suijckerbackerrij [in Amsterdam]."

"I have read your pleasant letter of 14th with singular pleasure. I discern your kind inclination and affection which I feel deeply obliged to requite [you] with service and friendship. Because of [my] inclination to do this, [and] in spite of your wish (of Constantijn Huygens], [I] am sending [you] along [with this letter] a painting, hoping that you will accept it, because it is the first momento which I offer you, Sir.. ..postscripttum]: My [dear] Sir: hang this picture in a bright light and in such a manner that it can be viewed from a distance. It will then sparkle at its best."

"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): ..soo ist door [mijn] geneegentheijt [voor Huygens de raadspensionaris] tot sulx tegens mijns/ heeren begeeren dees bijgaenden douck toesenden [ bij de brief]/ hoopende dat u mijner in deesen niet versmaeden/ sult want het is die eersten gedachtenis/ die ick aen mijn heer laet./.. ..[postscriptum]: Mijn heer hangt dit stuck op een starck licht en dat men daer wuijt ken afstaen soo salt best voncken."

"For some variation it would be better to place the donkey seen from behind [to avoid] all faces looking out of the picture [forward] And the tree could also have more foliage. 1. Joseph has been portrayed too fat and too recklessly 2. Mary should hold the child more gently because a vulnerable child can't stand being held so firmly Joseph is too short fat - his head is growing from his trunk and both [Joseph & Mary] their heads are too big"

"Quote in original Dutch (citaat van Rembrandt in Nederlands): Beeter waert dat (om de veranderin) den eesel van achteren was / dan dat al de hoofden iuist wt het stuck sien dat oock omtrent die boom wat meerder groente was 1 iosep heft alte swaer en te onbesuist 2 maria most het kindeken wat meerder vieren want een teeder kint magh sulck duwen niet ve[elen?] iosep alte kort en dick / syn hooft wast hem wt de [romp?] sij hebben alle beide al te groote koppen"

"Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will in good time, discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know. By following carefully the rules of teachings provided that they are truthful, you can save a lot of time. But a student full of doubt is unable to move forwards and to judge well the truth."

"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): Schikt u daer nae, dat gy 't geene gy alreets weet, wel leert in 't werk stellen, zoo zult gy de verborgentheden, daer gy nu na vraegt, tijts genoeg ontdekt zien..."

"As seen from the Weighing House, the Town Hall of Amsterdam / after it was burnt down. / July, the 9th 1652. / Rembrandt van Rijn.[Rembrandt The Ruins of the Old City Hall in Amsterdam (After the Fire). [ Rembrandt The Ruins of the Old City Hall in Amsterdam (After the Fire) ]."

"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): Van d'waech af te sien statshuis van Amsterldam / doen 't afgebrandt was. / Den 9 july 1652. Rembrandt van Rijn."

"[..that he] would not touch the painting, nor finish it unless the claimant pays him the balance due or guarantees it by giving a security."

"..in order to etch, take white turpentine oil, and add half the turpentine to it; pour the mixture into a small glass bottle and let it boil in pure [?] water for half an hour."

"I am most astonished by what has been written about the [painting] 'Alexander', which is so well done that I must suppose there are not many lovers of art [amatori] at Messina. I am also surprised that Your Lordship [Don Antonio Ruffo] should complain as much about the price as about the canvas, but if Your Lordship wishes to return it as he did the sketch [schizzo] of Homer, I will do another Alexander.. .If Your Lordship likes the Alexander as is, very well. If he does not want to keep it, six hundred florins remain outstanding. And for the Homer [painting] five hundred florins plus the expenses of canvas, it being understood that everything is at Your Lordship's expense. Having agreed to it, would he kindly send me his desired measurements. Awaiting the response to settle the matter."

"Anno 1659 / On Wednesday, May 14 / You are requested to attend the funeral of / Aegtje Nachtglas / daughter of the late Jacob Pietersz / Nachtglas / at the Cleveniers-Doele [Amsterdam] at one o'clock. Come as friend of the house / Nieuwe-Kerck. [Verso] So eager to catch Christ out in his answer that they could not wait for written reply."

"The Ground of Rinebrant of Rine: Take half an ounce of Expoltum burnt of Amber, one ounce of Virgin's was, half an ounce of Mastick, then take the Mastick and Expoltum, and beat them severally very fine in a Mortar; this being done, take a new earthen pot and set upon it a charcoal-fire, then shake into it the Mastick and Expoltum by degrees, stirring the Wax about till they be thoroughly mingled, then pour it forth into fair water and make a ball of it, and use it as before mentioned, but be sure you do not heat the plate too hot when you lay the ground upon it, this is the only way of Rinebrant."

"I can't paint the way they want me to paint and they know that too. Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do it. I just can't do it! And that is why I am just a little crazy."

"Choose only one master — Nature."

"Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God."

"A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished."

"A painting is not made to be sniffed."

"Also, the son of a miller [= Rembrandt] in Leiden is esteemed highly, though prematurely. Elyas Veldenus [= Esaias van der Velde ] is an elegant painter, though unimportant, now residing at the Hague. The rector Scrivelius showed me his portrait, very lifelike on a panel by the Haarlem painter Frans Hals."

"I have deliberately reserved for last a noble pair of youths from Leiden [Huygens visited Rembrandt and Jan Lievens in 1628]. Were I to say that they alone can vie with the greatest among the superior mortals mentioned earlier, I would still be underestimating the merits of these two; were I to say that they will soon surpass them, I would merely be expressing what their astonishing beginnings have led connoisseurs to expect."

"I maintain that it did not occur to Protogenes, Appeles or Parrhasius, nor could it occur to them were they return to earth that (I am amazed simply to report this) a youth, a Dutchman, a beardless miller, could bring together so much in one human figure and express what is universal. All honor to thee, my Rembrandt! To have carried Illium, indeed all Asia, to Italy is a lesser achievement than to have brought the laurels of Greece and Italy to Holland, the achievement of a Dutchman who has seldom ventured outside the walls of his native city (...)"

"Due to their parents' straitened circumstances, the youths [Rembrandt and Jan Lievens, living in Leiden, then] were compelled to take teachers whose fees were modest. Were these teachers to be confronted with their pupils today, they would feel just as abashed as those teachers who gave Virgil his first lessons in poetry, Cicero in rhetoric and Archimedes in mathematics. Let it however be said, with due respect for everyone's capacities and without detracting from anyone (for what is it to me?): these two owe nothing to their teachers but everything to their aptitude. Had they never received any tuition but been left to their own devices and suddenly been seized by the urge to paint, I am convinced that they would have risen to the same heights as they indeed have. It would be wrong to think that others have led them to this point."

"He was seized with the desire to paint my portrait. I assured him that I should be only too pleased to grant him the opportunity if he would come to The Hague and put up at my house for a while. So ardent was his desire that he arrived within a few days, explaining that since seeing me his nights had been restless and his days so troubled that he had been unable to work. My countenance had lodged so firmly in his mind that his eagerness brooked no further delay."

"Rembrandt surpasses Lievens in the faculty of penetrating to the heart of his subject matter and bringing out its essence, and his works come across more vividly. Lievens, in turn, surpasses him in the proud self-assurance that radiates from his compositions and their powerful forms. Because Lievens's spirit - and this is due in part to his youth - is charged with the great and the glorious, he is inclined to depict the objects and models before him not life-sized but larger than life. Rembrandt on the other hand, obsessed by the effort to translate into paint what he sees in the mind's eye, prefers smaller formats, in which he nonetheless achieves effects that you will not find in the largest works of others."

"I stand firm: neither Protogenes, Apelles nor Parrhasius ever came up with the idea, nor, if they were to return to earth could they produce anything like this, created by a young, as yet beardless Hollander [Rembrandt, c. 1631], a miller, what he has combined in one figure and created in its entirety. It fills me with astonishment even as I say it. Congratulations Rembrandt!. ..the achievement of a Dutchman who has never ventured outside the walls of his native city."

"Ah Rembrandt, do paint Cornelis' voice His appearance is the least of him The invisible one can learn by ear Those wanting to see Anslo, must him hear. (translation from original Dutch: Anne Porcelijn)"

"original old-Dutch version of Vondel: 'Ay, Rembrant, mael Cornelis Stem. Het zichtbre deel is 't minst van hem: 't onsichtbre kent men slechts door d'ooren wien Anslo zien wil, moet hem hooren."

"Explanatory version: Ah Rembrandt, try to paint Cornelis Anslo's voice / What one sees of his appearance is so little of him / What you can't see of him you can learn through hearing. / Those wanting a complete impression of him will have to hear him (preach). (transl. Aernout Hagen, Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam)"

"As for the art of Panting and the affection off the people to Pictures, I thincke none other goe beeyond them, there having bin in the Country Many excellent Men in thatt Faculty, some att Presentt, as Rimbrantt [Rembrandt], etts, All in general striving to adorne their houses, especially the outer or street roome, with costly peeces, Butchers and bakers not much inferiour in their shoppes, which are Fairely sett Forth, yea many tymes blacksmithes, Coblers, etts., will have some picture or some other by their forge and in their stalle. Such is the general Notion, enclination to Paintings. [i.m.] The affection of the people thereto, as Allso to the curious adorning and cleanly keeping of their houses, streets, etc."

"Dear Sir, You would do me a great favor, when in London, to greet Mr. Cornelius Poelenburg, the celebrated painter, and other friends on my behalf. And if, by chance, the illustrious Mr. van Dyck has arrived there, I send him my humble greetings and tell him that yesterday I was called upon to appraise the paintings belonging to Mr. Lopez, including some by Titian.. ..Sir, if you happend to think of it, when you pass through Holland, please.. ..[try to] obtain paintings by Mr. Cornelio [Cornelius Poelenburgh] which you can easily find in London and Utrecht. In the latter city greet Gerrit [van] Honthorst, and in Amsterdam give my greetings to Mr. Rembrandt and bring back [buy!] something by him. Tell him also that yesterday I appraised his painting 'The Prophet Balaam', [Rembrandt painted in 1626}. which Mr. Lopez bought from him. This piece will be sold together with the ones mentioned above."

"In the name of our Lord Amen.. ..Saskia van Uijlenburch, wife of the Honorable Rembrant van Rhijn, residing in this city, well known to me, the notary, although sick in bed, yet in full control of her memory and understanding, as it outwardly appeared, after commending her soul to God Almighty and her body to Christian burial, before me declared and appointed as her heirs Titus van Rijn, her son, as well as any other lawful child or children she might bear.."

"Thus is Anslo depicted [by Rembrandt Thus his piety is rendered his countenance So that if perchance The grand old man shall cease to speak, This present likeness will speak to nations."

"..dumb integuments teach. Cuts of flesh, though dead, for that very reason forbid us to die. Here, while with artful hand he slits the pallid limbs, speaks to us the eloquence of learned Tulp: 'Listener, learn yourself! and while you proceed through the parts, believe that, even in the smallest, God lies hid.'"

"that with her needle she eclipses what Rembrandt, in his paintings, does with his brush, for she also paints with gold.."

"original old-Dutch text: ..dat zy de schilderyen, Van Rembrant zellever, verduistert met de naald, Die een pinceel verstrekt, daar zy met goud mee maalt..."

"This drawing shows the outer Amstel bank so properly drawn by Mr. Rembrant's own hand P[hilips de] Ko[ninck] f 5:-"

"original old-Dutch text: Dees tekeningh vertoont de buiten amstel kant / Soo braaf getekent door heer Rembrants eijgen hant / P. Ko: f 5:-"

"..I will not attempt your fame O Rembrandt, with my pen to scrawl For the esteem you receive in every hall Is known when I merely mention your name.."

"in original old-Dutch: Ick sal niet pogen uwe roem O Rembrandt met mijn pen te malen, Elck weet wat eer dat ghy kont halen Wanneer ick slechts u name roem"

"Ah, Rembrant, be careful when you etch Coppenol , It is fraught with danger: the burin will slip from your hand When your eyes feast on this calligraphy Your stylus will lose all its power."

"When I read St. John's inscription of this scene And turn to see it in this splendid painting [of Rembrandt], then I ask myself if brush has ever followed pen As aptly, or dead paint near to life has been."

"Christ seems to say 'Mary don't tremble. I am here It's me. Your master's free of Death's authority' Believing, though not yet wit all her heart and mind, she Seems poised between her joy and grief, her hope and fear."

"They are both [Rembrandt's second wife Hendrickje and his son Titus very much in need of aid and assistance in this enterprise.. ..[and because] no one is more suitable for this purpose than the afore-mentioned Rembrandt van Rhijn [Rembrandt himself would live with them in the house on the Rozengracht, board and lodging supplied, paid for by supplying artworks for the inventory]."

"[that] Nature stands abashed—red faced For never before has she been so well rendered By any artist.. [than Rembrandt]"

"Here Rembrandt shows us how old Simeon With joy takes his savior into his arms And now wants to die, because the sun of his mercy [represented by beams of light in the drawing, falling onto the infant Jesus.. ..Has shown forth"

"My father engraves as well as anyone.. ..just the other day he engraved a curious woman with a pap pot \ pap-potgen \ that gave everyone a pleasant surprise."

"O, Rembrand, although your diligence has painted de Dekker So artful that his soul seems to radiate from his countenance, 'Tis only the shadow of the bark that covered him; His pen was mightier than any brushwork It renders his very spirit, which casts a shadow longer Than his body, extending up to Heaven."

"Thursday 29 [December].. .His Highness [ Cosimo de' Medici ], after attending Mass, went with Blaeu and Ferroni to look at paintings by various masters, among them the designer Van Velde, Reinbrent [= Rembrandt] the famous painter, Scamus who does seascapes, and others who did not have finished paintings, so that we visited private homes where we could look at their works."

"..four flayed arms and legs anatomized by Vesalius.."

"On 4 October 1669 [my] cousin, Rembrant van Rhijn, painter died."

"[comparing] great painters [who] try to show a beautiful nude body in which one can see their knowledge of drawing [with] an incompetent [=Rembrandt] who tries to cover their figures with dark clumsy garments.. ..a kind of painter, who does the contours so that one does not know what to make out of it."

"..a Leda or a Danae.. ..as a naked woman with swollen belly, hanging breasts and garter marks on the legs."

"Rembrandt, the son of a miller, a pupil of Lastman, attained to a high degree of excellence in art through industry and natural gifts, although he never visited Italy and was but imperfectly developed.. .He sinned against the laws of anatomy, proportion, perspective, and the antique, as against Raphael's draftsmanship; and he warred also against academies and relied on nature."

"His engravings bear witness to his industry, and by its means he acquired affluence.. .If he had been more prudent in his relations with others, he would have become still wealthier. But although he was no spendthrift, he cared little for social rank, and was addicted to the society of humble folks, who interfered a good deal with his work."

"Sometimes I was so saddened by my master's [Rembrandt] hard instructions that I would not eat or drink and slake my thirst with my tears.."

"..that the strong impasto was due to Rembrandt's slow way of painting and his habit of returning to the same passage over and over again, and that consequently the portrait commissions eventually stopped coming in."

"the great Rembrandt.. ..the first heretic in painting.. .What a shame for the sake of art.. ..that so able a hand made no better use of his inborn gifts. But ah! The nobler the man, the wilder he'll become if he fails to tie himself to a rein of rule."

"[Rembrandt's habit of taking] a washerwoman or peat-trader from some barn [and] calling his whim the imitation of Nature and everything else decoration."

"[an artist should paint] with a bold hand, but not like Rembrandt or Jan Lievens, whose colors run down the piece like dung.. ..an artist should evenly and lushly.. ..[so that] your subjects appear rounded and raised by Art alone, and not by daubing."

"Rembrandt has observed this requirement [of unity] in 'The Night Watch' / 'De Nachtwacht' very well.. ..though in the opinion of many [17th century critics] he went too far, making more of the overall picture according to his individual preference, than of the individual portraits he was commissioned to do. Nonetheless, the painting, no matter how much it is criticized, will, in my opinion, survive all its rivals because it is so painterly [schilderachtigh] in conception and so powerful that, according to some people, all the other pieces [c. 4 other paintings] in De Doelen [in Amsterdam] look like playing cards alongside it. Although I would have liked that he had put more light in the painting."

"In a nicely set up little work by Rembrandt of 'John the Baptist preaching', I can remember seeing a wonderful attention in (the faces) of the listeners, in all sorts of positions, this was really praiseworthy. But one could also see how a dog indecently jumps on a bitch. You can say that this happens and is normal, but I say this is an abominable impropriety in this story. But I want to state here that this scene belongs more to a preaching by the dog-like Diogenes than by John the Baptist.. .Pictures like this serve to illustrate the stupidity of the Master and become even more ridiculous as they drift into ever more trivial additions."

"[[w:Karel van Mander|[Karel] Van Mander]] says that a certain Jaques de Bakker in Antwerp first introduced the fleshy way of painting, by not painting only with white, but by heightening the colour/paint with a natural physicality. Certainly, his namesake Jaques de Bakker from Amsterdam followed him in this commendable observation.. ..Not to mention Rembrandt and the others Aert de Gelder in particular, Rembrandt's last pupil], who highly valued this aspect of art."

"But the empty spaces [in the painting] devoid of all shine or reflection we put in the fifth and last grade, and see them as identical to the black, the deepest colour [tone]. This remark will make us careful not to try and go further than the ability of our paint/colour allows. Because, if we go too far in height we will lack at the bottom of the picture [from light gradations: light to dark]. Such as will happen to those who, when painting a picture of the night, place a burning torch or candle in the foreground. They then no longer have the possibility of giving the rest of the painting clarity. As far as he was able, Rembrandt painted the strength of candlelight in a few brown prints, but when one covers the light the rest of the work remains dark because we tend to hold our hand up to the light, so that this does not obstruct our ability to differentiate everything clearly and vividly."

"The shadows cast in the house by sun shining inside are like those out of doors, except that they appear stronger and are more defined by a window or a door. Albrecht Dürer really enjoyed sun shining into a room in his 'Hieronymus in the Room' [https://www.Rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-P-OB-1224.. .Our own Rembrandt concerned himself in an amazing way with sunlight reflections. It seems as though he is really in his element when reflecting any light whatsoever. If only he had understood the basic rules of this art a little better. Because those who only trust their own eyes and delusional experiences, often make mistakes that earn the derisive remarks from pupils, not to mention the masters."

"I therefore advise you not to put too many lights and shadows together, but to arrange them cleverly in groups. Allow your brightest lights subtly flow into the not so bright lights. I can assure you that they will light up all the more. Always surround your deepest and darkest areas with a clear brown, this way they will allow the light to brighten in strength and intensity. Rembrandt has used this virtue to great effect and he was expert in bringing together related colours."

"I will not deny that I used to have a particular weakness for his [Rembrandt's] manner. But this was before I began to be aware of the infallible rules of painting. I later found myself obliged to concede my mistake and reject his art as based on nothing more than insubstantial imaginings."

"And Rembrandt, imaging the night too figuratively; in its bottom, full of darkness."

"Dutch original text: En Rembrandt, die den nagt verbeelde te figuurlijk. In zijnen duisteren grond."

"He had an excellent Disposition for Painting. His Vein was fruitful, and his Thoughts fine and lively. But having suck'd in, with his Milk, the bad Taste of his Country, and aiming at nothing beyond a faithful Imitation of the living (heavy) Nature, which he had always before his Eyes, he form'd a Manner entirely new, and peculiar to himself. He prepar'd his Ground with a Lay of fiich(?) friendly Colours as united, and came nearest to the Life. Upon this he touch'd in his Virgin Tints (each in its proper Place) rough , and as little disturb'd by the Pencil, as possible: And with great Masses of Lights and Shadows rounding off his Figures, gave them a Force and Freshness, that was very surprising."

"With regard to art he [Rembrandt] was rich with ideas, so that you frequently see him making a great number of different sketches of one and the same object, full also of changes in the figures and poses as well as the arrangement of the clothing; for which he is to be praised above all others – especially above those who employ such figures and clothing in their work as if they were twins."

"He [Rembrandt] had been so busy painting continuously over so many years that people had to wait some considerable time for their paintings, in spite of the fact that he continued working dexterously, particularly in his later period when, seen close to, it looked as though the paint had been smeared on with a bricklayers trowel.."

"Dutch original text: Vele jaren agter den anderen heeft hy het met schilderen zoo druk gehad dat de menschen lang naar hunne stukken moesten wagten, niettegenstaande dat hy met zyn werk vaardig voortging, inzonderheid in zyn laatsten tyd, toen het 'er, van na by bezien, uitzag of het met een Metzelaars truffel was aangesmeert..."

"He [Rembrandt] was not to be dissuaded from this practice, saying in justification that a work is finished when the master has achieved his intention in it."

"[that Rembrandt] tugged people away who peered to closely at his pictures when visiting his studio saying: 'The smell of the paint would bother you'."

"[that because] Rembrandt's manner was so generally praised, everything had to be based on it [so that] to please the World he (Govert Flinck) found it advisable to go and learn from Rembrandt for a year, where he became accustomed to that handling and manner of painting.. ..It was the mark of Flinck's talent that after only this brief time his own work was taken and sold as the rue brushwork of Rembrandt."

"He only lived with the lower class and people much below himself.. .He looked to nature as the only one capable of teaching him. He chose no other studio for his studies than his father's windmill."

"Works produced in an accidental manner [as Rembrandt did, according to Reynolds] will have the same free, unrestrained air as works of nature, whose particular combinations seems to depend upon accident."

"I have had three masters, Nature, Velázquez, and Rembrandt."

"I have likewise made many 'skies' and effects - for I wish it could be said of me as Fuselli says of Rembrandt: 'he followed nature in her calmest abodes and could pluck a flower on every hedge — yet he was born to cast a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature'."

"Rembrandt the Thinker."

"Perhaps we shall one day find that Rembrandt is a greater painter than Raphael. I write down this blasphemy which will cause the hair of the school-men to stand on end without taking sides."

"I am very sure that if Rembrandt had held himself down to his studio practice (drawing every figure nude before putting clothing on them) he would not have either that power of pantomime nor that power over effects which makes his scenes so genuinely the expression of nature.. ..the further I go on in life the more I feel within me that truth is what is most beautiful, and most rare.. ..[this] is to be found again in Rembrandt's mysterious conception of his subjects, in the deep naturalness of expressions and of gestures."

"I have a memory above all of a small landscape by Rembrandt with this inscription 'Tacet sed loquitur', which made such an impression on me in my childhood."

"You speak to me of Rembrand, of this famous, of this great, of this giant.. .I would very much like to see the painting by Rembrandt of which you speak, because it should be quiete splendid. I eat it up from here (you know the fashionable phrase)"

"He [Rembrandt] introduced a new ideal, not the ideal of forms, but the ideal of clair-obscur, not the ideal of beauty, but the ideal of expression."

"Rembrandt was also fond of this subject from the story of Tobias [and the Angel of which he painted various scenes in an informal style, which recalls a little the peasant-like style of M. Millet.. ..For two centuries, the exclusive amateurs of the grand Italian style have always manhandled Rembrandt, which have not prevented him from making inroads in the museums.. ..of Europe, This should console the realists [a. o. Millet a bit fort the current injustices and give them some hope for the future."

"Of the old etchers, Rembrandt, as all acknowledge, is the sovereign prince."

"The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen."

"This print speaks [the 'Hundred Guilder Print', a famous etching of Rembrandt], the shadow is vaporous like an autumn day and the figures are animated with a breath of air.. ..it summarizes everything, sentiment, order, moral, light and painting. If I looked at it an entire day, I would be dazzled and almost frightened by Rembrandt's genius.. [Rousseau ended up the talk paying 8.000 francs for the print]"

"Rembrandt printed himself. We have known this without a doubt since Doctor Scheltema, the wise archivist in Amsterdam, found in the archives in this city and published the inventory of all that was recorded in Rembrandt's house [location: Jodenbreestraat, Amsterdam] when it was seized in 1656 to be sold by the Chamber of Insolvents. We encounter scattered here and there all the trappings of a printmaker-printer: 'In the room behind the antechamber: a small oak-table, four lampshades; an oak press. In the room behind the livingroom: a press of marbelized yellow wood'."

"Would you believe it – and I honestly mean what I say – I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture [Rembrandt's 'Jewish Bride'] for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food?"

"What an infinitely sympathetic painting. This is the essence of Rembrandt's genius. It's his sympathy for humankind which makes his art eternal."

"There is something of Rembrandt in the Gospel, or something of the Gospel in Rembrandt, as you like it — it comes to the same, if one only understands the thing in the right way."

"Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language. Rembrandt is truly called a magician... that's not an easy calling."

"Above all the popular attracted him [Rembrandt], and in the squares, in the suburbs, the workers and the countryfolk appeared to him wearthy of attention.. ..their expressive gestures become more frankly marked, their attitude and their expressions are more natural... Rembrandt never stopped studying them. He loved living among the poor."

"Rembrandt, in effect, belongs to the race of artists who cannot have descendants, the race of Michelangelo, the race of Shakespeare, of Beethoven; like these Prometheuses of art he wanted to ravish the celestial fife, to put the vibrations of life into still form, to express in the visible, that which by its very nature is non-material and undefineable."

"Did you know that in 1900 I had the bold idea of renewing German art?.. .First of all I needed to invent a technique of grasping everything while it was in motion, and it was Rembrandts drawings in the Kupferstichkabinett in Munich that showed me how. I practiced seizing things quickly in bold strokes, wherever I was, walking and standing still.. ..and in this way I learned how to depict movement itself, and I found new forms in the ecstasy and haste of this work.."

"I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed."

"There he Rembrandt stood, when everything was on the canvas [of the 'Night Watch'], but then he shook his head.. .In his opinion the two men [in the center] did not yet come forward into the foreground. Then he [Rembrandt] took up his large palette again, dicked his thickest brushes deep into the paint, and once again took on these two front figures with powerful strokes; here more depth, there more light. In this way he put everything to the test, in order to give an even more powerful relief to what needed to stand out. Then he saw that it was good, and that is how he left it."

"Compare me with Rembrandt! What sacrilege! With Rembrandt, the colossus of Art! What are you thinking of, my friend! We should prostrate ourselves before Rembrandt and never compare anyone with him!"

"Neither Imperial Russia, nor the Russia of the Soviets needs me. They don't understand me. I am a stranger to them. I'm certain Rembrandt loves me."

"Rembrandt painted about 700 pictures—of these, 3,000 are in existence."

"He can blend, like no one else, reality with mystery, the bestial with the divine, the most subtle and powerful 'craftsmanship' with the greatest, the loneliest depths of feeling that painting has ever expressed."

"Rembrandt was himself a universal spirit, and this spirit informs everything that he painted, so that a biblical legend, a carcass of an ox, a naked woman, his own self-portrait — all stand as symbols of an all-embracing sympathy. Perhaps only Shakespeare, in another art, has that kind of universal intelligence."

"His temperament was that of a Prophet — a God-possessed man, brother to Dostoevski, and teeming with the future, a future he bore within him as the Hebrew prophets bore within them the coming of the Messiah, and as he bore within himself the past."

"A painting by Rembrandt not only stops the time that made the subject flow into the future, but makes it flow back to the remotest ages. By means of this operation Rembrandt achieves solemnity. He thus discovers why, at every moment, every event is solemn: he knows it from his own solitude."

"Probably no one has combined to as great a degree as Rembrandt a disciplined exposition of what his eye saw and a love of line as a beautiful thing in itself. His 'Winter Landscape' displays the virtuosity of performance of an Oriental master, yet unlike the Oriental calligraphy, it is not based on an established convention of brush performance. It is as personal as handwriting."

"The psychological truth of Rembrandt's paintings goes beyond that of any other artist who has ever lived. Of course they are masterpieces of sheer picture-making. In the 'Bathsheba' he makes use of studies from nature and from antique reliefs to achieve a perfectly balanced design. We may think we admire it as pure painting, but in the end we come back to the head. Bathsheba's thoughts and feelings as she ponders David's letter are rendered with a subtlety and a human sympathy which a great novelist could scarcely achieve in many pages."

"Did it ever occur to anyone how boring his pictures are?"

"Of all the Baroque masters, it was Rembrandt who evolved the most revolutionary technique and who seemed to grow into the Italians' spiritual heir. Where others needed five touches he was using one, and so the brushstrokes had begun to separate and could sometimes only be properly read from a distance. The exact imitation of form was being replaced by the suggestion of it: to some of his contemporaries, therefore, his paintings began to look unfinished. It was from the Venetians that he had learned to use a brown ground so that his paintings emerged from dark to light, physically as well as spiritually. Yet, despite a palette that was limited even by seventeenth century standards, he was renowned as a colorist for he managed to maintain a precarious balance between painting tonally, with light and shade, and painting in color. Just as form was suggested rather than delineated, so the impression of rich color was deceptive. Never before had a painter taken such a purely sensuous interest and delight in the physical qualities of his medium, nor granted it a greater measure of independence from the image."

"It is tempting to believe that Rembrandt might have owned, or seen, Chinese or Japanese paintings. But there is no evidence for this at all. Yet when we look at some of his drawings, notably those sketched freely in ink or ink wash, we find a combination of formal clarity and calligraphic vitality in the movement of pen or brush that is closer to Chinese painting in technique and feeling than to anything in European art before the twentieth century. This, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must attribute to coincidence and to Rembrandt's unique gifts as a draughtsman."

"Kolakowski, as we will see, has clearly depicted the religious life and the forms of community constructed by the cultured strata of the Dutch bourgeoisie. Spinoza lives in this world, with a vast network of simple and sociable friendships and correspondences. But for certain determinate strata of the bourgeoisie the sweetness of the cultured and sedate life is accompanied, without any contradiction, by an association with a capitalist Power ('potestas'), expressed in very mature terms. This is the condition of a Dutch bourgeois man. We could say the same thing for the other genius of that age, Rembrandt van Rijn. On his canvases the power of light is concentrated with intensity on the figures of a bourgeois world in terrific expansion. It is a prosaic but very powerful society, which makes poetry without knowing it because it has the force to do so."

"Offhand, I think of the Schubert Fantaisie in F Minor. The weight of the melody here is such that you can't place where it is, or what it's coming from. There are not many experiences of this kind in music, but a perfect example of what I mean can be found in Rembrandt's self-portrait in the Frick. Not only is it impossible for us to comprehend how this painting was made; we cannot even fix where it exists in relation to our vision. Music is not painting, but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament that waits and observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer's vested interest in his craft. Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians."

"About 1630, Constantijn Huygens in his briljant analysis of the figure of Judas in Rembrandt's 'Judas Repentant' argues that: 'Rembrandt had surpassed the painters from Antiquity, as well as the great sixteenth-century Italian artists when it came to the representation of emotions expressed by figures that act in a history painting'."

"Was the miller's son, all of twenty-three, stuck in pious, professional Leiden, already presuming to present himself as the incarnation of Genius? No wonder a visitor from Utrecht, Arnout van Buchell, who encountered Rembrandt in 1628, thought him 'highly esteemed but before his time.'"

"..the Rembrandt whom Constantijn Huygens had discovered was driven constantly to measure himself against the mark others had set: his Amsterdam teacher Pieter Lastman; his Leiden friend and rival Lievens;.. ..Most of all, though, and for an entire decade, Rembrandt measured himself compulsively against 'the prince of painters and the painter of princes': Peter Paul Rubens. To become singular, Rembrandt had first to become someone's double."

"Rembrandt was already deeply involved in his attachment to Rubens — at once adopting him as his model and fighting to have the differences noticed. His [painting] 'Descent from the Cross', also painted in 1631 for the Stadholder, was directly taken from the engraving after Rubens's greatest masterpiece in Antwerp Cathedral', while at the same time being a calculated Protestant response to the immense diapason of the [catholic] Flemish master's altar-piece."

"City chronicler Jan Orlers's 1641 account relates that 'he had no desire or inclination' to study at the university, and that 'his only natural inclination was for painting and drawing, so that his parents were compelled to take their son out of the School and following his own wishes to apprentice him with a Painter where he might learn the foundation and principles [of art]."

"But the first documented encounter [ of Rembrandt and Jan Six] was in 1647, 'when Rembrandt made a portrait etching of Jan Six', a work exactly calculated to gratify his self-image as a gentleman-virtuoso. What did the two men of unequal age, background, and ambition see in each other in 1647? Rembrandt had many pupils, assistants, and patrons, but few friends, least of all of the elegantly cultivated kind, personified by Jan Six."

"The picture of Jan Six, painted in 1654 is, then, a virtual encyclopedia of painting, from the loosest handling to the dry brush, sparely loaded with yellow, dragged over the surface at the edge of Six's right cuff; from the finest detail to the most impressionist daring. Yet Rembrandt manages to bring all this diversity of technique into a totally resolved single image. So that Jan Six does indeed stand before us much as we would dearly wish to imagine ourselves, all the contradictions of our character—vanity and modesty, outward show and inward reflectiveness, energy and calm—miraculously fitted together."

"There's a lot of great talent there [in Hollywood], but it's no place I wanted to spend much time. I'd rather spend time with Rembrandt and Goya at home. They're better company than those schmucks who never read Lord Of The Rings."

"During this period [1830 – 1900, in France], Rembrandt was appropriated as a symbolic figure by critics and painter-printmakers and assigned a heroic, cult-like artistic and political status. French critics molded and reinvented earlier anecdotal biographies.. ..to formulate an artistic persona that had particular meaning [for] nineteenthcentury French vanguard art and politics."

"Rembrandt was a model from the past that artists and critics [in France] sought out because he fulfilled their needs for a new 'non-ideal' exemplar, someone who could justify and bolster their own artistic projects and political views.. ..as a successful predecessor and he functioned as a mentor.. ..through the practical emulation of his artistic techniques.. .French artists did their utmost to absorb, invoke, subsume and usurp Rembrandt’s artistic persona in an effort to define their own identities."

"Two aphorisms about Rembrandt's paintings were drawn from his early biographies and repeatedly attributed to the artist by the French writers: 'A painting is finished when the artists says that it is finished' and 'A painting is not made to be sniffed', but contemplated from a distance.. .These paintings were identified with the latter years of Rembrandt's life, the period in which critics said he suffered most from financial pressures and a lack of public acclaim. Works identified with these final years were the most popular in France during the last decades of the nineteenth century."

"[Rembrandt] The most famous brand name in western art. In America alone it graces toothpaste, bracelet charms, restaurant and bars, counter-tops and of course the town of Rembrandt, Iowa just halfway around the world from the Rembrandt Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. Funny thing is Rembrandt might have been quite pleased with such widespread notoriety. (...) Rembrandt was a realist craftsman who showed off his craft to sell his work. His paintings brim with self-confidence as this in bold oil sketch of the entombment of Christ painted with an almost modern bravado. His drawings were dashed off with a Zen-like assurance. His etchings complete and elaborate works of art in themselves which sold in great quantity to two Dutch middle class."

"One thing that really surprises me is the extent to which Rembrandt exists as a phenomenon in pop culture. You have this musical group call the Rembrandts, who wrote the theme song to Friends—'I'll Be There For You.' There are Rembrandt restaurants, Rembrandt hotels, art supplies and other things that are more obvious. But then there's Rembrandt toothpaste. Why on Earth would somebody name a toothpaste after this artist who's known for his really dark tonalities? It doesn't make a lot of sense. But I think it's because his name has become synonymous with quality. It's even a verb—there's a term in underworld slang, 'to be Rembrandted,' which means to be framed for a crime. And people in the cinema world use it to mean pictorial effects that are overdone. He's just everywhere, and people who don't know anything, who wouldn't recognize a Rembrandt painting if they tripped over it, you say the name Rembrandt and they already know that this is a great artist. He's become a synonym for greatness."

"Alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo, Rembrandt is one of the three most famous artists ever, with whom the public is on a first-name basis; and the name Rembrandt has lent the cachet of greatness and the grace of familiarity to sell everything from kitchen countertops to whitening toothpaste to fancy hotels in Bangkok and Knightsbridge. No work of Rembrandt's has attained the iconic status of the David or the Mona Lisa; yet Rembrandt seems to rank with the greatest of the great."

"I gave up painting by 16. I secretly thought I would have been Rembrandt by then. I don't believe in genius. I believe in freedom. I think anyone can do it. Anyone can be like Rembrandt.. Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don't think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius. It's about freedom and guts. It's about looking. It can be learned. That's the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings."

"It's an exhilarating feeling, holding that painting, especially when you have studied it for so long and are now the sole proprietor of said piece. To an art lover, possessing a Rembrandt can be likened to winning the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the Stanley Cup all at once. You feel a real sense of almost being a part of the artist's mind."

"There's a Rembrandt trapped in this body. It's your job to find it."

"Well, any draftsman knows about speed. I mean, Rembrandt drawings, you can see speed in them. I am interested in speed. I think most painters paint faster than they tell you."

"There's a drawing by Rembrandt, I think it's the greatest drawing ever done. It's in the British Museum and it's of a family teaching a child to walk, so it's a universal thing, everybody has experienced this or seen it happen. Everybody. I used to print out Rembrandt drawings big and give them to people and say: 'If you find a better drawing send it to me. But if you find a better one it will be by Goya or Michelangelo perhaps.' But I don't think there is one actually. It's a magnificent drawing, magnificent."

"His own house figures in many aspects of his work. This was his home, but it was also his workshop and his showroom. The most evocative room is his sunlit studio, where so many of his paintings evolved. In a way, it's still a workshop. Visitors are taught to make their own artworks here."

"The Chinese regarded not acknowledging the brush and the marks it makes as a bit crude; to them, that was trying to cover something up, so not such a high form of art. European art historians don't look at China very much. But I suspect Rembrandt must have known Chinese drawings, and had probably seen a few. Amsterdam was a port, and the Dutch were trading a great deal in the Far East. For example, a Chinese master looking at Rembrandt's drawing of a family, now in the British Museum, would recognise it as a masterwork. (...) The trace of Rembrandt's hand is still alive. Your eye can go back and forth between brown ink: sister; fast mark: mother. How rewarding this is, to move from the physical surface of the paper to its disappearance when you read the “subject”, and then back again. How many marvelous layers does this drawing have? The mother has a double profile, Picassoesque. Was it an accident with the pen that he then used as a master would? Both profiles are fascinating about her character. Her skirt is a bit ragged, without any real detail; one seems to know this, and then marvels at how these few lines suggest it. Then, there's a passing milkmaid, perhaps glancing at a very common scene, and we know the milk pail is full. You can sense the weight. Rembrandt perfectly and economically indicates this with – what? Six marks, the ones indicating her outstretched arm. Very few people could get near this. It is a perfect drawing."

"In a way, Vermeer and Rembrandt are opposites. But Rembrandt is the greater artist, I think, because he's got more ingredients than Vermeer. Rembrandt put more in the face than anyone else ever has, before or since, because he saw more. And that was not a matter of using a camera. That was to do with his heart. The Chinese say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye and the heart. I think that remark is very, very good. Two won't do. A good eye and heart is not enough, neither is a good hand and eye. It applies to every drawing and painting Rembrandt ever made. His work is a great example of the hand, the eye – and the heart. There is incredible empathy in it."

"Rembrandt is revered as one of the greatest and most important figures in the trajectory of art, and for good reason. He was, by design or nature, a revolutionary. As such he is perhaps a uniquely qualified interlocutor with other cultures and civilizations. (...) For the first time in the history of art, the painting speaks for itself. To put it another way, as Malraux phrased it, Rembrandt was the first to touch the soul with his paintings. He went well beyond the subject matter, which is only a pretense of sorts, to reach a more profound truth. As one watches the trajectory of his career arc, he is always stretching further and further in his paintings, to find his own concept of 'beauty'. That is why he was influential for future generations. By throwing off the confines of classicism, he freed others to push their own boundaries in the pursuit of beauty through their own conceptions of truth.. ..André Malraux described Rembrandt as prophet. He drew from the past to unleash the future. It is an exciting thought. Of course, he came to be seen as a metaphor for virtuosity. André Gide made a wonderful compliment to Dostoyevsky by claiming that he was the greatest novelist because he created portraits in his writings like Rembrandt painted."

"Rembrandt to me is the greatest artist in history — not just because of his work, but also the impact that he had on the trajectory of art, by allowing artists to express themselves with unprecedented freedom. The DNA of Rembrandt can be found in Goya, Van Gogh, Picasso, Delacroix, Turner and all the way through to Russian avant-garde and Chinese contemporary art. That's what I would call transcendent influence."

"If you look at early Rembrandt portraits, they are very linear and the brushstrokes are almost invisible. The late ones are much freer, and the brushstrokes are very obvious and as much a part of the work as the subject. These things are never intentional, and I cannot see how they can be explained."

"..on 'Christ Presented to the People' Rembrandt confronts us head on with the dramatic events described in the Bible. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate appears on the platform with his retinue. Beside him stand two prisoners, one of them Christ. The people are allowed to decide. On the extreme left of the platform someone stands ready with a jug of water. Pilate would wash his hands to demonstrate his innocence after the people had chosen. That Rembrandt used such a large copper plate to create this spectacular and strictly organized composition is admirable enough. He scored the angular and expressive lines of the many figures into the tough metal with a hard, sharp needle. But then he had the courage to remove large parts that had already been completed and start all over again."

"Rembrandt is the most transparent artist I know. What he proclaimed as his credo, the commentaries of his contemporaries and what we find in the drawings all add up to one obsessively truthful, artist. One who proclaimed that he drew from nature (life) and 'anything else (invention) was worthless in his eyes'. He could not have been clearer, yet because this credo directly contradicts the apparent credo of our times: the more an artist differs from nature the more 'creative' that artist is, Rembrandt's true gift to us has been excised."

"Rembrandt was the sharpest observer of human behavior. This is his amazing strength and needs to be studied. We cannot understand him if we deny his use of models and de-attribute half his output. He was the most important signpost for artists. Scholarly antics have pushed him into a position where he is no longer trusted by the young. I have been preaching the need for a paradigm shift in the mind-set of the tribe of art historians for years. They need to start by experiencing practical art for themselves, or at minimum, have the humility to listen to those who have."

"My discoveries came as a result of practising art. For me Rembrandt's drawings exemplify above all others, the sculptural values of space and form. The scholars live in a world apart, reading each others books but refusing all correction from artists; alas, it is our history they are ravaging!"

"Rembrandt was on a continuous journey of discovery; not on a production line of consistent art objects for the market-place, as the scholars hope to recreate him. His wide ranging methods and interests produced very wide ranging quality. He did not tidy away his less successful works, nor should the scholars do so. He has left us the fullest record of his explorations of any artist and naturally his work includes many comparative failures. But astonishingly, even some of his greatest drawings have been mis-attributed to minor students."

"...there is a striking similarity in the surrealist and abstract painters attitude to the object;both have a horror of it in its proper context."

"The right creative act makes its own laws,and always will do."

"[Do you have a motto or creed that as an artist you live by?] Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great "art idea". And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you'll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere."

"Paintings are memories. Memories of the painter who painted them. Memories that can be shared as well. Paintings are things to remember things by."

"In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself."

"It fascinates me to create beautiful paintings with the simplest means."

"From early on I developed an attraction for the incongruous. I had no wish to try to resolve visual contradictions. I felt that aesthetic disparities were actually questions, questions that I did not need to answer. By leaving the meaning up in the air I could provoke responses in the viewer that would trigger further questioning. What are these things I'm looking at and what do they mean? Each person seeing the painting will come away with a different idea."

"Our ground today is not so much the national or the regional ground as it is the understanding of this single earth. The earth has been round for some time now, but not in man’s relation to man, nor in the understanding of the arts of each as a part of that roundness. As usual we have occupied ourselves too much with the outer, the objective, at the expense of the inner world wherein tie true roundness lies.. .America more than any other country is placed geographically to lead in this understanding., and if from past methods of behaviour she has constantly looked towards Europe, today she must assume her position, Janus-faced, toward Asia, for in not too long a time the waves of the Orient shall wash heavily upon her shores. All this is deeply related with her growth in the arts, particularly upon the Pacific slopes. Of this I am aware. Naturally my work will reflect such a condition and so it is not surprising to me when an Oriental responds to a painting of mine as well as an American or an European.."

"Every artist's problem today is: What will we do with the human?"

"An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms."

"Reality must be expressed by a physical symbol."

"We all feel a separateness; we wish that a drop of water would soften our ego; the world needs a common conscience: agreement.. ..we must concentrate outside ourselves."

"England collapses, turns Chinese with English and American thoughts. Thousands of Chinese characters are turning and twisting; every door is a shop. The rickshaws jostle the vendors, their backs hung with incredible loads. The narrow streets are alive in a way that Broadway isn't alive. Here all is human, even the beasts of burden. The human energy spills itself in multiple forms, writhes, sweats and strains every muscle towards the day’s bowl of rice. The din is terrific."

"I am accused often of too much experimentation.. ..but what else should I do when all other factors of man are in the same condition. I thrust forward into space as science and the rest do."

"My first lesson in relativity: ..we had a still life set-up to paint. Suddenly I saw that the pitcher was so big [his hands outside the shape of a pitcher, then close in] and the glass was so big. From that time on everything was all right. [Tobey is remembering his Saturday morning painting class]"

"I have many ideas for lights. I will paint only lights at night. [on the twinkling city-lights]"

"White lines in movement symbolize a unifying idea which flows through the compartmented units of life bringing the consciousness of a larger relativity."

"At a time when experimentation expresses itself in all forms of life, search becomes the only valid expression of the spirit."

"The Cubists used the figure, but they broke it up.. .But there was escape, too, even in those days, for there was Whistler living in the grey mists with a faded orange moon. The nocturne transformed itself into dreamy rooms with Chopin's music creating a mood that softened the hard core of self.[quote from conversation with Seitz]"

"We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit."

"There has been 32 isms since the advent of Cubism, yet after all there are essentially the same two old strings, the Romantic and the Classical. We've just be confused by the storm. Science and psychology have played a great part to say nothing of sex."

"Now it seems to me that we are in a universalising period.. .If we are to have world peace, we should have an understanding of all the idioms of beauty because the members of humanity who have created these idioms of beauty are going to be a part of us. And I would say that we are in a period when we are discovering and becoming acquainted with these idioms for the first time."

"On the third floor of Manning's Coffee Shop in the Farmer's Market in Seattle confronting the Sound, the windows are opaque with fog. Sitting here in the long deserted room, I feel suspended enveloped by a white silence. Two floors below, the farmers are bending over their long rows of fruit and vegetables; washing and arranging their produce under intense lights shaded by circular green shades. Above, where I sit, the world seems obliterated from all save memory; abstracted without the feeling of being divorced from one’s roots. My eye keeps focusing upon the opaque windows [an equivalent of the picture plane]. Suddenly the vision is disturbed by the shape of a gull floating silently across the width of the window, a line of movement drawn across the picture surface. Then space again. In opposing lines to the gull's flight, the Sound moves northward through the Inland Passage.. .It is true that trains run daily out of Seattle to points East and South, but my mind takes but little cognizance of this fact. To me Seattle seems pocketed. There is only one way out: Alaska, toward the North! Swerving to the South, there is the Orient, although in San Francisco I feel the Orient rolling in with its tides. My imagination, it would seem, has its own geography."

"I have just had my first lesson in Chinese brush from my friend and artist Teng Kwei. The tree is no more solid in the earth, breaking into lesser solids in the earth, breaking into lesser solids bathed in chiaroscuro. There is pressure and release. Each movement, like tracks in the snow, is recorded and often loved for itself. The Great Dragon is breathing sky, thunder and shadow; wisdom and spirit vitalized. All is in motion now.. .One step backward into the past and the tree in front of my studio in Seattle is all rhythm, lifting, springing upward."

"Two men dressed in white jeans with white caps on their heads.. ..climbing over a large sign of white letters. Of course, the words spell something, but that is unimportant. What is important is their white, and the white of the letters."

"It is Fall. The leaves are being raked under the great elms darkening in the evening light. Slowly they become weighted with darkness. Across the river they are burning the grass on the Minnesota bluffs. Myriads of colored streamers reflect in the river blow.."

"We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain."

"The root of all religions, from the Baha'i point of view, is based on the theory that man will gradually come to understand the unity of the world and the oneness of mankind. It teaches that all the prophets are one – that science and religion are the two great powers which must be balanced if man is to become mature. I feel my work has been influenced by these beliefs. I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value."

"I have sought a unified world in my work and use a movable vortex to achieve it."

"Migrating from continent to continent like a restless bird in search of propitious seasons, casting his glance across all cultures, Mark Tobey was one of the few 20th century artists who was truly cosmopolitan and in fact trans-avant-garde. Besides being a pioneer of American abstraction, he was a scholar of oriental calligraphy and Renaissance tempera."

"Bahá'í [religion] provided Tobey with aesthetic as well as social and religious principles. He has often stated that there can be no break between nature, art, science, religion, and personal life.. .Few religions.. ..have given the concept of oneness such pointed emphasis, and few modern artists have dealt with it as explicitly as has Tobey."

"In 1953, 'Life Magazine' featured the three painters and titled it Mystic Painters of the Northwest: 'Painters of our misty light, shimmering lines and symbolic forms.. ..They embody a mystical feeling toward life and the universe." The three painters took the title lightly but they were entitled to be called Mystics: [Mark] Tobey the more intellectual, Graves the poet and Anderson the extrovert. All studied Buddhism in depth and Tobey and Graves traveled the Orient.'"

"It seems to me the charm of etching is the glimmering through of the white paper even in the shadows so that almost everything sparkles or suggest sparkles."

"Rural poetry is the pleasure ground of those who live in cities."

"When less than four years old I was standing with my nurse, Mary Ward, watching the shadows on the wall from branches of an elm behind which the moon had risen. I have never forgot those shadows and am often trying to paint them."

"I hope to begin a new plan... not sitting down to local matter but walking and watching."

"The "rights of man" are the right of the less voracious to restrain those who are more so."

"The rights of the poor majority are pure air and pure water, and sufficient space to walk about in, when the rich minority are befouling the air with manufactories, poisoning the rivers, and as in the neighborhood of Foots Cray and St. Mary's, adding "field to field, till there be no place" left, and the villagers cannot step out of the dusty high-road without a trespass.."

"I don't suffer much from solitude in the evenings. I spring upon my books. I always spoke a good word for solitude, and it is grateful to me. Books ward off the ghastly thoughts."

"It seems to me that a great secret of early education is not to overrate the powers of attention in children. If they go to a church for instance, where there are long sermons, I should let them have scripture history, or lives of the Saints full of pictures, to be administered during the latter half of the discourse, rather than knuckle their ribs or prick them with pins, to make them "attend to what the gentleman says.""

"Nothing is important save the spiritual state that enables one to subjectify one's thoughts to a sensation and to think only of the sensation, all the while searching to express it."

"To say that a thing is beautiful is simply an act of faith, not a measurement on some kind of scale."

"We perceive nature through the senses, which give us images of forms of colour, sounds etc. A form which exists only in relation to another form on its own, it does not exist."

"Conceive of a picture really as a series of harmonies."

"One of the things I really love about Édouard Vuillard is that his paintings are often small, with domestic and rarely provocative subjects, but the more you look at them, the more quietly provocative they are."

"I believed that by a process of what I can only describe as inward dilation of the eyes I could increase my actual vision."

"Women had to work like slaves in the art world, but a lot of men got to the top through their charm. And it hurt them. To be young and pretty didn't help a woman in the art world, because the social scene, and the buying scene, was in the hands of women – women who had money. They wanted male artists who would come alone and be their charming guests. Rothko could be very charming. It was a court. And the artist buffoons came to the court to entertain, to charm. Now it has changed, now the younger men are in – older women and younger men."

"Art is a guaranty of sanity."

"I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents."

"At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering – the father saying something, the mother choosing to defend herself. To escape the bickering, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers. With the dough of the French bread – sometimes it was still warm – I would make little figures. And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture."

"England is very, very important to me, because in my family the English could do no wrong. When my father picked a mistress, it was always an English girl: if he made her pregnant, she could be shipped back to England and he would not be held responsible. It never happened, but I've made a lot of work called The English Can Do No Wrong."

"I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it."

"The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself."

"What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself."

"I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and repairs it."

"I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way."

"My heart beats more for a rougher, more ordinary, more vulgar art that does not live in a poetic, fairy-tale dream but admits the fearful, the common, the magnificent, the ordinary, the banal grotesque in life. An art that can always be directly present to us when life is at its most real.. [ on the same day he noted:] ..Martin thinks there will be a war. Russia England France against Germany. We agreed that it would be no bad thing for our rather demoralized present-day civilization if everyone's instincts and drives were to be harnessed to one cause.."

"The laws of art are eternal and don't change at all, as the moral laws don't change in human beings. [arguing with Franz Marc who demanded in 'Der Blaue Reiter' circa 1912 a new modern art, in relation to its own - changing - time]."

"Oh I wish that I could paint again. Paint is an instrument without which I cannot survive for any length of time. Whenever I even think of gray, green and white, I am overcome with quivers of lust. Then I wish that this war would end and that I might paint again."

"I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradation and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture"

"[it is] amusing all the same, how the peacetime life we cursed and groaned about now elevates itself with iron logic to the status of paradise.."

"I have such a passion for painting! I am continually working at form. In actual drawing and in my head, and during my sleep. Sometimes I think I shall go mad, this painful, sensual pleasures tires and torments me so much. Everything else vanishes, time and space, and I think of nothing but how to paint the head of the resurrected Christ.. .Or how shall I paint Minkchen [his wife Minna] now, with her knees drawn up and her head leaning on her hand against the yellow wall with her rose, or the sparkling light in the dazzling whiteness of the anti-aircraft shell-bursts in the leaden, sun drenched sky..."

"Yesterday we came across a cemetery that had been completely destroyed by shellfire. The graves had been blown up, and the coffins lay about in the most uncomfortable positions. The shells had unceremoniously exposed their distinguished occupants to the light of day, and bones, hair, and bits of clothing could be seen through cracks in the burst-open coffins."

"The trenches wound in meandering lines and white faces peered from dark dugouts – a lot of men were still preparing the positions, and everywhere among them there were graves. Where they sat, beside their dugouts, even between the sandbags, crosses stuck out. Corpses jammed in among them. It sounds like fiction – one man was frying potatoes on a grave next to his dugout. The existence of life here had already become a paradoxical joke."

"..[war] in itself is one of the manifestations of life, like disease, love, and lust. And just as I follow fear, disease, lust, love, and hate to their utmost limits, well, now I am trying war. It is all life, wonderfully various and rich in inspiration."

"The editor of this catalog asked me to make a statement about my work. I don't have much to write: - Be a child of your age. - Be naturalistic against your own ego. - Be matter-of- fact toward your inner visions - My love is dedicated to the four great masters of masculine mysticism: Mäleskirchener ([church-painters / muralists, Grünewald, Breughel [both famous painters in the late Middle Ages, ed.] and Van Gogh."

"To me the most important thing [in a picture] is roundness captured in height and breadth. Roundness in the plane, depth in the feeling of the plane."

"We're continually poring over plans, and the decision is difficult, but it's definitely coming soon. The idea with Barr is not bad and might convince me to take your advice, if B. really does get involved."

"I want to stay here [Amsterdam] for now, then maybe move on to Paris later on. For the interim, Amsterdam is not bad."

"What is important to me in my work is the identity that is hidden behind so-called reality. I search for a bridge from the given present tot the invisible, rather as a famous cabalist once said, 'If you wish to grasp the invisible, penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible'."

"Put the picture away or, preferably, send it back to me, dear Valentin. If people cannot understand it is based on their inner engagement with these matters, then there is no point in showing the thing at all."

"'Departure' [also the title of a famous triptych painting of Max Beckmann], yes departure from the illusion of life toward the essential things that wait behind appearance.. .We must insist that Departure is not bound to a political trend, but is symbolic for all times."

"Politics is a subordinate matter; its form of appearance constantly changes depending on the needs of the masses, the same way cocottes adjust to the needs of men by transforming and masking themselves. Because of that it is not fundamental. That is about what endures, what is unique, what is in the stream of illusions – what is eliminated from the workings of the shadows."

"I am working here [Amsterdam] on my last big triptych, which will be a tremendous story, and which gives me a more intense life and exhilaration. My God, life is worth living!"

"My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality in painting – to make the invisible visible through reality.. .What helps me most in this task is the penetration of space. Height, width and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space. My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality."

"Space and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained."

"It is not the subject which matters but the translation of the subject into the abstraction of the surface by means of painting. Therefore I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting."

"All things come to me in black and white like virtue and crime. Yes, black and white are the two elements which concern me. It is my fortune, or misfortune, that I can see neither all in black nor all in white.. .I cannot help realizing both, for only in the two, only in black and white, can I see God as a unity creating again and again a great and eternally changing terrestrial drama."

"Everything intellectual and transcendent is joined together in painting by the uninterrupted labour of the eyes. Each shade of a flower, a face, a tree, a fruit, a sea, a mountain, is noted eagerly by the intensity of the senses to which is added, in a way of which we are not conscious, the work of the mind, and in the end the strength or weakness of the soul.. .It is the strength of soul which forces the mind to constant exercise to widen its conception of space. Something of this is perhaps contained in my pictures."

"One thing is sure – we have to transform the three-dimensional world of objects into the two-dimensional world of the canvas.. .To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking."

"Imagination is perhaps the most decisive characteristic of mankind. My dream is the imagination of space – to change the optical impression of the world of objects by a transcendental arithmetic progression of the inner being. That is the precept. In principal any alteration of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it. Whether such alteration causes excitement or boredom in the spectator is for you to decide."

"The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or anti-pathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees – an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality."

"Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul – thus I have passed blindly many things which belong to the real and political life. I assume, though, that there are two worlds: the world of spiritual life and the world of political reality. Both are manifestations of life which may sometimes coincide but are very different in principle. I must leave it to you [the audience] to decide which is the more important."

"Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work."

"My first informed impression, and what I would like to achieve, I can perhaps only realize when I am impelled as in a vision. One of my figures, perhaps one from the Temptation, sang his strange song to me one night – ..We are playing hide-and-seek, we are playing hide-and-seek across a thousand seas, we gods.. ..when the skies are red in the middle of the night, when the skies are red at night. You cannot see us, you cannot see us but you are ourselves.. ..that is what makes us laugh so gaily.. .Stars are our eyes and nebulae our beards.. ..we have people's souls for our hearts. We hide ourselves and you cannot see us, which is just what we want."

"One of my problems is to find the Ego, which has only one form and is immortal – to find it in animals and men, in the heaven and in the hell which together form the world in which we live."

"Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, [Beckmann lived and worked in the heart of Amsterdam during World War 2.] an enormous old tobacco storeroom is again filled in my imagination with figures from the old days and from the new, like an ocean moved by storm and sun and always present in my thoughts. Then shapes become beings and seem comprehensible to me in the great void and uncertainty of the space which I call god."

"All important things in art since Ur of the Chaldea's, since Tel Halaf and Crete, have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all objective spirits. It is this Ego for which I am searching in my life and in my art. Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement, for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our Ego that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make."

"As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception' painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness."

"It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting."

"The Ego is the great veiled mystery of the world.. .I believe in it and in its eternal, immutable form. Its path is, in some strange and peculiar manner, our path. And for this reason I am immersed in the phenomenon of the Individual, the so-called whole Individual, and I try in every way to explain and present it. What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art."

"And then I awoke and yet continued to dream… painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement. I thought of my grand old friend Henri Rousseau [French Primitive painter, died in 1910] that Homer in the porter's lodge whose prehistoric dreams have sometimes brought me near the gods. I saluted him in my dream. Near him I saw William Blake, noble emanation of English genius.. .'Have confidence in your objects,' he said, 'do not let yourself be intimidated by the horror of the world. Everything is ordered and correct and must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection. Seek this path'.. .I awoke and found myself in Holland in the midst of boundless world turmoil. But my belief in the final release and absolution of all things, whether they please or torment, was newly strengthened. Peacefully I laid my head among the pillows... to sleep, and dream, again."

"If one perceives of it all – the entire War or even life as a whole – as a scene in the theater of 'infinity', many things are much easier to bear."

"Today I wanted to die of weakness and melancholy again."

"Afternoon with Q. [Quappi, his second wife] on foot, looking for butter and coals – in vain."

"Even our own cadaver-bones shall not hinder us from standing our ground until the very last, proud and tired in the face of the black wall that surrounds us."

"Very worried and nerveux for 1944. Life is dark – as is death. Close 1943."

"Saw the English [pilots] coming from the sea in huge bands like the bristling hair of Zeus Jupiter. Heard all destroyed in Frankfurt. Sad... (12 April 1944)"

"At 10 o'clock a Dutch girl came by Lütjens: ! PEACE!"

"Well - not quite yet - green police [the Germans] still driving around with machine guns, etc. Nevertheless big peace party with warning by Eisenhower. - Walked around in the city [Amsterdam], much drunkenness.."

"Thick rumors of imminent peace are in the air.. .Big spectacle with six or seven British tanks. In the afternoon, they played war once more at the Palaisplein [near Dam square in Amsterdam center] and at the Rokin [street where Beckmann lived for 8 years, as 'entartete' German artist under German occupation; The Netherlands was liberated by the Allies, 5 May 1945]."

"The world is rather shot to pieces [end of World War II - 1945], but the spectators climb out of their caves and pretend to have again become normal and customary humans who ask each other's pardon instead of eating one another or sucking each other's blood. The entertaining folly of war evaporates, distinguished boredom sits down again on the dignified old overstuffed chairs.. .May I report about myself that I have had a truly grotesque time, brim-full with work, Nazi persecutions, bombs, hunger, and again and again work – in spite of everything [a. o. using his bed sheets as canvas for the new paintings]"

"Is there to be no getting away from this loathsome vegetative physicality?.. .Utter contempt for the lewd enticements that always lure us back into life's clutches. And when, half-parched, we seek to quench our thirst, the gods laugh us to scorn."

"Arrival at break of dawn. Veiled giants stood sleepily in wet mist on Manhattan.. .Yes, New York is really grandiose. But it stinks of burned fat, just like the sacrificial meal of the slain enemies among the savages. But nevertheless – crazy, crazy, crazy! Babylon is a kindergarten compared with this, and the tower of Babel here becomes the mass erection of a monstrous and senseless will. I am sympathetic."

"And the evening of the big Vanity Fair arrived.. . Perre Rathbone and innumerable people received me in enormous halls. The reporter shot pictures and Mrs. Beckmann [Quappi, his wife] grinned – - o-la-La.. ..The whole story is a monumental caprice of my situation in Germany before the Nazi's."

"Learn by heart the forms to be found in nature, so that you can use them like the notes in a musical composition. That is what these forms are for. Nature is a marvelous chaos, and it is our job and our duty to bring order into that chaos and – to perfect it."

"A human face, a hand, a woman's breast or a manly body, an expression of conflicting joy and pain, the infinite ocean, savage crags, the melancholy speech of black trees against the snow, the fierce power of spring blossoms and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer noon when our old friend Pan is asleep and the ghost of noon are murmuring – all this is enough to make us forget the sorrows of the world, or to give them form. In any case the determination to give form to things brings with it part of the solution for which you are seeking. The path is hard and the goal can never be reached – but it is a path."

"The metaphysics of substance. The strange feeling which comes over us when we sense: this is skin – this is bone – all in a single vision that is completely unearthly. The dreaminess of our existence mixed at the same time with the indescribably sweet illusion of reality."

"He would had always seen the world as 'chaos' and 'grief' (the mad and violent world he tried to control in paintings like 'The Destruction of Messina' [Beckmann's early painting in 1909] and who relied on his art 'to order this chaos.. ..to give it form' now found himself overwhelmed by formlessness and horror, helpless. [Beckmann was a medic in the first World War] ..After less than a year and a half, he had broken down in mind and body and was invalided out of service [in 1915]."

"For much of his life, he [Beckmann] was torn between consciousness of the Transcendent and doubt about the very meaning of humanity. He felt that 'there was still some sort of force which wants to be eternal but which is still deeply convinced of the pointlessness of it all'."

"But Beckmann sees no purpose in the suffering he shows; there is no glory for anybody, no compensation.. .Beckmann blames human nature as such, and there seems to be no physical escape from this overwhelming self-accusation. Victims and aggressors alike are cornered. There is no exit."

"We live in such a hell, only we are not conscious of it; we have shifted all of the torment and doubt of our situation onto the artist's conscience; as prophet and soothsayer of the times, he carries our burden; he expresses the meaning and insanity of the everyday, which we hold hidden in our hearts."

"My collages are only ideas for things much larger – things to cover walls. In fact all the things that I have done I would like to see much larger. I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long – to hang on walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures – they should be the wall – even better – on the outside wall – of large buildings. Or stood up outside as billboards or a kind of modern 'icon'. We must make our art like the Egyptians, the Chinese & the African and the Island primitives – with their relation to life. It should meet the eye direct."

"This book [full of linoleum prints] will be an alphabet of pictorial elements without text, which shall aim at establishing a larger scale of painting, a closer contact between the artist and the wall, and a new spirit of art accompanying architecture."

"I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and the white, the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be."

"I like to work from things that I see, whether they're man-made or natural or a combination of the two.. .The things that I'm interested in have always been there. The idea of a shadow and a natural object has existed, like the shadow of the pyramids, or a rock and its shadow; I'm not interested in the texture of the rock, or that it is a rock, but in the mass of it, and its shadows."

"Simple, I don't like the word simple. I like easy better. I want to forget about the technique. I sweat and worry but I don't want it look like that; but you can’t separate the artist and his technique."

"I usually let them [his drawings] lies around for a long time. I have to get to really like it. And then when I do the painting I have to get to like that too. Sometimes I stay with the sketch, sometimes I follow the original idea exactly if the idea is solved. But most of the time there have to be adjustments during the painting. Through the painting of it I find the color and I work the form and play with it and it adjusts itself."

"I felt that everything is beautiful, but [not?] that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists."

"Soon after completing the 'La Combe' series [circa 1950] I had a dream in which I was assisted by many children on a scaffold, painting a huge mural made up of square panels fitted together. Each panel was being painted by a child very quickly in long black strokes with huge brushes. The work was done in seconds. Upon waking I immediately made a reminder sketch of the mural. Later I made a drawing of many ink strokes, which I cut up into twenty squares and placed at random in a four-by-five grid.."

"Like the postcard collages, the colors are shapes in a landscape. In this case [his collage 'Napoleon at Würtsburg'] it is a painting of a landscape, not a photo as in the postcards [collages], and therefore a contrast of the traditional painting and a presentation of literal space on top of depicted space."

"I made the photographs just like I draw.. .I wanted the photographs [Kelly made circa 1950 in Paris] to be enlightening to my art.."

"In 1949, I ceased figurative painting and began works that were object oriented. The drawings from plant life seem to be a bridge to the way of seeing that brought about the paintings in 1949 that are the basis for all my later work. After arriving in Paris in 1948, I realized that figurative painting and also abstract painting (though my knowledge of the latter was very limited) as I had known in the 20th century no longer interested me as a solution to my own problems. I wanted to give up easel painting which I felt was too personal."

"All the art since the Renaissance seemed too men-oriented. I liked (the) object quality. An Egyptian pyramid, a Sung vase, the Romanesque church appealed to me. The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedral or even a splatter of tar on the road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience than either geometric or action painting."

"Instead of making a picture that was an interpretation of a thing seen, or a picture of invented content, I found an object and 'presented' it as itself alone. My first object was 'Window' [Museum of Modern Art, Paris], done in 1949. After constructed 'Window' with two canvases and a wood frame I realized that from then on painting as I had known it was finished for me. The new works were to be objects, unsigned, anonymous."

"Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes."

"There is always for me a dominant figure, I simply don't agree with people who see both readings as possible [of the figure ànd ground]"

"The three horizontal bands at the top [ in his collage: landscape with paintings 1954] correspond to sea, sand and sky, while the yellow/white and red/white shapes at the bottom are the paintings – though of a kind I actually painted only later. It was the collage that suggested the idea of doing such paintings."

"I began to draw from plant life and found the flat leaf forms were easier to do than thighs and breasts. I wanted to flatten. The plant drawings from that time until now have always been linear. They are exact observations of the form of the leaf or flower of fruit seen. Nothing is changed or added, no surface marking. They are not an approximation of the thing seen nor are they a personal expression or an abstraction. They are an impersonal observation of the form. When I applied the procedure to other things such as the vaulting of Notre Dame [church in Paris] or a patch of tar on the road, the subject of the drawings and the subsequent paintings were not recognizable even though they were exact copies of the thing seen. I wanted to use things that had no pictorial use."

"I made it from just three lines in less than a minute. It was the first of the series [Water lily drawings, Kelly made in 1968; he admired the Waterlilies paintings of Monet that got the weight right. My eye followed my hand. Then I did all the others, but this was the best."

"My work is about structure. It has never been a reaction to Abstract Expressionism. I saw the Abstract Expressionists for the first time in 1954. My line of influence has been the 'structure' of the things I liked: French Romanesque architecture, Byzantine, Egyptian and Oriental art, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, Klee, Picasso, Beckman.."

"In my painting, negative space is never arbitrary. (I believe lithographs to be colored marks printed on a ground – the paper and the measure of the ground and the marks are to be considered of equal importance). In my painting, the painting is the subject rather than the subject the painting."

"When I was a child, I spent all my spare time looking at birds and insects (beetles). My color use, and the object quality of the 'painting', and the use of fragmentation is closer to birds and beetles and fish, than it is to De Stijl or the Constructivists."

"Looking through an aperture [a door or a window] is a way that I have been able to isolate or fragment a single form. My first memory of focusing through an aperture occurred when I was around twelve years old. One evening, passing the lighted window of a house. I was fascinated by red, blue and black shapes inside a room. But when I went up and looked in, I saw a red coach, a blue drape and a black table. The shapes had disappeared. I had to retreat to see them again."

"I admired and felt the anonymous structure of the work of Brancusi, Vantongerloo, Arp, and Taeuber-Arp [the wife of Hans Arp] whose studios I visited. [Kelly frequently visited Hans Arp and his wife in Paris and discussed his fresh-made art with them intensively]. Their work reinforced my own ideas for the creation of a Pré-Renaissance, European type art: its anonymous stone work, the object quality of the artifacts, the fact that the work was more important than the artist’s personality. Of the Europeans, I mostly admired the way Picasso, Klee and Brancusi 'made' their art. Contrary to what has been said about me, Mondrian and Matisse did not interest me when I was in Paris. Mondrian’s [paintings] could not be seen in Paris and when I did see them in Holland in 1953, I thought their structure too rigid and intellectual."

"When I left Paris in 1954, I saw no art that was being 'made' like mine and returning to the U.S. I found no one 'making' art that way either. In my own work, I have never been interested in painterliness (or what I find is) a very personal handwriting, putting marks on a canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something and which has a different use."

"Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all 'meaning' of the thing seen. Then only, could the real meaning of it be understood and felt."

"The form of my painting is the content."

"When I want to do a painting with one colour overlapping another, it has to be a real overlap, not a depicted overlap. I didn't want to paint an overlap, meaning that it would be a deception or illusion. I no longer wanted to depict space, but to make a work that existed in literal space. Thus, my recent works are one canvas as a relief over another canvas. Another important example of a panel painting that explores the idea of the mural was Red Yellow Blue White 1952. It's the only one I ever did using actual dyed fabric of ready-made colours, which moves the painting into the realm of real objects."

"In Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Fauves – Matisse, Derain – were using bright colours in their full intensity, which continued with Kandinsky, Malevich, Kirchner, Léger and Mondrian. They employed all the colours of the spectrum. In the 1940's and 1950's the majority of the Abstract Expressionists in New York rebelled against this European use of colour and mostly used mixed colours. That is, the Abstract Expressionists did use bright colours sometimes, but they tended to paint wet-on-wet, which muddled their hues. As Matisse would say, a small patch of any one colour is far less intense than a large one of the same colour. I returned in 1954 [from Paris] to New York and showed paintings done in France at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956 with bright colours that wouldn’t really be used until the Pop artists in the 1960's. My idea of using colour at its full intensity, which began with Colors for a Large Wall, hasn’t changed in the 60 years that I’ve been painting."

"Significantly he [Kelly] developed productive relationships [in Paris, circa 1949] with Alexander Calder (a friendship that continued for years after their return to the United States), Jean Arp (who showed in his studio in Meudon his and Sophie Täuber-Arp’s early works to Kelly, thereby providing his 'first introduction to fragmented forms according to the laws of chance'), and John Cage (who likewise encouraged Kelly’s pursuit of serendipitous aesthetic strategies)."

"Ellsworth Kelly spent the years 1948–54 in Paris, and the period was formative for the young artist. He was introduced to European and American modernists, including Jean Arp and John Cage, both of whom had an enormous impact on Kelly’s development and the creation of the Study for 'Cité'. Cage and Arp encouraged Kelly to involve chance in his compositional arrangements, as Arp had done in Dadaist collages as early as 1916, and as Cage began to do in musical compositions in 1951."

"Like Cézanne, Kelly observes nature. He simplifies and then flattens shapes until they become abstract. Ellsworth Kelly, .. ..said: "When I was studying at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1947, I painted a figure of a young man, taking my inspiration from Cézanne. I still look at Cézanne's works today.""

"War too, must be seen as a natural occurrence."

"Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, gas, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is! It is all the work of the Devil!"

"My nerves fell apart before I saw the front this time, the decaying corpses and piercing wire; for a while, they made me harmless, locking me up in order to undertake a special diagnosis of whatever military ability I might still have. The nerves, every last fiber, repugnance, repulsion!"

"If I can't be famous, I want at least to be infamous."

"RADIO – DADA DIX whose monumental painting 'Barricade' [now lost] created such a sensation in Dresden"

"Nobody wants to look at it. What is it all supposed to mean.. ..the old whores and the old, worn out women, and of life is cares?. .It doesn't make anybody happy. No gallery wants to exhibit it.[ his work]. Why do you even bother to paint it."

"[..it had been fun] to be able to draw in the midst of boredom and misery.."

"I had the feeling that there was a dimension of reality that had not been dealt with in art: the dimension of ugliness."

"After Herberholz had shown me all sorts of techniques, I suddenly got very interested in etching. I had a lot to say, I had a subject. Wash off the acid, put on the aquatint: a wonderful technique that you can use to get as many different shades and tones as you want. The 'doing' aspect of art becomes tremendously interesting when you start doing etchings; you get to be a real alchemist."

"I'm a man who is concerned with reality. I have to see everything. I have to plumb the depths of life. And so I go to war. That's why I volunteered [in the German army]. And when I tell people that nowadays, they say, "Good grief, so Dix was an out-and-out militarist! How does that fit together? He painted a war picture that was so frightful, so horrific, and now he says he was a militarist?" Yes, that's just it! What I said was: "If you want to be a hero, you have to see this whole mess and still say yes to it."

"I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I'm therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that for myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it's like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered. [in the German army during world War 1. (1914-1918)]"

"During the war, Dix kept a diary and a sketchbook with which he chronicled his experience. They would provide material for a major work of fifty prints called simply, The War. Dix was profoundly affected by the war. He described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through bombed out houses. His experience with war and its aftermath became a dominant theme in the art he produced after 1914."

"..it become a lightning rod the following winter when Paul F. Schmidt purchased it for the Dresden Museum. Later when Hitler came to power, it was seized and displayed in the Nazi's Degenerate Art exhibition. It was captioned, "Slander against the German Heroes of the World War".. .In this painting, Dix leaves no one unscathed. He damns the military for butchering his generation, the public for its fascination with these reconstituted men and the cripples themselves for their undiminished national pride.. .It's location is currently unknown and it is presumed destroyed."

"If I am lucky, the picture will paint itself."

"I have always been a pencil."

"Love is a disease which fills you with a desire to be desired."

"I paint things as they are. I don't comment. I record."

"Le vieux con!"

"I am quite incapable of doing them [making landscapes], even the shadow. My trees look like spinach and my sea like heaven knows what.. ..[the Mediterranean landscape was] the devil to paint, precisely because it is so beautiful."

"I'm very much alone all day, I read a litle but, in the long run, it gives me a headache. I draw and paint as much as I can, indeed till my hand grows tired, and when night begins to fall I hope Jeanne d'Armagnac [his cousin] will come to my bedside. She does sometimes, and cheers me up and plays with me, and I listen to her talk, without daring to look at her. She is so tall and so beautiful! And I am neither tall nor beautiful."

"I have tried to draw realistically and not ideally.. .It may be a defect, for I have no mercy on warts, and I like adorning them with wanton hairs, rounding them off and giving them a bright surface.. . - A painter in embryo.. ..- Write me a line soon. I am feverish with anxiety."

"I could never have believed that such kindness existed: to receive my wretched drawings and then thank me into the bargain. And you need not be so scrupulous about my drawings. Just use those you like.. ..But, I am madly, crazily happy at the thought that your prose [Devismes novel 'Cocotte'], like so many fireworks, will frame my daubs, that you should have offered me a helping hand on the arduous road towards getting known..."

"When my pencil starts moving, it must be allowed its head or - bang! - nothing more happens."

"There are two young Englishmen in the next rooms to ours who are superb; their two sisters, looking like umbrellas, are here too, dressed in pink, with a little friend in blue with red hair. She is a type I have tried to draw on horseback but have not succeeded."

"Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly, that you feel you could die of it! [And then probably with a fourth sniff as a break] Eh? What? Isn't that so, my dear chap?"

"I can't do it, I can't do it. I simply can't help turning a deaf ear to it and banging my head against the wall - yes - and all for an art that escapes me and will never know all the trouble I have taken on its behalf."

"Lautrec was still satisfying his rather classical art-teacher Cormon in Paris. The unreal conventions of Cormon imposed and discouraged him, according to Henri Perruchot"

"The Mirlitons in the Place Vendôme, opposite the column! What a crush! A lot of people, a lot of women, and a lot of nonsense! It's a crush made up of gloved hands manipulating tortoiseshell or gold lorgnettes; but it's a crush all the same!"

"In Paris [Summer of 1881].. ..Lautrec found 'with wild joy' his [older] friend Princeteau. The affection linking the sixteen-year-old cripple to the deaf-mute of thirty-seven was stronger than ever. Their respective infirmities served to increase their friendship, They saw each other every day. Lautrec called Princeteau his 'master'; Princeteau called Lautrec his 'studio foster-child.' Indeed, Lautrec imitated him 'like a monkey.' He copied his methods, his brushwork and his technique which had both solidity and fluency and was much concerned with the management of light."

"As far as Lautrec is concerned, I believe the truest reason is that Lautrec thinks of one thing only, that's himself and not the others. So it's probable that these gentlemen will have judged it preferable to do the same, i.e., to manage without him."

"De Lautrec has an excellent portrait of a woman at the piano ['Mademoiselle Dihau at the piano, 1890'] and a large painting ['At the Moulin Rouge: The dance'] which holds its own very well. There's a great distinction in it, despite the risqué subject."

"Here's a short note for Bernard and Lautrec, to whom I'd solemnly promised to write.1 I'm sending it to you [Theo van Gogh, in Paris] so that you can give it to them sometime, it's not in the least urgent and it will be a reason for you to see what they're doing and to hear what they're saying, if you want."

"I don't believe that my peasant [his painting 'Portrait of a peasant'] will do any harm, for example, to the Lautrec that you [Theo] have ['Young woman at a table / Poudre de riz', 1887] and I dare even believe that the Lautrec will, by simultaneous contrast, become even more distinguished, and mine will gain from the strange juxtaposition, because the sunlit and burnt, weather-beaten quality of the strong sun and strong air will show up more clearly beside the face powder and stylish outfit. What a mistake that Parisians haven't acquired sufficient taste for rough things.."

"I have learned from experience that it is useful to begin by drawing one's picture clearly on a virgin canvas, first having noted the desired effect on a white or gray paper, and then to do the picture section by section, as immediately finished as one can, so that when it has all been covered there is very little to retouch. I have noticed that whatever is finished at one sitting is fresher, better drawn, and profits more from many lucky accidents, while when one retouches this initial harmonious glow is lost. I think that this method is particularly good for foliage, which needs a good deal of freedom."

"The first two things to study are form and values. For me, these are the bases of what is serious art. Color and finish put charm into one’s work.. ..it seems to me very important to begin by an indication of the darkest values (assuming that the canvas is white), and to continue in order to the lightest value. From the darkest to the lightest I would establish twenty shades.. .Never lose sight of that first impression by which you were moved. Begin by determining your composition. Then the values – the relation of the forms to the values. These are the basis. Then the color, and finally the finish."

"I am staying on in Geneva, this charming city. With each step I discover delightful motives. How pleasant it is to work here. And the light is just the way I like it, full of delicate nuances."

"My spirits.. ..now lean towards sadness and melancholy. I too am beginning to feel my age. Then, as one moves on in life sorrows multiply, and necessarily it is harder to keep cheerful.. .[I experienced] violent disappointments, that I might even call grief."

"I am never in a hurry to reach details. First and above all I am interested in the large masses and the general character of a picture; when these are well established, then I try for subtleties of form and color. I rework the painting constantly and freely, and without any systematic method."

"Be guided by feeling alone. We are only simple mortals, subject to error; so listen to the advice of others, but follow only what you understand and can unite in your own feeling."

"Beauty in art is truth bathed in an impression received from nature. I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for a conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me. Reality is one part of art; feeling completes it.. .Before any site and any object, abandon yourself to your first impression. If you have really been touched, you will convey to others the sincerity of your emotion."

"You know, a landscape painter's day is delightful. You get up early, at three o'clock in the morning, before sunrise; you go and sit under a tree; you watch and wait. At first there is nothing much to be seen. Nature looks like a whitish canvas with a few broad outlines faintly sketched in; all is misty, everything quivers in the cool dawn breeze. The sky lights up. The sun has not yet burst through the gauze veil that hides the meadow, the little valley, the hill on the horizon.. .Ah, a first ray of sunshine!"

"The whole landscape lies behind the transparent gauze of the fog that now rises, drawn upwards by the sun, and as it rises, reveals the silver-spangled river, the fields, the cottages, the further scene. At last one can discern all that one could only guess at before.. .The sun is up! There is a peasant at the end of the field, with his wagon drawn by a yoke of oxen.. .Everything is bursting into life, sparkling in the full light – light, which as yet is still soft and golden. The background, simple in line and harmonious in colour, melts into the infinite expanse of sky, through the bluish, misty atmosphere. The flowers raise their heads the birds flutter hither and thither.. .The little rounded willows on the bank of the stream look like birds spreading their tails. It's adorable! And one paints! And paints!"

"I thank heaven that I was born in the same century as this remarkable artist [= Daubigny ]."

"He [ Delacroix ] is an eagle, I am only a lark."

"It is this book ['The Imitation of Christ'] that has helped me lead my life which such serenity and has always left me with a contended heart. I has taught me that men should not puff themselves up with pride, whether they are emperors, adding this or that province tot heir empires, or painters who gain a reputation."

"You can see the pains I take to hide the attachment [of the muscles] at the clavicles and sternum, to soften the modeling of the ribs where it seems that the breasts just begin to swell; I try to go about it entirely differently from the usual way, which is above all to show what one knows. As this is not an anatomy lesson, I must bind together as seen in nature everything covering the armatures that make up and support the body, in order to put down only what I experience faced with these tissues of flesh that let one sens the blood beneath, while they reflect the light of the sky. In a word, I must bring to the painting of that breast the same artlessness I would employ in painting a bottle of milk."

"I spent the winter [1859-1860, when he was painting 'Orfée et Euridice'] in the Elysian fields, where I was very happy; you must admit that if painting is a folly, it’s a sweet folly that men should not only forgive but seek out."

"If my time has come I shall have nothing to complain of. For fifty-tree years I have been painting; so I have been able to devote myself entirely to what I loved best in the world. I had never suffered poverty; I had good parents and excellent friends; I can only thank God."

"Je rêve mon tableau, et plus tard je peindrai mon rêve."

"..and, to tell the truth, I find it very difficult to like new art. It is only lately, and after having been unsympathetic for a great while, that I at last understood Eugene Delacroix, whom I now think a great man."

"At the head of the modern landscape school stands M. Corot.. .Clearly this artist has a sincere love for nature and knows how to study nature with as much intelligence as love. The qualities that shine forth in him are so emphatic – because they are rooted in his soul and his nature – that the influence of Mr. Corot can now be detected in almost all the paintings of the young landscape painters."

"..he [= Corot] knows how to be a colorist with a tone-range of little variety – and that he always achieves harmony even when using fairly crude and bright tones. His composition is always perfect. Thus in his 'Homère et les Bergers' no detail is unnecessary, nothing could be cut out; not even the two little figures walking away along the path.."

"One has to see a painter in his own place to get an idea of his worth. I went back there [to Corot's studio, after the official exhibition] and I appreciate in a new light the paintings that I had seen in the Museum and that had struck me as middling.. .He told me to go a bit ahead of myself, abandoning myself to whatever might come; this is how he works most of the time.. .Corot delves deeply into a subject; ideas come to him and he adds while working; it's the right approach."

"[at Charles Daubigny's place where] ..animated conversations on the direct study of nature or the comparative merits of Haarlem paint driers and thick oil paints were often interrupted bu bursts of merriment greeting a witticism of one of the guests, who included non other than Corot, Daumier, Geoffroy-Dechaume, etc.."

"My travelling companion [= Corot] has just abandoned me. He's a perfect Father Joy, this Father Corot. He is altogether a wonderful man, who mixes jokes in with his very good advice."

"[Corot] has the devil to seldom within him. However inadequate and even unjust this expression may be, I chose it as approximately giving the reason which prevents this serious artist from dazzling and astonishing us. He does astonish – I freely admit – but slowly; he does enchant – little by little; but you have to know how to penetrate into the science of his art.. ..an infallible strictness of harmony."

"Don't you think your Corot is a little short on temperament? I'm painting a portrait of Vallabreque; the highlight on the nose is pure vermilion."

"It is only in ceasing to be entirely true that the artist will cease rendering the precise effect that has struck him, and this is what happens to Corot all those times when, too eager to idealize, he gets lost in forms and colors that have no equivalent in nature."

"He [Corot] was always surrounded by a crowd of fools and I didn't want to get caught up in it. I admired him from a distance."

"Don't look to closely at Corot's figures.. ..his half-finished manner has at least the merit of producing a harmonious ensemble and a striking impression. Instead of analysing a feature one feels an impression."

"My dear Theo.. ..Yesterday I saw the Corot exhibition. It included a painting of the 'Mount of Olives'; I'm glad he painted that. On the right, a group of olive trees, dark against the darkening blue sky; in the background hills covered with shrubs and a couple of tall trees, above them the evening star. There are 3 Corot's at the Salon [in Paris], very beautiful, the most beautiful one, painted shortly before his death, 'Women cutting wood', will probably appear as a woodcut in 'L'Illustration or Le Monde Illustré'."

"He [= Theodore Rousseau ] does not carry us away, as Francois Millet, toward the sorrowing epochs of rustic life, to reveal their savage grandeur or gloomy solemnity.. ..he does not transport us as Corot, into the lands of twilight, where the light, the freshness and the shadow sing an aerial melody, whose last notes reach out into infinity. No: simple, strong, all impregnated with naturalism, he respects the exact relations of the trees, the animals, man and the sky."

"It will be hard to fill the place of the painter [ Corot ]; it will be impossible to fill the place of the man."

"What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found in the museum of Naples [in 1882] – in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot's nymphs."

"The Dupré's [paintings] are superb and there's a Daubigny.. ..that I couldn't get enough of. The same goes for a small Corot [probably the painting 'Pond at Ville-d'Avray', late 1860's , a stretch of water and the edge of a wood on a summer morning about 4 o'clock. A single small pink cloud indicates that the sun will come up in a while. A stillness and calm and peace that enchants one."

"He [Corot] is always the strongest, he has foreseen everything."

"'Adieu' he [ Daubigny ] said, 'adieu, I am going to see up there [after his death] whether friend Corot has found me any new subjects for landscape painting.' In this final thought for his art the last sigh of Daubigny was drawn."

"I believe Corot painted a tree better that any of us, but still I find him superior in his figures."

"He was a good kind man, mr. Daubigny. And mr. Corot too; he [= Corot] used to put on his blouse, light his pipe, and sit down to paint in the middle of the road like any workman. He had a merry word for all who passed and was a rare good fellow. Those were the times when Les Valléés [Auvers] were full of life."

"The light! [in the paintings of Délacroix ].. .There is more warm light in this interior [probably: 'Woman of Algiers'] of his than in all of Corot's landscapes.."

"I have lingered among the nymphs of Corot, dancing in the sacred wood of Ville-d'Avray."

"If Theodore Rousseau was the epic poet of the Fontainebleau school, and Corot the idyllic poet, Dupre seems its tragic dramatist. Rousseau's nature is hard, rude and indifferent to man. For Corot, God is the great philanthropist, who wishes to see men happy, and lets the spring come and the warm winds blow, only that children may have pleasure in them."

"Whatever is in common is true; but likeness is false. Trouillebert's work bears a likeness to that of Corot, but they have nothing in common."

"It was Corot who taught her [ Berthe Morisot, c. 1860-1864] to bathe in air her landscapes, her figures, her still-life compositions; it was he who taught her the difficult lesson of understanding values."

"Only what can be seen there [in the painting] is there.. .What you see is what you see."

"My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he's doing. He is making a thing.. ..all I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion.. .What you see is what you see."

"We believe that we can find the end, and that a painting can be finished. The Abstract Expressionists always felt the painting's being finished was very problematical. We'd more readily say that our paintings were finished and say, well, it's either a failure or it's not, instead of saying, well, maybe it's not really finished."

"If you don't know what Ad Reinhardt's) paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about."

"I always get into arguments, with people who want to retain the old values in painting — the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object."

"The idea in being a painter is to declare an identity. Not just my identity, an identity for me, but an identity big enough for everyone to share in. Isn't that what it's all about?!"

"When Morris Louis|Morris Louis showed in 1958, everybody [like in Art News, by Tom Hess ] dismissed his work as thin, merely decorative. They still do. Louis is the really interesting case... In every sense his instincts were Abstract Expressionist, and he was terribly involved with all of that, but he felt he had to move, too."

"The thing that struck me most was the way he stuck to the motif [in the 'Flag' and 'Target' paintings by Jasper Johns ].. ..the idea of stripes – the rhythm and the interval – the idea of repetition. I began to think a lot about repetition. [quote, 1960's]"

"There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is learning something and the second is making something."

"I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting. After looking comes imitating. In my own case it was at first largely a technical immersion. How did Kline put down that color? Why did Guston leave the canvas bare at the edges? Why did H. Frankenthaler used unsized canvas. And so on."

"I got tired of other's people painting and began to make my own paintings. I found, however, that I not only got tired of looking at my own paintings but that I also didn't like painting them at all. The painterly problems of what to put here and there and how to do it to make it go with what was already there, became more and more difficult and the solutions more and more unsatisfactory. Until finally it became obvious that there had to be a better way."

"There were two problems which had to be faced. One was spatial and the other methodological. In the first case I had to do something about relational painting, i. e. the balancing of the various parts of the painting with and against each other. The obvious answer was symmetry – make it the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A symmetrical image or configuration symmetrically placed on a open ground is not balanced out in the illusionistic space. The solution I arrived at, and there are probably quite a few, although I only know of one other, color density, forces illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals by using a regulated pattern. The remaining problem was simply to find a method of paint application which followed and complemented the design solution. This was done by using the house painters technique and tools."

"There's always been a trend toward simpler painting and it was bound to happen one way or another. Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or surrealism, there's going to be someone who's not painting complicated paintings, someone who's trying to simplify..."

"You are always related [as an artist] to something. I'm related to the more geometric, or simpler, painting, but the motivation doesn't have anything to do with that kind of European geometric painting. I think the obvious comparison with my work would be Vasarely, and I can't think of anything I like less.. ..the 'Groupe de recherché d'Art visuel' actually painted all the patterns before I did – all the basic designs that are in my painting – I didn't even know about it.. ..it still doesn't have anything to do with my painting. I find all that European geometric painting – sort of post Ma Bill school – a kind of curiosity, very dreary."

"Ken Noland has put things in the center [of the painting] and I'll use a symmetric pattern, but we use symmetry in a different way. It's non-relational. In the newer American painting [in contrast to European geometric art] we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical, but just to get a kind of force, just to get the thing on the canvas. The balance factor isn't important."

"Ken Noland would use concentric circles; he'd want to get them in the middle [of the painting] because it's the easiest way to get them there, and he want them there in the front, on the surface of the canvas. If you're that much involved with the surface of anything, you're bound to find symmetry the most natural means."

"But we're still left with structural or compositional elements. The problems aren't any different. I still have to compose a picture, and if you make an object [as Donald Judd does] you have to organize the structure. I don't think our work that radical in any sense because you don't find any really new compositional or structural element. I don't know if that exists. It's like the idea of the color you haven't seen before. Does something exist that's as radical as a diagonal that's not a diagonal? Or a straight line or a compositional element that you can't describe?"

"The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward lager brushes. In a way, Abstract Expressionism started this all. De Kooning used house painter's brushes and house painters' techniques."

"Yes, the aluminum paint ... What happened, at least for me, is that when I first started painting I would see [[Jackson Pollock|[Jackson] Pollock]], [[Willem de Kooning|[Willem] de Kooning]], and the one thing they all had that I didn't have was an art school background. They were brought up on drawing and they all ended up painting or drawing with the brush. They got away from the smaller brushes and, in an attempt to free themselves, they got involved in commercial paint and house-painting brushes, Still it was basically drawing with paint, which has the characterized almost all twentieth century painting. The way my own painting was going, drawing was less and less necessary. It was the one thing I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to draw with the brush."

"I didn't want to mask variations; I didn't want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas.. .I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can."

"Clement Greenberg talked about the ideas or possibilities of painting in his - I think -, 'After Abstract Expressionism' article, and he allows a blank canvas to be an idea for a painting. It might not be a good idea, but it's certainly valid. Yves Klein did the empty gallery. He sold 'air', and that was a conceptualized art, I guess."

"One could stand in front of any Abstract-Expressionist work for a long time, and walk back and forth, and inspect the depths of the pigment and the inflection and all the painterly brushwork for hours. But I wouldn't particularly want to do that and also I wouldn't ask anyone to do that in front of my paintings. To go further, I would like to prohibit them from doing that in front of my painting. That's why I make the paintings the way they are, more or less."

"I think I had been badly affected by ... the romance of Abstract Expressionism ... particularly as it filtered out to places like Princeton and around the country, which was the idea of the 'artist as a terrifically sensitive ever-changing, ever ambitious person', particularly [described] in magazines like Art News and Arts, which I read religiously."

"I began to feel very strongly about finding a way that wasn't so wrapped up in the hullabaloo ... something that stable in a sense, something that wasn't constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux."

"I wanted something that was direct – right to you eye .. ..something you didn't have to look around – you got the whole thing right away."

"I do think that a good pictorial idea is worth more than a lot of manual dexterity."

"I see my work, as being determined by the fact that I was born in 1936."

"The painting never changes once I've started to paint it. I work things out before-hand in the sketches."

"If we are the best, it is only fair that they imitate us."

"The aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live."

"[Asked: "Is that one of the reasons you went into sculpture?"] I don't know how I got into sculpture. I liked its physicality, that's the only reason. I didn't have a program."

"They are more complex to begin with, but their organization, the way they end up being put together, isn't that different. You can't shake your own sensibility. No matter what the concept is; the artist's eye decides when it's right ... which is a notion of sensibility."

"The paintings got sculptural because the forms got more complicated. I've learned to weave in and out."

"I know what I want, but it's physically beyond me now. I can work on what I can handle. It's a playoff between the object and my physical limits."

"I hate to say this. ..it's made to order. Then, I disorder it a little bit or, I should say, I reorder it. I wouldn't be so presumptuous to claim that I had the ability to disorder it. I wish I did."

"Time is what you have left.. ..you just march with it and use it the best you can."

"They just want to get a handle on you and the idea, and that's enough. Some people sense more but they don't really get into it because it's going one step too far. But the whole idea of making art is to be open, to be generous, and absorb the viewer and absorb yourself, to let them go into it. I have to go into all those places in order to make it work."

"When people still talk about art that I made in the 60's— most of them never saw it, and they never lived through it, and they don't have a clue about it. The idea that they know what minimalism is is absurd. I don't know what minimalism is!"

"People say that the paintings are always big because they're striving for effect, but they're also big so that I don't trip over myself, so that I have room to work, and people can come in and be comfortable."

"I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you. Anyway, the real point is that the things that don't seem to me to be pictorially informed are not so interesting to me."

"Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessity of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella's painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These path leads only into painting."

"I've been educated in some pretty lively barrooms, like the Cedar Bar in New York. And I went to high school with Frank Stella and when he got out of college he went to New York and started painting ... I was working with sculpture in a kind of dilatory way, and he said to come up and work in his tiny loft when he wasn't there. At the same time I sort of dabbled in a little bit of painting, and a kind of confusion. I was an eye, ear, nose, and throat person too ... One day Frank Stella just said to me, "Look, if you paint another painting I'm going to cut off your hands." I asked, "Can't I become a good painter?" Frank said, "No, because you are a good sculptor now." That's really my formal education ... the company of artists is the great education."

"So I had carved one face with hollows curving in-out, in-out, very simple really. I set the timber upright and Stella came in [in Stella's own loft where Carl Andre was sculpting temporarily] and came over and looked at the chiseling and said it looked good. He turned around to the back of the piece which was uncut – the backside of the timber – and he said, you know that's sculpture too. I supposed what he meant to say was, that cutting was a good idea and the idea of not cutting was good too."

"By 1958 when [Frank] Stella came to New York, the art-buying public had become convinced that Americans could produce major painting, worthy of comparison with the best of earlier European modern art. And it was now clear that this work could be sold at prices that made an artist's profession economically feasible."

"If a woman has her PhD in physics, has mastered quantum theory, plays flawless Chopin, was once a cheerleader, and is now married to a man who plays baseball, she will forever be "former cheerleader married to star athlete.""

"Frank, you are, without doubt, a scarcity. Anyone who looks at the historical record of the juncture of art and technology finds you nearly unaccompanied when it comes to documenting this historical record between the years of the late-1960's up to the early 1990s. Basically there is you, Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968), and Gene Youngblood's reference work Expanded Cinema (1970). Specifically, your books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (1968), Art, Action and Participation (1975) and Art of the Electronic Age (1993) are indispensable research tools in helping us figure out how art got to where it is today - in your terms virtualized."

"The very idea of philosopher as art curator deeply interests me. One swiftly dreams of what Gilles Deleuze might have done with the opportunity to curate an art exhibition at MoMA: Art and Alloverness perhaps? Or Michel Foucault: the New Panopticons at the Centre Georges Pompidou? What would Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes have done at the International Center of Photography or at the Tate? What could Friedrich Nietzsche have done at the Louvre Museum? What indeed could Georges Bataille have haughtily done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?"

"The digital revolution changed my process early on in terms of technique, but my early analog drawings and paintings had the same thematic intention as my latest digital work: the attempt to conjure, or render, a glimpse into an enigmatically layered and lively world that I sense and know to be reality, an energetic vibratory world of almost dreadful depth. In this respect, my process of making computer-robotic assisted paintings and animations have, until recently, been made up of an excessive concoction of ambiguous sexual body parts (morphed from both sexes) tied to the viral form. Philosophy has been, and is, a way of freeing myself enough to connect with this depth so as to process the phantasmagorical aspects of reality into art. This process of art making, for me, must hinge on a dynamic engagement and then wedding of image production and image resistance. The idea is to encourage subversive readings of computational media by presenting an artistic consciousness that articulates contemporary concerns regarding safety, truth, identity and objectivity."

"In the artist/theorist tradition of Robert Smithson, Joseph Nechvatal is a pioneer in the field of digital image making who challenges our perceptions of nature by altering conventional notions of space and time, gender, and self... Nechvatal successfully plunged into the depths where art, technology and theory meet."

"To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release.By crisis by no means limited to a morbid state, but could just as easily be an ecstatic impulse."

"I'm drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements."

"For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)."

"In painting it is the forming of the image."

"Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization. [a written art note by Twombly on a painting he created in 1957]."

"I think of myself as a Romantic Symbolist."

"I show things in flux."

"I respond to the Greek love of metamorphosis."

"I work in waves because I'm impatient. It has to be done. I take liberties."

"When I work I work very fast, but preparing the work can take any length."

"Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape.. .All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it.. .And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it’s more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense."

"I knew a poet who was totally ignorant about botany. And I said: you can't be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that; it's impossible, that's the first thing you should know."

"I've found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning, or things you have a sentiment for or something. Because your life closes up in so many ways or doesn't become as flexible or exciting or whatever you want to call it. You tend to be nostalgic. And I think about my boats. It's more complicated than that, but also it's going out and also there's a lot of references to crossing over. But the thing of the Nile boat in Winter's Passage: Luxor was about the wonderful thing, the lazy thing, of being two or three months in Luxor by the river. It was just that, it explains a winter passage. From a certain point to the other side: it's like the Greek boat that ferries you over to the other world. That sculpture didn't have it. But sometimes the large painting in Houston does have it. It's a passage through everything."

"And I am very happy to have the boat motif because, when I grew up, in summer with my parents we were always in Massachusetts, and I was always by the sea. You know, sometimes little boys love cars, but I had a particular passion for boats, and now I live by the sea. For sure, it is a passage, but it's also very fascinating for lots of things. When you get interested in something you can find out a lot about things. You might meet people who are interested in one subject or another, like they collect palms. I've found people from all over the world who were fanatical about palms, which you wouldn't know unless you were interested in palms. And the sea: because, if you've noticed, the sea is white three quarters of the time, just white – early morning. Only in the fall does it get blue, because the haze is gone. The Mediterranean [where Twombly is living later in his life], at least – the Atlantic is brown – is just always white, white, white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a lighter white.. .Not because I paint it white; I'd have painted it white even if it wasn't, but I am always happy that I might have. It's something that has other consciousness behind it."

"It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks.. .So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks.. .And I did those charts, big palettes.. .two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task."

"To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It's very lyrical. Gorky, who is very passionate, can copy a drawing or take a drawing and copy it exactly as a painting, and Miro can too, it's amazing. Miro can do a drawing to paint and that's another training in a sense. So there's a certain mannerism that comes in both of them [three], and probably everything becomes obvious in time. But I don't have that. The line is illustrated or the colour. I'm sure it has great feeling when they're doing it, but it's more towards defining something. It has a certain clarity because it's a complex thing. I'm a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting. It's the instinct for the placement where all that happens. I don't have to think about it. So I don't think of composition; I don’t think of colour here and there. Sometimes I alter something after. So all I could think is the rush.. .I cannot make a picture unless everything is working. It's like a state."

"It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture. So I've never had anyone around. I never have. People are different, but I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours. Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well, but the sitting and thinking.. .I usually go off on stories that have nothing to do with the painting, and sometimes I sit in the opposite room to where I work. If I can get a good hot story I can paint better, but sometimes I'm not thinking about the painting, I'm thinking about the subject. Lots of times I'll sit in another room and then I might just go in. It takes a lot of freedom. I'm working for two years on a subject now: ten paintings, and that can carry on for two years. I worked last summer and I started this summer and with just the simplest motif I just can't seem to do it. And everything slowed down."

"Cy Twombly was the first [artist], Robert Rauschenberg shared ideas with]. But Cy and I were not critical. I did my work and he did his. Cy's direction was always so personal that you could only discuss it after the fact."

"For Twombly, the first thing is the line. It is something deliberately artificial and artistic. He has worked on his line, has made it supple enough to convey form, pace, depth and much else besides (Catlo Huber). The line, which Paul Klee called a path, a guide through the imaginary territory of the picture, becomes in Twombly's hands, a vibrant, autonomous, complex 'self' and 'other' that roams through wider and wider landscapes, spaces and processes. Or, as Twombly himself says: each line is the present expedience of its own inherent history.."

"The curator [Varnedoe] somewhat underplays the vast impact of Twombly's early relationship with Rauschenberg.. .Varnedoe reminds us that the two artists met in the spring of 1951 after Twombly moved to New York and entered classes at the Art Students league, where the slightly older Rauschenberg [born in 1925] was also enrolled. Varnedoe maintains that it was probably Twombly who turned Rauschenberg on to Schwitters, rather than vice versa. But it was clearly Rauschenberg who convinced Twombly to join him at Black Mountain College in North Carolina for the summer of 1951. At Black Mountain the young artist was exposed to the teachings not only of Ben Shahn, whom he emulated in his spindly graphic style, and Robert Motherwell, who was one of his strongest early defenders and wrote the first catalogue essay about him, but John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Charles Olson and Franz Kline.[2] A certain Cagean sense of flux, together with a kind of I Ching-influenced orientalism, would remain an undercurrent in Twombly's work, distancing it from the more purposeful and willfully heroic strokes of the Abstract Expressionists."

"But on longer consideration the artist's role [of Twombly] as teacher can be seen as part of his ivory-tower position, a stance of highly selective accessibility that he has cultivated over the years. Since the late '50s younger artists have sought him out in Rome, including Jannis Kounellis in the late '50s, Alighiero e Boetti in the late '60s and Francesco Clemente in the '70s. Brice Marden, having worked for Rauschenberg in the '60s, was early drawn into the Twombly circle. In the early '80s, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Donald Baechler, James Brown, Julian Schnabel and w:Terry Winters all learned much from his art. (Twombly will reportedly appear in the same area as [Terry] Winters and [Brice] Marden in the 1995 Whitney Biennial.) Ross Bleckner's signature '80s image of chandeliers doubles back to Twombly's lost chandelier paintings of the early '50s, which Rauschenberg described in an interview with Barbara Rose. Both Philip Taaffe and Michele Zalopany followed Twombly's expatriate steps to Italy, where they became friends of the artist. In the '90s Suzanne McClelland [see A.i.A., Oct. '94] and Pat Steir each defined her stance in relation to his work. Thus at least three generations of very different artists have studied at the 'School of Twombly'."

"I don't make drips [in her painting] purposely. This drip business is a pile of shit. If I see them, I take them out [of her painting] like cleaning the house."

"[Mitchell wanted in her painting].. the feeling in a line of poetry which makes it different from, a line of prose.. .Sentimentality is self-pity, your own swamp. Weeping in your own beer is not a feeling. It lacks dignity and hasn't an outside reference."

"I've have tried to take from everybody [every artist in American Abstract Expressionism ].. .I can't close my eyes or limit my experiences.. .Because I live now, I am more interested in art now. It's different as any art is different from period to period. But it's no better or worse."

"It's [the color white] death. It's hospitals. It's my terrible nurses. You can add in Melville, Moby Dick a chapter on white. White is absolute horror. It is just the worst. [quote c. 1957]"

"When I came back [from a temporary stay in Paris] and heard you play with Charles Mingus, and when you and Cecil Taylor [also a free Jazz musician] opened up the 'Five Spot' in the Fall of 1956, I felt better about being in New York. All the musicians who create from the gut as well as their intellect can change things. People will never understand what we are doing if they can't feel.. .All art is abstract. All music is abstract. But it's all real.. .When you improvise, I can see the seeds of a symphony you could write. When I first heard Charlie Parker in Chicago, I could see he was a symphony.. ..we were all trying to bring that spirit, that spontaneous energy, into our work. [talking to jazz-player David Anram in the jazz club the 'Five Spot', in 1956, she was visiting with Franz Kline ]."

"I'm trying to remember what I felt about a certain cypress tree and I feel if I remember it, it will last me quite a long life."

"Light is something very special. It has nothing to do with white. Either you see it or you don't. [George] de la Tour doesn't have light; Monet hasn't any light. Matisse, Goya, Chardin, Van Gogh, Sam Francis, Kline have it. But it has nothing to do with being the best painter at all."

"Pop Art, Op Art, Flop Art and Slop Art.. .I fall into the last two categories [her remark, in the mid 1970’s] ."

"It is quite a narrow studio [1970s], I can never see a big four-panel [panels she was working on the same time as parts of one tryptich] all at once.. ..I can see two big panels. That’s about all.. .I had an awful lot going on at once, going back and forth. I turn [canvases] to a wall (when I am not working on them). I cant paint with everything showing."

"And I came [to New York, 1945].. .It was just after the war and I thought it was a little early to get over there [to Europe]. So I spent the winter under the Brooklyn Bridge, on the Brooklyn side, living with Barney Rosset, and I came here [to New York] to study with Hofmann.. .And I went to Hofmann's class and I couldn't understand a word he said so I left, terrified. But he and I became friends later on. Friends, but I never studied with him.."

"And then the spring of [19]'48 I toddled off to Paris on a Liberty ship.. .Yes, and arriving in Le Havre on that Liberty ship and seeing all those—the sun was coming up—and seeing all those ships sunk.. It was hardly.. .I mean, war, war, war, war... .I went to Paris, and I stayed with Zuka and Louis [Mitelberg] [her husband then, the cartoonist 'Tim']. And I looked for a place—and found it on Rue Gallande. Across the river was Notre Dame. That was all of four dollars a month, with a hole on the stairs as a toilet and a spigot with cold water and one light-bulb. That was all the electricity there was. But this view, I mean, God!.. .Saint Julien le Pauvre [Greek Orthodox Church, oldest in Paris] was right in front of me. And so I painted there."

"Oh, early Kandinsky.. [stuck her early] .Well no, they had that at the Art Institute in Chicago, don't forget. See, everybody, to do 'modern art' then [New York, mid-forties], seemed to me, when you were going 'modern' [both chuckle], it was Picasso. I mean, everybody. But I avoided that like the plague. I thought.. .I loved Picasso, but it just wasn't for me.. .Well, I don't! I have some of those [early] paintings from LeLavandou - they're in storage - and from Mexico. They were Expressionist landscapes, or boats on the beach or something like that, which I still do. Sort of going abstract, going towards.."

"And the first studio I went to [in New York, c. 1950].. .I was trying to find de Kooning because he had a painting at the Whitney, which was in the old Studio School [Eighth Street], you know.. .And I thought I would like to know him. I really dug his painting, and I dug Gorky's painting.. .But the first studio I went into was Franz Kline.. .and there were all these Klines, unstretched, hanging on the brick walls. Beautiful. You know, with the telephone book drawings all over the floor, and Kline yakking away, and it was just, I was out of my mind! And so from then on I got involved in the Artists Club. They allowed very few women in, and I was included for $35 a year. And I got very involved in the Cedar Bar and the whole thing.."

"[being a woman in the Artists Club, there were] Elaine Elaine de Kooning, Mercedes Matter.. .Well May Rosenberg, but she wasn't a painter. Jane Freilicher. Nell Blaine.. .Well, there were Grace [ Grace Hartigan ] and Helen [ Helen Frankenthaler ], of course.. .How did I feel, like how? I felt, you know, when I was discouraged I wondered if really women couldn't paint, the way all the men said they [the women] couldn't paint. But then at other times I said, 'Fuck them,' you know. But I think the women were, some of them, more down on women than the men.. .I adulated the men so much they sort of liked me. I mean, I thought Bill [ Willem deKooning ] was a great painter. They liked me.. .Hans Hofmann was very supportive -of me. I used to run into him in the park. I'd be dog-walking at nine in the morning, he'd say, 'Mitchell, you should be painting.' Very nice. [both chuckle] I don't think women in any way were a threat to these men, so they could encourage the 'lady painter.'"

"I started in, got it [former Monet's house, where he lived 1878 - 1881 in Vetheuil; [Mitchell bought the house and used it mainly first in the weekends] in summer of 67, Yeah, well, and then I started.. .I was still painting at Fremicourt and I remember starting the 'Sunflowers' [series, c. 1969-72], which I saw in Vetheuil and painted them in Fremicourt, you see.. .The thing about [the studio in] Fremicourt, also about St. Marks: I had to roll [large] paintings to get them out, which was a real drag, because of thickness [of the paint which cracked]. And when I started painting in Vetheuil, you can just take the [stretched] paintings out [in open air]. Well, that really changed unconsciously an awful lot of.. .Walk them out stretched, it's great."

"I might get an idea [for the start of a painting] sitting looking at the river, or something, or a specific.. ..Yeess. I'm sure, yes, I'm sure it [the environment] influences me in terms of green and gray and color and.. .I mean, New York light is so different, and it always hits me when I come here [in New York], and it excites me to see great extremes of dark and light and no nuance - which I love. But there the Isle de France [round about Paris] has that, you know, filtered light that is that.. where even on a gray day, the green is very green, and the red is very red.. ..I think walking out barefoot and moving the paintings, being able to move them out of my studio [in Vetheuil] for transportation, things like that have had [influence].. .As well as the landscape. Lake Michigan was pretty important, you know."

"Well, I once wrote in - it's in Joan Mitchell Paints a Picture, as I remember, Irving Sandler, a long time ago, that I hated the word 'Nature' with a capital 'N.'.. .But now I accept it, I suppose. I mean, I really like trees and flowers and dogs and all that much more than.. ..a lot of other people [do].. .You know, I really do get pleasure out of.. .Great pleasure. Out of just looking at.. .But I have fun here [New York] too, you know."

"I've always been told that I was a painter's painter.. .What does that mean?.. .That painters like my painting and the big wide world overlooks it, I suppose?.. .Well, I know.. .To me, it would have meant that - this is pre this new rage in buying and selling paintings - that, I think, that the formal values, like light, space, color, all those things that a painting is made up of, as well as the Jacob going up the ladder or Venus on the half shell or something [chuckles] would be what interested the painter. And perhaps the public would want the picture of the Christ child, so to speak. You know what I mean."

"I'm not religious or anything like that. [But] a little more spiritual something or other.. .A little more 'feeling'. And there's my word again. You know?.. .And I find that.. ..[pauses], I find that uninspiring, and if I hung around too much I might find it very deadly. If I let it enter my studio. And it would be hard not to have it enter."

"I'm not so sure I could have done otherwise, but I wish I.. .I'm re-going to a French shrink now, and she's helped me a lot. I wish I'd gone sooner, because I think women are inclined more than men to be self-destructive, and I really think I had the masochistic medal there for a while, and I, you know, I want to, that I wish I had stopped. I think it's also very masochistic to sit and cry in my spilt Scotch for areas in my life that have been very creepy and that I should have cut, left sooner. So what's, that's, I feel sorry about that. But I'm getting to [me, be] perhaps more, oh, I don't know, trying to look at that in a more positive way. Maybe I got something out of that too, I don't know.. .Maybe. I mean.. .I feel also uncomfortable about staying in France, but then, if I could only make sort of a.., instead of saying negative, 'I'm too lazy to move,' a positive thing, 'I really like this house. I really like this view. I really like Paris better than New York' - or not better, or equally, or differently, or something, which is quite true - instead of sitting - which I can do, I used to do - and missing the country and missing New York, or missing France."

"That's where, I think, I changed for that 'Grande Vallée' subject [a large series of 'natural' paintings, Joan painted during 1982-83], which was really not a subject - the 'Grande Vallée' was a [wild vast] place where this Gisele Barreaux [composer] played with her cousin when they were children, and the cousin, aged 28, died of cancer. And she told me he said to her [when he was dying in 1982], 'If we could only return to the Grande Vallee once again,' as he was dying. I mean, that was what that was all about, so that was a subject of.. .You know, it was the summer my sister died - the same week - and we went to the Manet show. [in '82].. ..when I started the 'Grande Vallée'.. .And I was stuck on a subject, and I thought, 'This is very true and very simple,' and I thought, 'Shit, I'll paint the Grande Vallée for her.' And now, I got her to tell me about it, and it was green and blue, and it was just a vast sort of territory outside Nantes [in Brittany, France]. And so that's how I got started on that whole series."

"..he [ Samuel Beckett ] would pore for hours over the intricacies of the paint and the patterns. He liked her refusal to explain or justify her art, since it reflected his own inability and unwillingness to discuss his writings.. .She was the one person with whom he could drink, talk, relax, and her friendship became a crutch he leaned on heavily. [Paris, c. 1952 – 1956]"

"There are those fleeting moments, those almost 'supernatural states of soul', as Baudelaire call them, during which 'the profundity of life is entirely revealed in any scene, however ordinary, that presents itself for one. The scene becomes its symbol.' Miss Mitchel attempts to paint this sign, to recreate both the recalled landscape and the frame of mind she was in originally. Memory, as a storehouse of indelible images become her creative domain.. .The lack of yearning for any length of time causes an inquietude and despondency, a sedulous longing for the yearning. Miss Mitchell paints to reawaken this desire."

"We saw your [ Cuno Amiet's ] work with feelings of admiration and enthusiasm.. .Our group [ Die Brücke ] would be exceedingly glad to find in you a comrade in arms and a champion of its cause."

"I finished my first woodcut in Dresden in 1905 after the Xylographic art, cutting out of the hard boxwood the clean sketches with the slate pencil. Then followed the rounded iron, to arrive at the woodcut more freely through the simply ripped out sketch on the log (alder, lime tree, poplar), which would be utilized from here on out. Then finally came a short cobbler knife, and without a pré-sketch, the hand cuts freely into the wood a woodcut, just like it would work on paper with the pen."

"What we [Brücke-artists] had to remove ourselves from [the German bourgeois mores] was clear; where we were heading was certainly less clear. (original German: Wovon wir weg mussten, war uns klar. Wohin wir kommen würden, stand allerdings weniger fest)."

"..differences arose that hindered the publication of the 'Chronik' (written by Kirchner and brought us to the agreement of dissolving Die Brücke group."

"Brücke will remain in the inner sense; only the outer organizational thing should be dissolved."

"How glad I was to paint that for the soldiers it is very beautiful, how much respect and even love for art there is in human beings, in spite of everything, and who would have thought that my style, which seemed so modern and incomprehensible to critics and public at rotten exhibitions in the cities, would now be able to speak and convey something to men to whom I make a gift of it."

"He [ Otto Mueller ] himself omitted certain things in his pictures that his contemporaries deemed to be of importance, in order to capture the essence.. ..with the greatest possible simplicity."

"The first encounter with Otto Mueller's paintings was in Berlin, at the showing of the 'Rejects of the Berlin Secession'. which took place at the Galerie Macht in the spring of 1910. And we met him personally the very same day in his studio on Mommsenstrasse. This meeting was significant for all of us and occurred at a fruitful moment; and, as a matter of course, he belonged to Die Brücke community from then on."

"I still remember the first time [ c. 1903-04] when Heckel who had started to draw a plant in the broad white and black manner of a woodcut, stopped bothering to observe the overlapping and the movements of the leaves and instead got down something on the paper that bore a distant resemblance to the overall form of the object. When I criticized the drawing for its carelessness he invoked his right to stylize.. .He said that the only important thing so far as he was concerned was the seizure of a total expression."

"When I did not want to be satisfied with the hastiness of his [Heckel's] drawing, he called upon his right of stylization. I presented the view: one must first learn to draw properly, only then is one allowed to stylize.. ..but I did not convince him at all. He was of the mind that only came down to the creation of an overall impression and this is what the case was for him. From this point on, the Brücke people began to draw highly 'un-orderly,' to my horror.. .But in reality, the future was breaking through here.."

"In 1905 I had the opportunity to observe Heckel outside the foor walls of the art room. I took thirty of my students [in architecture] on an excursion.. ..I found him in front of Grünewald's Pieta.. ..and with the greatest of care he had copied the hands that are movingly wrung over the dead body in his sketchbook.. .Then later [ in the train through the country] he suddenly pulled out his sketchbook again and began to scrawl passionate smudges on its pages.. .. and a great roar of 'Heckel's sketching' and shouts of laughter ran through the whole coach.. .When the time came [some days later] I was delighted to find that the boys gave the first price to Heckel's sketchbook, although most of it seemed rather mad to them."

"As far as I can see, as a printmaker Erich Heckel essentially developed out of the woodcut. Because it imposes the necessity to simplify, it is a good means of education.. .Sometimes it charmed him to take advantage of the nature and quality of specific woods; in that way he cut the weather-beaten face of an old man in oak that had lain in the moor for hundreds of years."

"Heckel was inclined to feel that he dared not advance further on this path without inflicting violence on the style of the woodcut. He found the lithograph as a substitute."

"He often got up at night in order to seize that seen within, which quickly with a crayon, quickly with a broad brush, he brought onto the stone, and the use of acid allowed him to bring out the finest and most capricious tones. Through all the preciosity of the treatment these works preserve exactly the characteristic features of the lithographic technique."

"Landscapes became more important and more numerous when Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff decided to make their first trip [together] to Dangast in 1907. Heckel's paintings at this stage still show the same violent brushwork as his friends', modeled on Van Gogh. The pictures are set down on the canvas spontaneously and quickly, with short curving strokes. The predominant colours are saturated reds, greens and blues.. .But Heckel soon recognized the dangers of these wild, uncontrolled storms of colors.. ..the reflection, the intellectual discipline, characteristic of Heckel, are already apparent by 1908.."

"Theodor Däubler, one of the chief representatives of German Expressionist prose.. ..frequently spoke of the asceticism of Die Brücke.. ..certainly a succinct expression of Heckel's [early] style. Heckel developed a lyrical defined form. [during the formation of Die Brücke ]"

"In the days that I spent in Dresden [before 1911].. ..I was together with Kirchner and Heckel a great deal.. .Here they led a singular bohemian life, liberated from any ordering of day-times and mealtimes; when they had the impulse they worked the whole night through and slept through the morning. I was convinced that they not infrequently lived on coffee, cake, and cigarettes.. .When the lamps were lit, we sat on benches and crouched over the batiked fabrics that were spread around the low table and looked at the portfolios with hand drawings and printed sheets; all the time strange, grotesque sculptures peered over our shoulders. The two showed me how they etched their lithographs, printed their etchings, and Kirchner drew two.. ..portraits of me with the dry-point needle."

"Heckel however, reacted to the turbulent life of the metropolis [Berlin] with a retreat towards the private and a concentration on the human condition. His melancholy scenes from this time period are filled with resignation and world-weariness, such as his 1913 woodcut 'Liegende' (Reclining Woman). It depicts his significant other, and later wife, Siddi sleeping in what appears to be a seated position but on a flat surface. Combined with the red oval surrounding her, this has the effect of creating a sort of cocoon around her, especially since the rest of the image is rendered in black and white. The slashes outside of this cocoon shape make it seem like an external force attempting to disturb her. For the time being, she is protected by her red cocoon and seems to be in a deep sleep as judged by her slightly drooping mouth. Yet her environment is encroaching on her peace, mirroring the events of this time leading up to the first world war."

"Quote of Claire Louise Albiez, in: Brücke und Berlin: 100 Jahre Expressionismus; submitted to the Division of Humanities New College of Florida, Sarasota, Florida, May 2013, p. 51"

"All form is a process of notation."

"If you haven't done it twice, you haven't done it."

"What truly remains of me Is that very thing- my absence."

"I am a polyartist."

"I never feel quite complete unless I'm doing all the arts-visual,musical,literary."

"I guess that's why I developed the form 'intermedia'.You are always focussing on all kinds of media to express yourself."

"Happenings are a fusion of visual art , music and theatre."

"Concrete poetry is a fusion of visual art and poetry."

"Sound poetry is a fusion of music and literature."

"In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession."

"Figures were never for me a compact mass but like a transparent construction."

"There was a third element in reality that concerned me: movement."

"That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it."

"And then the wish to make compositions with figures. For this I had to make (quickly I thought; in passing), one or two studies from nature, just enough to understand the construction of a head, of a whole figure, and in 1935 I took a model. This study should take, I thought, two weeks and then I could realize my compositions...I worked with the model all day from 1935 to 1940...Nothing was as I imagined. A head, became for me an object completely unknown and without dimensions."

"A little after I started to do sculpture, I painted some of them, and then I destroyed them all. I've begun again several times. In 1951, I painted a whole series of sculptures. But in painting them, you see what the form lacks. And it's useless to paint over something that you don't believe in. I tried again a month ago. In painting them, the deficiencies of form came through."

"Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away. The others hang on and never let go."

"One starts by seeing the person who poses, but little by little all the possible sculptures of him intervene... The more real a real vision of him disappears, the stranger his head becomes."

"There's no doubt but that without this liberté, égalité and fraternité there could not have been a Monet, Modigliani, Picasso, or Giacometti."

"It isn't necessary to make things large to make them monumental; a head by Giacometti one inch high would be able to vitalize this whole space."

"I mean, the official definition of Surrealism is to make a work automatically without a priori aesthetic or moral conditions, which is exactly what we do [artist in New York School / Abstract Expressionism]. At the same time Surrealism was an assault, - with a few exceptions: Giacometti, Arp and Miro - on the 'purity' of painting. I mean mean, on making painting - means themselves speak, without reliance on literature; and that second insistence of Surrealism, Americans really rejected. So that historically.. .Abstract Expressionism is in part, I think, a fusion of certain Surrealist means, above all plastic 'automatism' with the Cubist's insistence that the picture speaks as a picture in strictly pictorial language."

"What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal…. For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space."

"Opposers of compassion urge: ‘If we should live on vegetable food, what shall we do with our cattle? What would become of them? They would grow so numerous they would be prejudicial to us—they would eat us up if we did not kill and eat them.’ But there is abundance of animals in the world whom men do not kill and eat; and yet we hear not of their injuring mankind, and sufficient room is found for their abode. Horses are not usually killed to be eaten, and yet we have not heard of any country overstocked with them. … Cattle are at present an article of trade, and their numbers are industriously promoted. … Self-preservation justifies a man in putting noxious animals to death, yet cannot warrant the least act of cruelty to any being. … Some animals are savage and unfeeling; but let not their ferocity and brutality be the standard pattern of the conduct of man. Because some of them have no compassion, feeling, or reason, are we to possess no compassion, feeling, or reason?"

"[Describing her visit to a slaughter facility in Pennsylvania] The floor was very slippery and the walls and everything else were covered with blood. Dried blood had formed a crust on the chains. I surely didn't want to fall down in all that blood and guts. The workers wore non-slip boots, yellow aprons, and helmets. It was a scene of controlled, mechanized chaos."

"Sue Coe … has done more through her paintings and prints to help animals than any other artist in history."

"I have no doubt that Sue's art … is of historic importance. A hundred years from now and more, assuming our species has managed to survive, Sue Coe's work will hang in all the great museums of the world."

"The method of printing with three wooden blocks produces painterly prints. But Hercules Segers first applied a layer of paint to his papers or fabrics for his smooth compositions of skies, horizons and foregrounds, and then printed on to them, in a very effective and painterly manner."

"It is a common failing among practitioners of art to become accustomed to a way of coloring, as if things were bound to their manner, and not their manner bound to the nature of things. Many, however, because of a certain natural inclination, adopted manners of coloring that seemed ideally suited to that branch of art to which they were most inclined. And so Hercules Segers concerned himself with savage mountains: and one [another artist:] Liefrinck painted imaginative rocks. Gemstones are also wonderfully colored, and the attractions of shells and other treasures from the sea have their particular admirers."

"And it is understandable, if it were possible to print finished paintings, as Hercules Segers has done with landscapes in our time, that it would no longer be easy to find anyone who would want to devote much labor and time to producing his works."

"Another fitting example here is that of Hercules Segers, disregarded and yet a great artist... ...His observation was unwavering and effective, particularly in his design of landscapes and compositions, with imaginary mountains and caves. It was as if he were pregnant with whole provinces, giving birth to them with immeasurable spaces, and picturing them to a marvel in his paintings and prints."

"..although he even painted and printed on his shirts and the sheets from his bed (for he also printed paintings), he and his whole family remained in abject poverty, so that his dejected wife eventually complained that there was not a piece of linen left that had not been used for paintings or prints."

"Unfortunately, we have no clues about Segers's reputation as an etcher during his lifetime, and it seems very probable that those of his prints which have survived were originally gathered in a few large, privately owned and therefore inaccessible groups. This inaccessibility partly explains their minimal influence on later artists."

"[ Rembrandt ] admired Seger's reworking of the [etch-]plate to create different states. This adventurous approach to printmaking [new developed by Segers] was taken up enthusiastically by Rembrandt, and gives a new significance undreamt of by Segers."

"Before Segers began touching up his prints with the brush, he had used hand-tinted papers on which to print his etchings.. .By varying the tints he was able to clarify the relation of successive planes to each other. But spatial clarity was not enough. What mattered more to Segers was bringing out the structure of the landscape.. ..he goes especially far in specifying, with the brush [in the etching] the particularities of the terrain."

"My travelling companion [= Corot] has just abandoned me. He's a perfect Father Joy, this Father Corot. He is altogether a wonderful man, who mixes jokes in with his very good advice."

"Speak to me no more of the old masters. Not one of them can stand up to this sturdy fellow [=Courbet ]."

"I have bought at Auverse thirty perches of land, all covered with beans, on which I shall plant some legs of mutton when you come to see me. They are building me a studio there, some eight by six meters, with several rooms around it, which will serve me, I hope, next Spring [of 1861]. Father Corot has found Auvers very fine, and has engaged me to fix myself there for a part of the year, wishing to make rustic landscapes with figures. I shall be truly well of there, in the midst of a good farming country, where the ploughs do not yet go by steam."

"[I] preferred paintings full of daring to the nullities welcomed into every Salon."

"I was not able to work in the several excursions and ascensions made in the neighborhood, where it was very beautiful. One is so surprised by these grand aspects that it would be necessary to remain a long time before finding the interpretation capable of rendering them. I am going to finish the season at Auvers. There is nothing like one's natural every-day surroundings where one really takes pleasure. The pictures we do then feel the effect of their home-life, and the sweet sensations we experience in it."

"Adieu, adieu, I am going to see up there [after death] whether friend Corot has found me any new subjects for landscape painting."

"Mr. Daubigny is again to be found among the new landscapist group. I do not know anyone who was a more intimate feeling for nature, and who can better make it felt [in his former paintings]. But why does he only produce [now] rough sketches like 'La Moisson' and the 'Vue Pris sur les Bords de la Seine'. This latter is particularly beautiful. Is Mr. Daubigny afraid if ruining his work by finishing it? But that would be an avowal of weakness. I have a better opinion of his talent and I am convinced that a man who has begun so well could not finish badly."

"[at Daubigny's place where] ..animated conversations on the direct study of nature or the comparative merits of Haarlem paint driers and thick oil paints were often interrupted bu bursts of merriment greeting a witticism of one of the guests, who included non other than Corot, Daumier, Geoffroy-Dechaume, etc.."

"I thank heaven that I was born in the same century as this remarkable artist [= Daubigny] ]."

"It is a pity that M. Daubigny, the landscape painter, with a sentiment so true, just and natural, contents himself with a first impression and neglects at this point the details. His pictures are no more than sketches, and sketches little advanced; it is to a system that one should attribute this careless manner which we believe dangerous for the future of the painter if he does not quickly abandon it. Each object delineates itself by an apparent or real contour, but the landscapes of M. Daubigny offer little except spots of color placed in juxtaposition. It needs, however, but a few days' labor to make excellent pictures of these insufficient preparations."

"Those were the times when Les Vallées [ Auverse ] were full of life. Monsieur Daubigny would go off on the plain in the early morning, work an hour or two, and then start for he river. Sometimes he would come to draw my donkey or have some rabbits let loose in the kitchen here to sketch from. I always attended to his garden in which he was very much interested."

"It was among the apple-blossoms, in the pure air of the country, that he passed his earlier years and imbibed that love of the fields which became the passion of his life."

"Another landscape painter, one of the first of our time, whose beginnings were rough, was always supported and guided by Corot. M. Daubigny well knows how, in hours of depression, his master appeared, as if by chance, and just in time to wind him up with good advice and praises."

"First and foremost, the masterly etching, 'The Bush', by Daubigny/Ruisdael. [= Daubigny's etching 'The bush', he made after Jacob van Ruisdael ].. ..I plan to do two drawings, either in sepia or something else, one of them after this etching [by Daubigny] — the other [etching, made] after T. Rousseau's 'The oven in Les Landes'. This latter sepia is already done — it's true — but if you compare it with Daubigny's etching, you'll understand that it becomes weak, even though the sepia drawing considered on its own may very well have a certain tone and sentiment. I have to go back to it and work on it again.. ..I couldn't tell you how happy I feel to have taken up drawing again. It had already been on my mind for a long time, but I always saw the thing as impossible and beyond my reach."

"The boat used by Daubigny was arranged for long voyages; the cooking was done on board; there was a good wine cellar; you drank deep and you worked hard. The sketches accumulated, and when winter was come, Daubigny returned to Paris provisioned with the booty of art and nature, the landscapes which, toward the close of his life, collectors and dealers battled for."

"The dwellers on the banks of the Oise and the Seine knew him [Daubigny] well. The ambulant landscape painter was more especially designated by the title of the 'Captain', a rank which vastly flattered him, for by dint of living on the water he had acquired a sailor's roughness and a sailor's pride in good navigation. The boat used by Daubigny was arranged for long voyages; the cooking was done on board; there was a good wine cellar; you drank deep and you worked hard. The sketches accumulated; and when winter was come, Daubigny returned to Paris provisioned with the booty of art and nature, the landscapes which, towards the close of his life, collectors and dealers battled for. How many times I have seen him thus, in his latter days, when his hair had grown white.."

"When the landscape had struck him especially by its general planes, he flung it on the canvas in those marvelous sketches which the artist refused to carry on further because he had nothing to add to this massy statement; at other times he insinuates himself into the details as exhaustively as possible and refines on his work to the utmost limits of execution. In this way the career of Daubigny is based on the simple and truthful art-theory that the handling of a picture ought to reflect the mood felt."

"I am grateful for the [financial] assistance I received last year [1955] through the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. It gave me the materials I needed and a certain amount of security and enabled me to make a very good try for my New York show. This did not succeed but Miss Betty Parsons whose gallery I will eventually show in assured me that in one more year she thought I could make it, which is not discouraging.. .I painted all together one hundred canvasses of which I had a good opinion and sold seven [in a year]."

"When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square. Destroys its power."

"My [artworks] have neither object nor space nor line nor anything – no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. You wouldn’t think of form by the ocean. You can go in if you don’t encounter anything. A world without objects, without interruption, making a work without interruption or obstacle. It is to accept the necessity of this simple, direct going into a field of vision as you could cross and empty beach to look at the ocean."

"I am staying unsettled and trying not to talk for three years. I want to do it very much."

"The adventurous state of / mind is a high house // To enjoy life the adventurous / state of mind must be / grasped and maintained // The essential feature of adventure is that it is a / going forward into / unknown territory // The joy of adventure is unaccountable // This is the attractiveness of / art work. It is adventurous, / strenuous and joyful."

"Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this.. ..that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature, an experience of simple joy.. .My paintings are about merging, about formlessness.. .A world without objects, without interruption."

"My interest is in experience that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in art work which is also wordless and silent."

"..the function of art work is.. ..the renewal of memories of moments of perfection."

"Bring ice, thanks, Agnes"

"Architect/arcetects/arcatects/arcetects/archetes"

"On a Clear Day: Art work that is completely abstract - free from any expression of the environment is like music and can be responded to in the same way. Our response to line and tone and color is the same as our response to sounds.. .It holds meaning for us that is beyond expression in words. These prints [title, 'On a Clear Day'] express innocence of mind. If you can go with them and hold your mind as empty and tranquil as they are and recognize your feelings at the same time you will realize your full response to this work."

"People think that painting is about color It's mostly composition It's composition that's the whole thing The classic image- Two late Tang dishes, one with a flower image, one empty – the empty form goes all the way to heaven It is the classic form – lighter weight."

"My work is anti-nature The four-story mountain You will not think form, space, line, contour Just a suggestion of nature gives weight light and heavy light like a feather you get light enough and you levitate"

"I painted a painting called 'Milk River' [in 1963] Cows don't give milk if they don't have grass and water Tremendous meaning of that is that painters can't give anything to the observer People get what they need from a painting The painter need not die because of responsibility When you have inspiration and represent inspiration The observer makes the painting"

"When I draw horizontals you see this big plane and you have certain feelings like you're expanding over the plane Anything can be painted without representation"

"I used to look in my mind for the unwritten page if my mind was empty enough I could see it I didn't paint the plane I just drew this horizontal line Then I found out about all the other lines But I realized what I liked was the horizontal line Then I painted the two rectangles correct composition if they're just right"

"As I describe inspiration I do not want you to think I am speaking of religion. That which takes us by surprise - moments of happiness - that is inspiration. Inspiration which is different from daily care. Many people as adults are so startled by inspiration which is different from daily care that they think they are unique In having had it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Inspiration is there all the time."

"Inspiration is pervasive but not a power. It's a peaceful thing. It is a consolation even to plants and animals. Do not think that it is unique. If it were unique no one would be able to respond to your work."

"Of course we know that an untroubled state of mind cannot last. So we say that inspiration comes and goes but really it is there all the time waiting for us to be untroubled again. We can therefore say that it is pervasive. Young children are more untroubled than adults and have many more inspirations."

"To be an artist, you look, you perceive, you recognize what is going through your mind. And it is not ideas. Everything you feel and everything you see and everything that your whole life goes through your mind, you know. But you have to recognize it and go with it and really feel it."

"You can't be in an unconscious state and paint. Because whatever is in your mind, and not the subject matter, but the feelings that you have related to that subject matter, is what you're going to paint. So, the beginning is not actually painting, you know. The beginning of painting is not you put down green, and then you like pink, and you put down pink. Painting's not about that anymore than music is about this sound and that sound.. ..And it's something that drives you to expression. And it's irresistible."

"It takes time, see. You finish painting the painting and then you turn it to the wall. I mean, you say, does it have it or doesn't it have it? If it doesn't have it, you throw it away, but if you think it has it, you turn it to the wall. And then when you have made some more work, then you turn them all over. And you, again, try to see exactly what it does mean and just exactly how effectively you have rendered this meaning."

"To neglect your own mind, that's like to neglect your consciousness. That’s like to give up all hope of joy and happiness, really. You're the only one that can discover for you the meaning of anything. What it means to you. By that, I don't mean intellectual meaning. I mean, what it means, how it makes you feel. You have to see whether you really are happy or not. Whether you really are sad or not. And you have to investigate what goes through your mind."

"Inspiration comes from a clear mind. Right straight through. We have nothing to do with it."

"To live truly and effectively the idea of achievement must be given up. Put unsentimental piety first, turn your back on the world, and get on with it."

"It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words. But there is a wide range of emotional response that we make that cannot be put into words. We are so used to making these emotional responses that we are not consciously aware of them till they are represented in art work."

"When a beautiful rose dies beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose. Beauty is an awareness in the mind. It is a mental and emotional response that we make. We respond to life as though it were perfect. When we go into a forest we do not see the fallen rotting trees. We are inspired by a multitude of uprising trees.. .The goal of life is happiness and to respond to life as though it were perfect is the way to happiness. It is also the way to positive art work."

"When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision."

"When we realize that we can see life we gradually give up the things that stand in the way of our complete awareness. As we paint we move along step by step. We realize that we are guided in our work by awareness of life."

"You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting."

"Some things fail and others succeed. Well, then you get quite desperate, and you think: 'I am going to work and work and I'm not going to have any failures.' But then you find out that failures are inevitable; you can't even draw a straight line, you know that."

"When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is in the mind, not in the eye. In our minds, we have an awareness of perfection that leads us on.. .The response to beauty is emotion. Sometimes very subtle emotions of which we are almost not aware, and sometimes our most powerful emotions.."

"Beauty is very much broader than just to the eye. It is our whole, positive response to life. An artist is fortunate in that his work is the inner contemplation of beauty, of perfection in life. We cannot make anything perfectly, but with inner contemplation of perfection, we can suggest it."

"Although we are all different, we all respond to each other's suggestions of perfection. And we enjoy the same response as the artist. It is the inner contemplation, the wanting to respond to life, that opens our eyes to what is already in the mind."

"Everything is contemplated in the mind without meditation. We make a very complicated response. Just to look at a floating branch evokes very complicated objective and nonobjective responses. The artist must slow all this down, mentally. It is this mental experience that makes the representation of beauty possible."

"In the middle of the work of art, an artist often feels that he is failing. And he starts interfering with his inspiration. That is a mistake. The mistake. It is best to push on through. Such works frequently turn out to be the best. To fail is a very ordinary experience for an artist. To fail and fail and still go on, marks his character. Most people cannot bear to fail, even once. They think of security."

"Take beauty: it's a very mysterious thing, isn't it? I think it's a response in our minds to perfection.. .My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines. There's not any hint of nature. And still everybody responds, I think."

"Pollock was terrific. I think he freed himself of all kinds of worry about this world. Ran around and dripped, and then he managed to express ecstasy."

"The Minimalists were nonobjective. They just recorded beauty, I guess, without the emotions - or at least without personal emotions. My work is a little more emotional than that."

"[about Ad Reinhardt:] ..we supported each other.. .He thought I was a good painter, and I thought he was a good painter."

"The little rectangle contradicts the square. And the square is authoritative.. .The rectangle is pleasant, whereas the square is not.. ..It's too stiff, too authoritative. My paintings are made up of little rectangles, not little squares There was a scholar who dug up a Tantric drawing that was just like my grid, and it was made of rectangles, too, just exactly like mine.. .I was surprised. I didn't think anybody had made a grid quite like that."

"Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings. That's the end [of the interview]."

"I used to pay attention to the clouds in the sky.. .I paid close attention for a month to see if they ever repeated. They don't repeat. And I don't think life does either. It's continually various. That's the truth about life."

"It was so flat, you know, you could see the curves of the earth. And when a train came into vision at nine o'clock in the morning, it was still leaving at noon.. ..it took that long to get across the prairie."

"I was very happy. I thought I would cut my way through life.. ..victory after victory, [laughing..] Well, I adjusted as soon as they carried me into my mother. Half of my victories fell to the ground.. [she pauses] ..My mother had victories. [her candid, weather-beaten face darkens abruptly]"

"There's no indication or hint about the material world in my painting. No, I don't paint about the world. Everybody else is painting about the world. That's enough."

"I am simply painting concrete representation of abstract emotions such as innocent love, ordinary happiness. I do want an emotional response. And I paint about emotions, not about lines. The truth is that it's not the lines that express the emotion. It's the scale of the composition. You know, if you go into a room that has perfect scale, you feel it.. .If the painting has perfect scale, it moves you. And you have different scale to show different emotions. It's the space between the lines that counts."

"I painted for 20 years without liking them very much, you know. I burnt them at the end of every year. For 20 years I burnt the whole bunch because I didn't want them to get in the market. And well, sometimes when I was starving, I used to sell one cheap, you know. But I always regretted it because you hate to think of a painting in somebody's house that you don't like well enough, you know."

"The truth is that I have lived on an even keel. I don't go down, and I don't go up. I believe in living above the line. Above the line is happiness and love, you know. Below the line is all sadness and destruction and unhappiness. And I don't go down below the line for anything."

"Once you are caught in one of her paintings, it is an almost painful effort to pull back from the private experience she triggers to examine the way the picture is made. The desire to simply let yourself flow through it, or let it flow through you, is much stronger.. ..Her paintings exert themselves differently, depending on their line, their pattern, and the quality of the ground color on the canvas. Some are less lyrical, evincing aggression or tension.. .Others suggest spaciousness or vast space, again without using illusionistic devices or the egotistical implication of infinitely extensible surface."

"Agnes Martin often speaks of joy; she sees it as the desired condition of all life. Who would disagree with her?.. ..No-one who has seriously spent time before an Agnes Martin, letting its peace communicate itself, receiving its inexplicable and ineffable happiness, has ever been disappointed. The work awes, not just with its delicacy, but with its vigor, and this power and visual interest is something that has to be experienced."

"[looking at the facture of her works is] a conceptual traffic jam: sheer undesirability. My analytical faculties, after trying to conclude what I'm looking at is one thing or another, give up, and my mind collapses."

"[Agnes] Martin also often spoke in her writings of a blissful, egoless state, an 'untroubled mind', which she tried to achieve in her art, an idea that stems from her own interests in Eastern philosophy. Martin first encountered Buddhism in the late 1950's in the lectures of D.T. Suzuki at Columbia University, and also became interested in the writing of two Taoists, Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, who advised that, rather than looking at others, one should look within one's own mind and soul."

"If what counts most in communication is pattern and its variations, we can look again at the many surfaces and repetitions in Martin's work: in format, medium, mark, measurement. The square itself, as the artist well knew, is the most repetitious of linear lay-outs; each defining dimension repeats the next. That's why she used the square for her basic setup, as well as why she famously credited it with an 'unpleasant' power, which she actively opposed by dividing her canvas into rectangular units."

"I was interested in geometry. And in the colors of nature. Remember, I learned from Agnes Martin and [fiber artist] Lenore Tawney. It was just gardening, making a quilt."

"Over the years, she gave an assortment of reasons for her departure in the Summer of 1967. She had been living in a beautiful studio on South Street, with cathedral ceilings, so close to the river that she could clearly see the expressions on the sailors' faces. One day, she heard that it was going to be torn down. In the same post she received notification that she had won a grant, enough to purchase a pickup truck and an Airstream camper. Her friend Ad Reinhardt, whose black paintings she loved, had just died; her relationship with Chryssa had ended, and anyway she'd had enough of living in the city. The voices [in her head], too, were in agreement. 'I could no longer stay, so I had to leave, you see,' she explained decades later. 'I left New York because every day I suddenly felt I wanted to die and it was connected with painting. It took me several years to find out that the cause was an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.'"

"I would like to somewhat dispel this impression that she [agnes Martin] was some ascetic saint of the desert. She was more complicated than that and more sophisticated than that. I'm leery of sweeping her up in this celebration of artists, these artists who are self-trained or outsider, or beyond the pale of cosmopolitan art and life, and that's their merit. I think her mental illness [schizophrenia] is liable to enforce that impulse and I think that would be a mistake. It's not who she was. It was part of her life, but it didn't define her."

"My specialty is really painting moonlight – but I will not forget the sunshine."

"What I have suffered is unbelievable.. .I was given nothing [for his paintings in the Salon of 1855], not even a honorable mention."

"I miss my friends in Paris. Holland is fine to paint, but Paris is the only place to follow one's studies. One can find judges there who will encourage you, who wil tell one what is necessary and what is missing. My great hope is to return as soon as the weather and luck are on my side for he journey."

"I have another painting finished, a view near Rotterdam, and then another in process, and very far along. I made them from nature, that is to say I made watercolors [in open air] after which I made my [oil]-paintings."

"Eight days ago I left Paris and here I am at Honfleur, the place to which I return, as always, with new pleasure. It is a little seaport where there are ten or twenty ships of all nations; not counting the fishing vessels of the same nations. I tell you that this is very interesting for my studies."

"Monsieur Jongkind is a very fine Colorist. His slightly over-bright colors belong to him alone, his vividly sketched landscapes have great character, his paintings could be recognized among thousands. This is a fairly rare merit today. Monsieur Jongkind is opening up a very pretty part in art. It is not a royal highway, but where he walks by himself, without being elbowed out."

"You know that the only marine painter that we have, Jongkind, is dead to art. He is completely mad."

"Jongkind's craft hardly concerns him; and this results in the fact that, before his canvases, it does not concern you either. The sketch finished, the painting completed, you do not trouble yourself with the execution, it disappears before the power of the charm of the effect.."

"With him [Jongkind] all lies in impression."

"He works himself up into a frenzy, on order to make great strides, before returning to Paris."

"There at the moment in Honfleur.. ..Boudin and Jongkind are here; we get on marvelously.. .There's lots to be learned and nature begins to grow beautiful.."

"One must be particularly knowledgeable in order to render the sky and the land with this apparent disorder, here [in Jongkind's art, showed at the Salon of 1868] everything is true (French: 'vrai')."

"Jongkind is beginning to make us digest a kind of painting of which the hard outer skin hides an excellent and most tasty fruit. I too have profited by coming in the door which he already had forced, and I have begun, albeit timidly, tp present my seascapes.. ..the longer one looks at his watercolors, the more one wonders how he does them! They are made from nothing and yet the fluidity and the density of the sky and clouds are reproduced with unbelievable precision.. ..Nothing alters him, success, honours, fortunes, attacks or disdain. He sizes men up for himself; he knows that the disdained Corot is the master of landscape, that the insulted Monet will soon be the glory of his age; he knows how to assess the weakness in the art of Isabey or Troyon."

"[Jongkind].. ..his painting was too new and far too artistic to be appreciated in 1862 at his prices. Moreover, no one was as bad at making himself valued, as he was. He was a straight-forward and simple kind of man, who could hardly speak bad French and was very shy. But he was very outgoing that day [in 1864, somewhere around [[w:Le Havre| Le Havre] ]. He asked to see my sketches, invited me to come and work with him, explained the whys and wherefores underlining his work and thereby, completed the training that I had already received from Boudin. He became from this moment my true master and it [is] to him, that I owe the definitive training of my eyes."

"One of the most precious gifts he [Jongkind] owed Schelfhout was his initiation to quick sketching after nature, rendering the full aspect of a landscape through a wash of summary colours over a nervous and solidly constructed drawing."

"He painted them 'after life', but one has to agree on the definition of this phrase insofar as he was concerned. A painting by Jongkind 'after life' is not a straightforward copy of the motif he had settled on. It is the reproduction of the same subject treated through watercolour. His first sketch is a watercolour. It is with his watercolour brush that he captured directly the impression of nature"

"One must not forget that Boudin had received lessons from a master, Jongkind, whose oeuvre, especially in the watercolors, is the origin along with Corot of what has been called Impressionism."

"..in 1863 [Jongkind] begins the most beautiful series of watercolors that exists in the world."

"As he painted them [the sailing ships, in the harbor of Le Havre ] again that summer of 1865, Courbet and Whistler were his neighbours. At Deauville the robust Courbet reveled in swimming and was enjoying himself as usual. Whistler was with him. Courbet still spoke of him as his pupil, although Whistler had outgrown his influence."

"He has spent his childhood near a small port [Vlaardingen, near Rotterdam ]. The boats on the quayside, the proud three-masters leaving their home waters to sail the seas have always haunted his imagination and fed his imagination.. .His views of the river w:Scheldt, near Antwerp, painted during his most colorful period, are among his most memorable works."

"Watercolor provides him with an autonomous art-form, and attracts him with a charm, of which he is fully aware, and because of this he prepares all the means necessary to capture on paper the beauty of values, whether they be questions of color or of balance."

"Jongkind divides his colors more and more, puts them in juxtaposition, and by about 1875 he is on equal footing with Sisley, and later with Seurat."

"As the misfortune befell in November [1918], I threw myself into the woodcut.. .It is a technique that provokes one to confession, to the unmistakable statement of what one finally means. It, or far more she, enforces a certain general validity of expression.. .I have finished a number of large woodcuts that deal with all of the distress of the times."

"My principle aim is to express my experience of landscape and human beings with the greatest possible simplicity."

"I have always taken the art of the ancient Egyptians as my model, even in purely technical matters."

"I depict my life and experiences in my works of art."

"I will try to develop an entirely new style and I am sure I will succeed."

"By new style I meant mainly technical aspects. It is impossible to experience things from an entirely new angle through will-power; it has to mature in solitude."

"Since I am not well and have difficulty walking.. .More than anything else, I need lots of rest; even letter-writing is a strain."

"Appreciation Otto Mueller has until now been hampered by the circumstance that his timeless art provides no recognizable points of reference, has been spared the problems surrounding contemporary art and is difficult to classify under any of the categories that are so popular wit his terminology addicts."

"[the nicest artist and his works were] always of a high standard and truly free works of art and genuine because they matured freely and purely on the basis of his philosophy of life."

"He himself omitted certain things in his pictures that his contemporaries deemed to be of importance, in order to capture the essence.. ..with the greatest possible simplicity."

"The first encounter with Otto Mueller's paintings was in Berlin, at the showing of the 'Rejects of the Berlin Secession'. which took place at the Galerie Macht in the spring of 1910. And we met him personally the very same day in his studio on Mommsenstrasse. This meeting was significant for all of us and occurred at a fruitful moment; and, as a matter of course, he belonged to Die Brücke community from then on."

"In the autumn of 1884 I went to Paris. The spirit that greeted me was certainly more impressive than in Germany. I studied in a famous school. The French who I met there seemed to me not at all equipped. Traditional views. I was there for three years. I never found a talent. Among the Germans, in particular at the Academy of Munich, there was a lot more momentum. I admire the French painting from Watteau to Monet, otherwise there is nothing that can be said to be exceptional."

"My conscious motivation was to bring German art up to the highest level. I saw what the French artists could do since some time, we could do much more. I spoke in front of our youth, I can say with success."

"Diseases, a paralysis of the left side, a monstrous right hand tremor strengthened by the efforts by the needle [for engraving] and caused by previous excesses with alcohol, prevent me from doing any calligraphic craftsmanship. A constant effort to achieve my goal - I've never reached the degree hoped - has exacerbated my life, and every job has ended with the depression of having to go on with this life."

"I see Legros less often sometimes at Andler's as little as possible it means I get to bed late and I am short of funds, it is very pleasant nonetheless Courbet is so charming, Legros often goes there they get on very well he has some superb articles in the figaro. in the gazette des Beaux Arts.. ..then he will have one in the courrier du Commerce those are the ones I know about. success, women, good food, wine, beer, new acquaintances as a result of these articles, in short an accolade !!!!!!!!.. ..success can be harmful, it makes you relax, you sit on it and are distracted.. ..you alone should correct the faults, you know what I think of advice, correction. the gifted man should walk alone, straight to his goal, what happens is nothing, rejection, success, selling pleasing, all that is nonsense."

"Well! according to the sketch your picture [which Whistler sent him in a letter] seems well-composed, the lines of sky, sea, the position of the figures all that seems very, very well done[,] on opening the letter it struck me immediately, an impression of decorative ornamentation which makes a good picture appeal to the eye as well - upside down and any other way up. Arrangement, layout, composition. etc - mysterious words harmonious laws - in no way conventional - needs of the Artist glory of the Raphael's Michelangelo's etc etc - for me a repetition a hesitation, a matter of feeling - which should also be a law, a mathematical thing, like form, like light, colour[.] I find similarities with the colour method which works by opposing colours to arrive at a harmony that is to say to make a canvas a complete whole, to put into a small space an image with all the forces all the principles of nature - [instead of showing a part of it].."

"I even belief that the schools and artistic movements is past. After the Romantic movement, born of classicizing exaggeration, after the Realist movement, product of the follies of Romanticism, it may be seen that there is a great foolishness in all these ideas. We are going to achieve a personal manner of feeling."

"I do not understand your silence you know all the same how interested I always am in what you are doing. you also know that there are not many of us who understand each other we have always got on well together. I have seen and I see every day how little people like us[.] Between ourselves there are things we cannot say to others.. ..you cannot imagine how little I find myself in sympathy with other people.. ..- I do not want to lose another day, one hour this year I have no hope I have lost it and you know how unlike me that is. at the moment I have several studies to do at the Louvre order[s] which are going to bring me many others [p. 2] as soon as this time has passed I want to do two large pictures for the Salon[.] I think of nothing else.. .I am becoming more and more the Fantin of the old days you know here I am today but neither discouraged nor bored. I have my own views now nothing can distract me.."

"The oeuvre of Frédéric Bazille is unclassifiable."

"You speak to me of Rembrand, of this famous, of this great, of this giant.. .I would very much like to see the painting by Rembrandt of which you speak, because it should be quiet splendid. I eat it up from here (you know the fashionable phrase)"

"his flower-paintings.. ..are all marvels of colours and artistic sensibility. They are as compelling as they are charming, in fact one might even call them moving. They are tonal rhythms, freshness, abandon, surprising vivacity. Their beauty captivates. This is nature with all.. ..that fleeting radiance that is the fate of flower.. .Delicacy of expression being the essence of his art, Fantin seems to be the visual poet of flowers."

"Dear Fantin.. .As for me nothing could be more charming for me than to be introduced to my Compatriots by Fantin - Besides you know that I am very flattered that you kept me when you destroyed the painting - it's much to be regretted all the same this demolition of our earlier works! I have done it too often! - and wept so much afterwards! Do not ever do it my dear Fantin - Now I would much like to know what is the portrait of me [made by Fanton-Latour] that you say Valentin has sold to this stranger?. - So try to find this out and let me know I beg you - If the American does not buy your portrait of me I could perhaps get it sold for you here.."

"Many young women's hands would be incapable of doing what I see there,' said the Prince, pointing to Mme de Villeparisis' unfinished watercolours. And he has asked her whether she had seen the flower painting by Fantin-Latour which had recently been exhibited."

"(5 January.)..Oh if you could have listened in to the conversation you would have been beside yourself! Well then I cauterize their wounds once again! - And I had not forgotten during the evening to say 'And what is Fantin doing for you now?' 'Nothing at the moment.' - 'Oh, but what is the next copy he's doing for you? [Fantin-Latour made copies of old masters' paintings] 'I don't know' - 'But he's supposed to be doing something more for you isn't he! a Titian I thought?. 'No not now' - 'Oh I thought he was!' You see - As I leave, I invite Haden and his artist (a poor relation of the family) to dine with myself and Alphonse, for the Monday week - They accept! Much ceremony! and we wish each other good evening! - Ah! now Fantin my good friend light up your pipe!"

"My dear Fantin two words more and then I shall send you this long affair - I have had your two letters and I was very pleased to get them - Your picture will be superb! The composition very fine, and I can see the heads painted by you in magnificent colour - The bust will perhaps be difficult to arrange - but I have the greatest confidence in you - Oh I wish I knew a little of what you know!.."

"Meanwhile here is another order - You must do two flower pictures the same size, as those you have just done for Mr Ionides - You will get 150 frs for each - Do them straight away and you will have the money immediately - I wrote yesterday (on getting your letter) to Mr Ionides and Dilberoglou, asking them to send you the money that is 300 frs from one, and 100 frs from the other That makes 400 frs - you will receive it tomorrow - Now I must tell you - Do not spoil your fortunes which are rising, as you see, by a lower price for the large flowers - The point to start from is easy - 200 frs for the little ones (that is the price we shall ask after this next order) so for the large pictures the price is proportional. There must be a price for each size - I suppose that the large bunches we are talking about should be around 300 to 350 frs each - As for the Wedding in Cana - do not make it too big for the 1000 frs.."

"Fantin your picture is going to be very fine - the great mass of light is excellent - It will do you a lot of good, as it's a picture which is bound to bring you a lot of attention - I should like to talk to you about myself and my own painting - But at this moment I am so discouraged - always the same thing - always such painful and uncertain work! I am so slow! - When will my execution be quicker when I say execution I mean something quite different - you understand - I produce very little, because I scrape off so much - for the Paris Salon I am thinking of sending my picture of the Thames which you saw one day with Edwards"

"It should always be remembered that Fantin's still-lifes were made for a Victorian [English] public.. ..and that from his earliest visit to London he had been intrigued by the Pré-Raphaelites."

"I work in the mornings and in the afternoons I go to the Latin Quarter. It is a long way from the Batignolles district to the Pantheon: Fortunately there is the Metro. It amuses me to see the people squashed together, and among them are some pretty faces which I draw in the evenings, from memory, in my sketchbook."

"My first pictures were done by instinct, the others with more method perhaps. Instinct which nourishes method can often be superior to a method which nourishes instinct."

"I should have sent you news of myself long ago, for I know how much pleasure one derives from a letter during one's first days in the regiment. One needs it to be reminded that one is something more than a registered number and that in the past one's existence was different from that of beast. Anyway that is how I felt about the army. I was unable to connect my present existence with my former life as a civilian.. ..Here [in Paris in his studio in La Rue Pigalle] I am leading a studious and quite exemplary life.. .I am working on an important picture which is progressing well and which will be exhibited, I hope, at the [[W:Société des Artistes Indépendants|[Salon des] 'Indépendants]]. In addition I am planning to do a screen which will also be shown at the exhibition. Otherwise nothing is happening. I may go with Vuillard to see a music publisher, but I do not expect any success as yet in that direction. I have abandoned chromolithography (ouf!) for the moment, but I shall take it up again whenever I feel impelled to interrupt my oil painting, in order to vary my pleasure's."

"I have all my subjects to hand. I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream."

"It would bother me if my canvases were stretched onto a frame. I never know in advance what dimensions I am going to choose."

"Almost invariably he recognizes the precise point where his voluptuousness may be getting out of hand, where he needs to introduce an ironic note. Bonnard's wit has everything to do with the eccentric nature of his compositions. He finds it funny to sneak a figure into a corner, or have a cat staring out at the viewer. His metaphoric caprices have a comic edge, as when he turns a figure into a pattern in the wallpaper. And when he imagines a basket of fruit as a heap of emeralds and rubies and diamonds, he does so with the panache of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat."

"Bonnard was the humorist among us; his nonchalant gaiety, his wit was evident in his pictures [many of daily-life in the Paris' streets], in which a kind of satiric quality was always embodied n the decorative spirit.. .Bonnard did not resemble Denis or Vuillard in any way, yet all three approached life with a noble determination which was a god-send to me."

"[Bonnard] catches fleeting poses, steals unconscious gestures, crystallises the most transient expressions."

"It's not just the colors that radiate in a Bonnard; there's also the heat of mixed emotions, rubbed into smoothness, shrouded in chromatic veils and intensified by unexpected spatial conundrums and by elusive, uneasy figures."

"In Bonnard's work, Impressionism becomes insipid and falls into decline."

"My dear Genron, I am forced to write to you because I can not go to see you because I am detained at Ste. Pelagie by a slight indisposition.. ..I eagerly await your response. Reply me right away about Cabat or Huet; my respects to your family.. Farewell, the Gouape, H.-D. she is always in all her Charms (the Republic) - do not talk to me about politics because the letters are opened."

"'The swarm of ducks so darkens the sky that poor Europe does not know which way to go'"

"'We have not died in vain'"

"Dear Monsieur, I can make a drawing for you; when you have time to see me we will talk about it. I am always at home during the day. I have the honor of greeting you, h. Daumier."

"Paris, 30-7-1843, h. Daumier - I, the undersigned, Honoré Daumier declare to reduce the price of my drawings in lithography, to forty francs the drawing with the condition 1st, that the first 11 stones which I will deliver to 'Charivari' will be paid to me at the old price, that is, fifty francs each. 2° that this reduction will be made to me as long as M Dutacy remains attached to the.. .'Charivari'; this having been made for the sole purpose of being agreeable to him."

"I was sick these days here is what prevented me from delivering my stones last Friday as I promised you I am in the purgations it is better and I hope to send my stones Tuesday at the latest.. .Bien a vous, - h. Daumier"

"At the moment of our writing these lines, M. Daumier, sentenced to six months' imprisonment for the caricature of 'Gargantua' was arrested under the eyes of his father and mother, whose sole support he is."

"Dear Mr. Moureaux, You will soon receive your drawing [made by Daumier], you just need a little patience. I saw Daumier on my last trip to Paris. Since I will not be able to come to the lunch in your honor I want to tell you that I will be with you in my imagination. I shake your hand, J.F. Millet, see you soon."

"[at Charles-François Daubigny's place where] ..animated conversations on the direct study of nature or the comparative merits of Haarlem paint driers and thick oil paints were often interrupted bu bursts of merriment greeting a witticism of one of the guests, who included non other than Corot, Daumier, Geoffroy-Dechaume, etc."

"Daumier's.. drawing is fluent and easy; it is a continuous improvisation. He has a wonderful, almost super-human memory, from which he works as from a model. His powers of observation are such that in his work we never find a single head that is out of character with the figure beneath it.. .The artist manifests here a marvelous cunning in portraiture: while caricaturing and exaggerating the features of his originals, he yet adheres so faithfully to nature that these productions might serve as models to all portraitists. Here in these animalised faces may be seen and read clearly all the meanness-es of soul, all the absurdities, all the aberrations of intelligence, all the vices of the heart; yet at the same time all is broadly drawn and accentuated. Daumier combined the suppleness of the art with the exactness of a Lavater."

"However, I remember very well being most impressed by a drawing of Daumier's: an old man under the chestnut trees in the Champs Elysées (an illustration for Balzac), though the drawing was not all that important. What impressed me so much at the time was something so stout and manly in Daumier's conception, something that made me think It must be good to think and to feel like that and to overlook or ignore a multitude of things and to concentrate on what makes us sit up and think and what touches us as human beings more directly and personally than meadows or clouds."

"I am sending you.. ..a portfolio containing ten lithographs by Daumier.. .These are rare by now and I prize them much. I often used to look at them but I am sending them to you in order to give you an opportunity to fill your mind with the real artistry of these two great masters. I am entrusting them to you in the expectation that you will take good care of them, and bring them with you on your next trip. There is nothing better in lithography."

"To give you an idea of what I mean by done, I sent you those Daumier lithographs.. ..they are "marvels" from any point of view. For myself, I cannot look at them without admiring this great artist. But clearly understand, that if it is done that's mainly because it is constructed. The junctures of the arms, legs and ankles are as wonderful as in the greatest masters, and these are caricatures! Notice the ties, the collars, the trousers, the folds which reveal so well the forms underneath ; the shoes, notice them, and the hands!"

"In Rouen, I bought a copy of Champfleury's 'Histoire de la Caricature', an invaluable book with illustrations by Daumier. In it the whole story of Daumier is told. Looking through this book you see at once that Daumier was the man his drawings show him to be, a convinced, a true republican. And you feel in his drawings the sweep of a great artist who marched towards his goal but did not cease to be an artist in the most profound sense, so that even without legends and explanations his drawings are beautiful."

"He loved this little cot [in Valmondois]. There were passed the only hours of his life in which he was permitted to escape from the tyranny of his calling; to hug closely his fair dreams of art; in short, to know that fruitful, restful, and encouraging work of hours chosen and determined at will. Another attraction made still more dear to him this secluded corner of an obscure village. Not only could he there breathe freely and work at ease; but he felt himself encompassed by warm friendship, neighboured by brave comrades who loved him, and who, like himself, meditated far from the bustle of towns."

"Daumier highlighted socioeconomic distinctions in the newly modernized urban environment in a group of paintings executed around 1864 that illustrate the experience of modern rail travel in first-, second-, and third-class train compartments. In 'The First-Class Carriage', there is almost no physical or psychological contact among the four well-dressed figures, whereas 'The Third-Class Carriage' is tightly packed with an anonymous crowd of working-class men and women."

"O how wild I am to get to work, my fingers farely itch & my eyes water to see a fine picture again."

"I have given up my studio & torn up my father's portrait, & have not touched a brush for six weeks nor ever will again until I see some prospect of getting back to Europe. I am very anxious to go out west next fall & get some employment, but I have not yet decided where."

"I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his [Degas'] art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it."

"..we [the Impressionists ] are carrying on a despairing fight & need all our forces."

"If you [[w:Ambroise Vollard|[Vollard] ]] should ever happen to find that picture ['Milliners's workshop'] by Edgar Degas I know an American who will pay any price for it."

"..crushed by the strength of this Art [the old Egyptian art].. .I fought against it but it conquered, it is surely the greatest Art the past has left us.. ..how are my feeble hands to ever paint the effect on me."

"..Mary Cassatt, sister of Mr. Cassatt, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who has been studying painting in France and owns the smallest Pekingese dog in the world."

"this fantastic work called Young Mother Sewing by Mary Cassatt."

"It is absolutely necessary, while what I saw yesterday at Miss Cassatt's is still fresh in mind, to tell you [Lucien, his son] about the colored engravings she is to show at Durand-Ruel's at the same time as I. We open Saturday.. .You remember the effects you strove for at Eragny? Well, Miss Cassatt has realized just such effects, and admirably: the tone even, subtle, delicate, without stains on seams: adorable blues, fresh rose, etc."

"M. Degas and Mlle. Cassatt are, nevertheless, the only artists who distinguish themselves.. ..and who offer some attraction and some excuse in the pretentious show of window dressing and infantile daubing."

"She [Mary Cassatt] has infinite talent. I remember the time we started a little magazine called 'Le Jour et La Nuit' together. I was very much interested in processes then, and had made countless experiments [in printing; Degas mainly mono-type - Mary Cassatt mainly etchings].. .You can get extraordinary results with copper; but the trouble is that there are never enough buyers to encourage you to go on with it."

"[how anyone could] remain an individual if he had to conform with senseless orders and old foolish things without being asked his opinion on them."

"..a revolt against an established order in painting, a revolt against an established order in society, a same spirit of provocation.."

"[Picasso is guilty of] having dragged French painting into the most dismal 'impasse' and of having led it into in describable confusion. From 1900 – 1930, he led it towards negation, impotence and death. All alone with himself Picasso is impotence made man. Nature havinf denied him a real character, all his intelligence and malice have been employed to fabricate a personality."

"The thought of becoming a painter never as much as occurred to me. I would have laughed out loud if someone had suggested that I choose painting as a career. To be a painter is not a business, no more than to be an artist, lover, racer, dreamer, or prizefighter. It is a gift of Nature, a gift.."

"[T]ranslated by instinct, without any method, not merely an artistic truth but above all a human one."

"I wanted to burn down the 'École de Beaux Arts' with my cobalts and vermilions and I wanted to express my feelings with my brushes without troubling what painting was like before me.. .Life and me, me and life."

"[with painting] directly tube against canvas, one soon becomes too slick.. .I regretfully realized that my composition was reduced to no more than a series of coloured rhythms, harmonious, discordant, monotonous and that, from simplification to simplification, I was falling into the trap of decoration. I no longer got to the bottom of things: I no longer cut through to their heart. The decorative spirit was leading me to forget painting."

"The war [World War 1] gave me a certainty of belief. I grew aware of the bankruptcy of theories, of the theories of intellectuals as well as artists. L'art pour l'art and other grave problems no longer gave me a headache; they seemed to me so much bosh hand interested me as little as platonic love."

"My father was a violinist, my mother a pianist. I was born into a world of music...The practicing of my father's pupils accompanied every thought and action of my childish life. ...Then when I was thirty [c. 1906], my career as musician was brought to an end by Vollard [art-dealer in Paris] who bought all the pictures I possessed, pictures which I had painted over several years with unbounded enthusiasm during such hours of freedom as I was able to spare between [music]-lessons to my pupils."

"I always look at everything with the eyes of a child. I feel enthusiastic for things today fort he same reasons as I was enthusiastic about them as a child...I remember one summer morning when I was twelve years old [1888], I was with my father. We were following a road which crossed the plain from Rueil to Croissy. The whole plain was a solid field of corn and the ears stood higher than my head. I still retain today the impression of the vast expanse, spangled with flowers and filled with the drone of insects. Often, later on, I have tried to recapture, to fix firmly in my mind once again, the impression of that world around me, of the sun which burns my face and hands.. .Every time a see a field of corn I an reminded of that morning."

"For me, the discovery of the outside-world, dates from my acquisition of a bicycle [c. 1892]. I spent whole days on the high-roads. I rode through villages, towns and the country-side. I tasted dust; rain poured down on me; I struggled against the wind. With my cycle I was able to visit places never dreamed of.. ..thanks to my bicycle I saw fort he first time the whole of the valley of the Seine from Chatou to Havre, Mantes, Bonnières, Rouen, Duyclair and Tancarville."

"All this countryside [along the Seine] was calm and peaceful. The strongest emotions I have experienced on the high roads or on the hill tops whence I could see down into the valleys on to the roofs of houses which I felt I could reach out and touch with my hand.. And then I was tempted to begin painting [c. 1893 - 17 years old].. .I composed instinctively and awkwardly. I applied colors with only one idea which justified everything: to express what I felt. I painted hesitantly and exclusively for myself and no one else. It seemed to me that water, sky, clouds and trees understood the happiness they gave me."

"It was only in the evenings that I played the violin [c. 1999-1901, to earn his money for living]. During the day I was free to spend my time as I wished. With a few colours in a box, a canvas and a cheap easel under my arm, I would make my way to the Banks of the Seine.. .I painted to restore my peace of mind, to calm my desires and, above all, to purify myself a little.. .Make a career of painting. How I would have laughed if someone had talked to me about that! To be a painter is not a profession, no more than being an anarchist or a lover, a race-track rider.."

"Vlaminck is entirely possessed by Vlaminck. It is his strength; dare I say, his virtue."

"[C]o-existent with...a personal poetry and romanticism that is often gloomy and even violent, Vlaminck's pictures have a formal logic, an underlying strength of organization that derives from more than one classical precedent."

"Thijs, Thijs, you came to a people [of Paris], when they were doing well, now you must help them, when they are in distress. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Last year I asked too much of my strength. I can't go on like this. it was not possible for me, I had to step back, I didn't make anything but stones [about his paintings?] ... They wanted to see beautiful paintings but I still couldn't make them, one illusion disappears for the other. I have made Cold reality, and I have made Truth. Is there a truth, also the cold reality is a truth. What exists between them was [only] baroque convention. I threw away everything in the stove.. .I am messing up my time with them; what is nothing more than material is no art to me; I could not bring it out.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Just at the time I got your letter Mr. Angus sent me the 'Scotsman' [magazine]. You say some critics have thought it fair to make it the basis of a personal attack, and it is very critic-like. Critic means knife, means dissection, means wisdom, means perfection. Art is stupid, art-less. That is a hard job for the critic to understand. I like your book because it is 'stupid', like Japanese; which means done for the love of it in itself; not for gain or success. You don't go to criticise a Japanese drawing and say it is out of shape, out of drawing, no perspective nor anatomy. This is only for the critic to show his knowledge by killing the things; those stupid fellows do harm, like Whistler says, with their learnings. They must have schools and applications of knowledge. Thackeray calls them scavengers - scavengers are at least necessary, those fellows are for no good.."

"Besides (and I now quote the artist's own words) I never put a bullet in my gun, but only pretended, to do so!"

"My brother Jaap was born as a painter, which means he really enjoyed it. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"I liked the room [his new place in London, c. 1906] the moment I saw it, so here I am set up as a swell.. .Don't you take this to be a trap set up for the unwary, you know you're always touching a sore spot when you talk painting, and drag my suicides before the public, the right name for potboilers, one has to give up all aim for any good intention, and do the technical skill and cleverness to please those with halfpennies and farthings in their pocket, to be favoured to live.. .I just got a letter from somebody, saying: but with potboiling one can make money, money always considered to be the principal. I told him he was greatly mistaken, when a little honesty remains, one can scarcely ask anything for them."

"I recollect after the war in '71 [in Paris, where he stayed then and was fighting against the German] there were some debts to pay of course: what had I to do? I said to Wisselingh [Dutch art-dealer] who was with Goupil, 'tell them that I'll take them back later on.' I've never been able to do so, for one Van Gogh [probably Vincent, then art-seller at Goupil], his partner, gave me 200 francs, someone bought it for 350, and sold it in America for 700 pounds. He had asked Wisselingh how long it had taken me to do [make] it; he said a week, so I was the chap for him; no wonder he was always talking making fortune, fancy 100 pounds per day, make some more or this sort: do it only for a year. So I had to commit suicides upon suicides [he means, making salable paintings]: what did it matter to him or anyone else ? Someone said once to me: 'You must have somebody fool enough to say, here is money for you, and go your own way': that is the very thing one may not do. There is always someone telling you how to set about, and then come the schools telling you that it is not allowed to be one's self, but that one has to be a Roman or Greek, or imitate what they have performed.."

"..Besides of all things I hated and detested was painting. They told me I had a talent for it, and was a clever chap and could make as much money as I liked. Money always the principal thing and so it happens that I got forced into it. Being considered a very clever talented chap, after the war or siege of Paris [1870-71], a young fellow of the name of Vincent van Gogh [not painting yet, but still art-seller at Goupil in Paris] came around asking me for advice.. .The law of the pocket: 'full' signifies 'rich'; empty 'poor', all the world over the same; black, brown, yellow or white skinned. Heathen, barbarians, Mahommetans; pocket full, 'power' - empty, 'helpless'."

"Some time ago I saw a painting by Thijs Maris that reminded me of it. An old Dutch town with rows of brownish red houses with step-gables and tall flights of steps, grey roofs, and white or yellow doors, window-frames and cornices; canals with ships and a large white drawbridge, a barge with a man at the tiller going under it.. .Some distance away a stone bridge over the canal, with people and a cart with white horses crossing it. And everywhere movement, a porter with his wheelbarrow, a man leaning against the railing, gazing into the water, women in black with white caps.. .A greyish white sky over everything..."

"Matthijs started with the left eye, which - since he painted the portrait à trois quarts - is about the center of the bud. The [left] eye finished, he started to paint around it the details of forehead, nose, the right eye, the mouth, etc.. ..until he finally enclosed all of these with the contour of the head and the light-brown background. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"[I saw] landscapes, more color-visions than reality; ruins of castles ghostly shining through the mist, cobblestones, gently blown on the canvas.."

"Thijs knew everything by himself, he was a genius. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"That splendid, head, in which everything is said that can be said; color, line, tone, expression; the slightly advanced head, with the soft, almost human eyes, I never enter my studio in the morning without my eye falling upon this creature and wishing it 'Good Morning'."

"He is the painter of the border land between the seen and the unseen world."

"The exception is Matthew [= Matthijs, in Dutch] Maris.. .It is perfectly impossible to be certain of anything produced by this remarkable artist. One day a figure, next day a head, another time a windmill landscape, and again a town or village."

"Take, as example, the early picture of the artist, the 'Souvenir of Amsterdam', [painted in 1871,].. .This measures only 18 ins. by 13 ins.. .Yet it is no exaggeration to say that this small canvas contains the essential features of the great Dutch city with its good half million inhabitants. The tall houses, the canals, the 'ophaalbruggen [drawbridges]' towering over everything - as the bridge always does, and must do, in a land under the level of the sea - the distant buildings and shipping. Everything.. ..that the commercial Capital of Holland says to the visitor is concentrated on these few square inches.. .I wanted to discuss this picture with Mr. Maris, for its goldenbrown colour went straight to my heart from the moment I first saw it, now many [30] years ago, but the artist would have none of it. 'Only a pot-boiler, made to coin a little necessary money, and one of my suicides..' [he said]"

"..This master, one of the seers of the century, and a recluse resident in one of the most populous districts in London, has painted almost always his own ideas as compositions, and has practically avoided the obvious amongst his surroundings.. ..the subjects of Matthew Maris have been crystallisations of his dreams. Blown on the canvas, as it were, with practically no trace of the machinery of paint visible to distract, all the pictures of this mystic artist have soared to a height above the more material arrangements in his brothers' work [= Jacob Maris.] He has sought and found his inspiration from the least tangible of his surroundings, or from his heaven-born gift of exquisite dreams such as never materialise except to the seer whose life is hardly of this world at all."

"It were mainly three or four [paintings] which kept him specifically busy [in the 1890's]. They were in progress for years already and he always spent hours and hours working on them - in which he wholly and truly disappeared into his work, persistently trying to perfect it in construction or composition and to saturate it with the life itself, of his soul - never satisfied with any result he achieved. Most of the time 'The Westmacott children' [and] 'The child with the Butterflies' were on his easel, and never they stayed the same with a next visit. They both had an expression that only he could give them. Sometimes, he acknowledged, he spent too many days working on one single work, with the inevitable danger of weakening his sensitivity by a lack of variety. Often it was sad to see that he could not leave them as they were.."

"As far as 'Melancholy' concerned, or as he liked to call it 'Evaporated Dreams', on that painting he worked most times during the last years of his life, when his eyes got less and less reliable. When he died the painting stood on his easel. Often he spoke about it with bitterness, as if it should express the nature of his own life. With his almost lost drawing [using no lines] and his subdued color, it sometimes seemed to me the saddest possible emblem of all the unhappiness of his fate."

"I try to point out to them there's less chance of your becoming just illustrative when you become involved with the plastic elements of painting. So in short this is how I try to adapt it to teaching. You don't see a head as a head, but you see it as a form and as a shape. And you can work as realistically as you care to. But if you just see these things for what they are the chances are you will become more illustrative and you will never develop from this, you know; move out from this…"

"…My early beginnings, as most Negroes in the United States, has been the Negro experience. This is all I knew at one time was the Negro experience. My whole background, Negro family, Negro community, everything was Negro. So I think it was natural that I would use this symbol for my expression, you see…"

"‘The migrants kept coming’ is a refrain of triumph over adversity. If it rings true for you today, then it must still strike a chord in our American experience."

"When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it."

"When I started investigating my relationship to my identity and what my identity means, it was in the context of artists doing identity-based art. I envy and have a love for people who research in great detail history or some moment in history (say, feminist history), and then present it in a way that’s somewhat didactic and matter-of-fact—and, really, with an effort, a sincere effort to throw meaning out to an audience that, maybe, isn’t conscious of this aspect of history. But I’m incredibly suspicious of that impulse, too. I think that it’s all going to be filtered through one’s subjectivity. And my subjectivity—as a young person, as a person at the end of the twentieth century—my subjectivity is of a sexual woman, as a person who makes sometimes really bad decisions. There was no nobility in trying to do research like that, and in trying to filter my sense of self through the lens of a larger history. It was going to get complicated, and I liked the complications that I was finding. "Kara Walker Projecting Fictions: 'Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On'" in Art21 (interview originally published on PBS in September 2003, and later republished by Art21 in November 2011)"

"There is I suppose, historically, this seminal moment in the lives of African Americans where one becomes black. Frantz Fanon and everyone talks about it. There is a moment when you go from subject to object and I guess that was my moment…"

"I think there are many open-ended questions that artists can pose and we can ask communities to feel empowered enough to reply, respond, rebel, and feel amazed by the relentless spiraling of thought and image and action that is the artist's profession."

"Expectations on the performance of race and gender are simultaneously high and low, depending on who is looking or asking. I prefer to keep all the options in the air, to try and better understand the conundrum that inequality creates---not just in culture, but internally."

"There’s no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist. It’s not like becoming a doctor or something. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist."

"I believe—when somebody gave me a pencil and a sheet of paper—was to create a world for myself, basically. It sort of made everything fall to the wayside. The environment where I was growing up, the poverty—all of that just sort of fell to the wayside, and I was able to create these worlds and enter into it. And I think that sort of isolated me a lot from other kids in the neighborhood, even isolated me while I was going to school. And my earliest recollections of entering school was the times when it was art time, and they had easels and they had paint and they had brushes…"

"It was explaining early on, I think, the process. And I can see that those were like the early stages of what I eventually went into when I was doing the large-scale on-site installation pieces when I paint directly onto the walls. Because I’m actually painting but I’m also engaging the viewer and talking during the course of the time that I’m actually doing the work. So I think the early performance pieces actually influenced me in the direction that I would later take in the larger on-site pieces when I started doing those pieces."

"People like to hold onto life in many ways, but everything is transitory. This is it, right now. Youth doesn’t last forever, beauty doesn’t last forever, so appreciate it for the moment."

"The hardest thing these days is to make something that’s beautiful; it’s easy to make ugly art. I think it takes a lot more talent to make something beautiful. Beauty to me is when you show something to someone that they’ve never seen before. That’s what a great work of art does; it shows you something that you didn’t know existed."

"Punk articulated the vitriolic disapproval by the young of the sneaking complacency in music, art, politics and perhaps most important of all - the environment."

"As punk rock was able to sweep the board clean in music, so must the board be cleared in visual art."

"The self-inflicted isolation of the contemporary artist and the mistrust levelled against the architect are both important contributing factors in the current situation of architectural art. The painter is anxious to keep intact the historical image of artist as loner, the intense sensitive, the genius and “maestro”; while the architect, feeling the watchful eye of his client constantly over his shoulder, approaches any extra-to-budget expense, such as art, with considerable trepidation, guarding jealously any intrusion into his building by potential glory-thieves. – Clarke in the essay 'Towards a New Constructivism', from his 1979 book Architectural Stained Glass."

"Painting is a way for me to view the world as it exists and the world as it might be."

"When I am designing a stained glass window I am painting; when I am drawing a drawing, I am painting; when I am making the cartoon for a tapestry, I am painting; and when I am listening to music I am painting. It is the centre of everything that I do."

"It's not that painting is the medium with which I identify the most. Painting is the medium through which I am able to identify with anything external."

"It is through painting that I understand how to view architecture, appreciate the rhythm of a poem, draw pleasure from the structure of a well-composed sentence. And it is through painting that the complexity of music makes itself understood to me. It is through painting, in fact, that I am."

"Colour is the animator of my poetical ideal. It is the single most important device in my work, and the driving force behind its impact."

"Art is reimbued with its genuine power and profundity in the architectural realm. Its real power lies in the cathedral, the shopping center, the hospital. Not in the studios of Soho and Chelsea or the galleries of Madison Avenue or Bond Street."

"Moving with frequency between the polarities of my experience is a fertile source of ideas. Somewhere between anguish and joy lies a region taut with further contradictions. If art speaks truth to power then in my view both compelling forces need to be addressed. The desolate truth carried in profundity is made even more striking when matched by the sublime energy of the decorative."

"The Spitfire and the Porsche and the battleship have something of perfection in their design. They are anonymous in their beauty, like the fleur-de-lys, and compelling, like heraldic ciphers of the 20th century."

"I used to think that I somehow existed apart from making art and thus my work itself existed outside prevailing realities, uninfluenced by circumstance. I was wrong and that's clear to me now. Biography and art intertwine, strangling and oxygenating simultaneously."

"Black has the power to astonish. It absorbs and reflects colour stealing much from the prevailing chromatic landscape. It makes blue bluer and light lighter. There are as many variations of black as there are of green."

"Fallen petals on the grass or scattered flowers across a field do unexpected things when you examine them – Primroses seem to cluster together in a shape that recalls a single flower; Bluebells become entirely anonymous in a hovering mist; Daffodils group together into crowns of thorns and barbed wire."

"There is a world that can be seen only through stained glass. It is like no other. The medium is thought to have been at its zenith in the Middle Ages – though the medievals had the advantage of Gothic architecture to respond to. I want to surpass the Middle Ages, not equal them. Surpass them with the new and irresistible: volumetric, spatial colour, transporting post-industrial godless man to the edge of ecstasy."

"My art is an art for the working class."

"I am working class artist. I am very happy if my work pleases or engages intellectuals or professional people, but my art is an art for the mass: I want to communicate this idea of intimacy and poetic transcendence to as many people as possible, and the idea that it is confined to one social demographic is abhorrent to me."

"If Mondrian, with the omission of diagonals, modulation of colour and sensuality of material, moved into an increasingly life-alienated and Apollonian ideology, so Clarke explores the optical stability of forms with sensory Dionysiac temptations where here and there they give rise to menacing disturbances of order."

"[In Clarke's work] I see a possible enlivening of the jaded purity of Constructivism, an extension of geometry into the opposite, namely the emotional and incalculable as one of the answers to the conflicts and contradictions of our time. Art can only remain effective if it does not ignore the painful depth of unresolved antinomy."

"Vasarely Go Home!"

"After being expelled from the Academy, Major worked one year unskilled labourer in the Orion Factory."

"János Major started to take photographs in cemeteries at the beginning of the sixties most probably around 1962-63."

"A big city is always partially a Babylon, sometimes an eclectic mixture, juxtaposing contrasts, dialogue and conflict all at once. It is a Unity achieved thanks to our differences. It contains both old and new things. A city without development is dull. A city deprived of its historical context is uninteresting. Moreover, a city without clear urban planning ideas is a toneless backwater."

"Megalopolises. Plans. Building plans. Yellow. Street lineature. Labyrinths of yards. Pigeon flocks. Green. The geometry of squares. Dead zones. Subway burrows. Red. Meaning signs. Dim light. Noise. Voids. Black. The work transformed itself in the process of manifestation. The pictograms appeared almost by accident — naturally. Text: Parking / Diner / Bird / Airport / Disabled / Attention / Parking / Motel / Bar / Attention / Cat / Bird / Diner ... Recoded, literally: art, like all modern culture, lost its clear value criteria, meaning and purpose of movement long ago. City. One of the main problems of modern society is the almost complete loss of the ability to self-cognition and self-identification. City. Civilization is degrading. The agony still continues, maintaining the illusion of life, but it does not change the merits of the question. City."

"Another important direction in contemporary Russian artists’ books, with many precedents set by the Futurists, is the fusion of poetic and artistic talent of artist-authors blessed with Doppelbegabung. The intimate relationships between text and image is enhanced when author and artist are one and the same person and engage in an inter-art discourse that leads to creations that are truly unified works of art. An artist who achieved equal mastery in more than one medium and made different arts merge in his personality was no doubt Alexey Parygin. His poetic collections <...> represent an attempt to synthesize text and plastic figurative form in books where literary and visual languages are calculated to have a simultaneous effect on the reader/viewer. The work of Alexey Parygin have common features that are not accidental as the books were created at more or less the same time."

"...from my point of view, a very serious, worthy and professional exhibition. It's nice that there is a solid culture of color, ...there is a persistent desire to express their feelings of life, their artistic vision."

"His works show high culture, erudition and taste, it is hard to favor any particular piece. Moreover, the artist prefers options on a particular plastic theme, as he himself puts it. He uses various in techniques, and revisits it in different periods of creativity. He believes his plastic theme conveys the plastic state. The state arises and manifests in very different ways, yet retaining its basic sign. Perhaps this art form blends both the sign and its notion."

"The works create new poetry, which involuntarily rivals with habitual esthetic stereotypes. For instance, we accept as a common notion to worship joyously the classic beauty of St. Petersburg, its harmony and stately grandeur. This exposition does have variations of that sort. But observe “Night Nevsky” by Parygin. Rough to the touch texture, dark abyss. In the darkness urgent lights explode. They bring forth immediate spiritual angst. One does not regard the regal magnificence of the urban landscape-it is neither cast aside, nor left behind the curtains, as dramatism of modern perception takes over. One regards not a city museum for curious crowds, but one beholds the habitat of our days where we seek, love, fight, suffer. That art defines perception."

"'These women are not victims' – Paula Rego's extraordinary Abortion series (Thursday 9 June 2022 07.00 BST)"

"English Quotations"

"Paula lived for her work."

"She belong[ed] to a category of artists who are fully and consistently producing work, incredibly rare for a female artist [of her generation]."

"I see [her influence] in the work of most female painters – particularly in artists who engage with the body – and with women's position in the world, In fact, I would struggle to think of a significant painter, particularly in Britain, where I can't see a connection to Paula."

"Paula takes you to uncomfortable places – Jung called it the Shadow. They are taboo areas, where love and cruelty touch each other"

"Paula Rego is a great artist, and an underrated artist... whether she's tackling war, or 'honour' killing, nothing escapes her awareness of the challenges of life… she's shocking sometimes, and exciting – but that's one of the roles of art."

"Each and every one is subtly disturbing without it being clear quite why."

"The vigour of her hand and brilliance of her technique meant she could realise singular, wondrous and disturbing scenes rising in her mind’s eye with unflinching honesty; these images are ambivalent, often perverse, mischievous, with undercurrents of danger. She generated hundreds of entirely original scenarios that are often baffling yet go straight through to the nervous system of the viewer, as Francis Bacon (whom she admired), wished to do. She called her style "beautiful grotesque", a phrase that catches the contradictions in her images, but does not convey the strength and strangeness of the bodies she painted, the turbulent force of her compositions and the sympathy she shows in her depiction of emotions and ordeals."

"Her studio, in Kentish Town, north London, was a prop room, a wardrobe, a rehearsal stage, a theatre—her playroom. ... Rego also drew on family and friends to enact her scenarios: her daughters, her grand-daughters, and her partner, the writer and publisher Anthony Rudolf. Rudolf has said that he realised early on that if he wanted to have time with Paula, the only way was to sit for her. He appears in many roles, sometimes cross-dressed, at other times naked as Gregor Samsa in the painting Metamorphosis, or the dead Christ in the mysteries of the life of the Virgin, which Rego painted for the president of Portugal in 2002. When no model fitted her vision, she made “dollies”, stuffed, bulbous puppets that she did not disguise, and who like the sinister Pillowman, haunt her most troubling scenes."

"A white sheet of time, on which the sunlit city appears as a relief imprint. Thick golden air with poplar fluff. Time has stood still. House number 29a. Yellow square of the wall. Small square of the window, which is cramped. You are flying away beyond the fence of the Childhood House on the wings of a memory bird. Grass-blade days are woven into a tangle of years that rolls along the road of memory. A unique, vivid image of the home town from the distant childhood, the Home from which you flew away forever. The town of my childhood."

"The music I play is not really the music I would like to play”, my favorite saxophonist Art Pepper once said. The lithograph, which I began to do for the "City" project, was completely different in my idea, but for technical reasons beyond my control, I had to make a compromise, leaving the original scheme, having decorated it with a rainbow of night city advertisements giving hope that everything will be mighty fine in the future, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night will be Saturday night. In "Edichka" Limonov wrote literally the following (I am quoting from memory): The money that old dotards like Dali, Shagal, Miro have from selling their pictures is not enough, to make even more money they put their lithograph masterpieces on sale in thousands of copies. Bearing in mind the financial aspect, I would object to Kharkiv native. You might clench eggs between your legs failing to fry them on a hot stone. Lithography is not just a multiplying technique; the final product has a flavor that can not be achieved with a conventional frying pan. I demonstrated this together with the printer, although I deviated from the original conception."

"Sheet from the album “Forms of the Future”, based on the texts of Russian self-taught scientist and visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who recreated a project of an ideal society and city of the future in his books. The left side of the sheet is devoted to selection of ideal city residents for dormitories, the right side is a description of a high-tech house equipped with an autonomous life support system. Rewriting the scientist’s texts by hand, the artist as if reincarnates into him, trying to grasp and hear the cosmic flows that controlled Tsiolkovsky."

"Сity is a fertile theme for any artist. And the city I live in is especially good. Here you can find plots to suit any taste: if you want you can paint and draw its grand views of beautiful architecture, rivers, canals, bridges ... Or well courtyards, firewalls, which I have not seen in other cities and towns. And a variety of subjects — on the streets, in cafes, bars. In the title of my graphic sheet I used a quote from an interview with a famous poet, friend of Joseph Brodsky, former Leningrader Yevgeny Rein: “What is a glass of vodka? It liberates the soul ...."

"I’m entering the hall staircase, going up the stairs. Graffiti on the walls, windows with remnants of Art Nouveau stained-glass. The elevator cab door slammed and a shadow of a man standing on the landing dashed upstairs. He is wearing a trench coat with his collar turned up and a hat drawn over his eyes to hide his facial features. Spying, obviously an agent. I’m going to the poet Viktor K., I’ve brought him a banned book published abroad. Viktor has long been under suspicion of the "authorities" for underground press. I see: the door of a communal apartment is swinging open half a flight above and two dwellers, who have grappled in a fight, are tumbling out of it screaming and swearing. The agent is not reacting to what is happening, he’s got a different task. He is standing motionless, one hand in his pocket, with a bright yellow glove on the other one. These impressions from fifty years ago gave an impetus to create a lithograph. For half a century, the interior of the hall staircase and the stairs have not changed, but now the surveillance over the house and its inhabitants is carried out by video cameras instead of agents. Warning, video surveillance, the signs on the house walls say obligingly."

"Artist in big city / City is a huge anthill, in which the artist, overcoming obstacles and dangers, resists temptations and rushes towards his success against time. My subjective city is a punk quest in the format of a classic board game. Having thrown the dice, you can try your fate: reach the finish line or get stuck in the labyrinth of the octopus city forever."

"Order and randomness arise under the influence of the creative act in the context of a certain approach to forming and are the fundamental principles of creation that have an ontological basis in art. The metaphor of letter — Littera, architectural integration and synergy of metaphors — columns of a chaotic set of a ghost city, a carrier of randomness information code. Typographic metropolis — Babylonian Chaos of letters spontaneous arrangement like a thesis and antithesis of harmony and order of newspaper columns in the form of eternal city. Randomness is divine, because it is not made by hands, it is not subject to man, unlike order. There is something mystical about the randomness code. The idea of the involvement of ontological “order” and “randomness” in forming is a universal approach to creative act. Thus, the "effect of randomness" is created in the process of creative experiment with printed form and printing. The categories of "order" and "randomness", being the basis of the beautiful, manifest themselves as aesthetic paradigms of the unique author's printing and visual art."

"In London, the red route is road marking used to indicate bus priority area. I found myself In East London at the turn of the 2000s. The East End was lively and diverse back then, and I enjoyed wandering there. I was particularly impressed by the railway bridges over the streets - a piece of iron crossed residential quarters whimsically. Car repair shops, pubs, warehouses and shops were built into space under a flyover. Another artery cutting off the East End from the rest of the city was the Regent Canal. I photographed two- and three-story residential blocks, bridges, parked red cars and roaring double-deckers. There was much red: buses, hydrants, telephone booths, bridge trusses and road markings."

"The plasticity idea «form draws form», expressed by Vladimir Sterligov in the late 60s of the last century, is being honed in lithographs. This is an attempt to find inseparable plastic penetrations of depicted forms. An attempt to ensure that one detail of a drawing becomes part of another. Flowing into each other, they should make a strong visual composition. The main task is to create a single graphic organism, when a drawn object gives life to another one. In this case, there is an interpenetration of silhouettes, where the foreground, middle ground, and background become a single whole. Light, transparent drawing, on the one hand, and a found plastic construction, on the other hand, the way I see it, complement each other, making a graphic sheet both airy and convincing."

"If men be fighting over there [across the channel] for their possessions and their bodies against the Corsican robber [Napoleon], they are fighting here to be first in Ackermann's shop and see Gillray's latest caricatures. The enthusiasm is indescribable when the next drawing appears; it is a veritable madness. You have to make your way in through the crowd with your fists."

"To the task of political caricature, Gillray brought excellent working qualities. He had a plain straight-forward practical understanding, which never rose above the comprehension of the crowd—he never desired to veil his satire in subtleties, nor hide it in thoughts far-fetched and profound. The venom of his shafts was visible—nor did he seek to conceal his poisonous draughts in a gilded cup. All was plain and clear—and all was bitter and biting. The measures of the tories, and the plans of the whigs, were to him a daily source of subsistence and satire. He lived like a caterpillar on the green-leaf of reputation; and loved to crawl over those whom Fame had marked out as her own. He never desisted from either shame or remorse—public distress was his gain—private misery brought him bread, and out of the bickerings of men for place and power he had his per-centage. Our ridiculous expeditions, our modes of raising money, our fears, our courage, our love of liberty, and our hatred of France, were to him so many sources of emolument. He lifted a tax off all public—and even made Napoleon contribute."

"The golden age of English caricature, from 1780 to 1830, was dominated by an artist of genius, James Gillray, who lifted the art of political caricature to a higher plain."

"There's something special about Gillray. I feel an affinity with him, because he was the first to have an obsession with politics and to do characters as intense as Fox and Pitt. My favourite Gillray is The Apotheosis of Hoche, a mock-elegy for a French revolutionary general. We don't remember now who Hoche was, but the print is so strong that it leaps out at you, including millions of decapitated heads singing the general's praises."

"Gillray was ballsier than Hogarth. He was so successful that he affected the Government's standing and kept the Jacobins at bay. Nobody could do that now. The nearest we get to it is Spitting Image or Rory Bremner. But it's essential to keep on trying, and in Gillray the savagery of the attack is what counts. I love his obsession with vulgar bodily functions. Everyone thought he was strange – he never justified himself. I find that interesting. My choice is the Toadstall upon a Dung-hill, where Pitt grows out of royalty. It's a good double swipe, at a politician and a monarch."

"Gillray too frequently lent his powerful talents to attack private character in a manner not justifiable."

"A powerful draughtsman, a master of the art of engraving, and possessing a vigorous imagination, he had but little to fear from Sayer. He was really an excellent engraver in line, dot, and aquatint, but these talents are all merged in his fame as a caricaturist, in which walk of art he still remains unrivalled."

"James Gillray was a patriotic Englishman and a commercial artist. Which took precedence hardly matters, for once the Terror began in France, and English life, liberty and property were threatened, his patriotic feelings and commercial instincts went hand-in-hand. The educated and monied customers of Mrs Humphrey's shop could be sure that their political views and prejudices would be reflected and reinforced. The excesses of the revolution were pilloried mercilessly, as were those Englishmen rash enough to express sympathetic views. The advent of Napoleon Bonaparte raised the stakes, heightened the danger. The true sensitivity of Gillray as an artist is seen in his response to Bonaparte, without in the least reducing his impact as a satirist."

"James Gillray...stands without dispute at the head of the English caricature tradition, and his boldly drawn prints are not merely masterpieces of caricature but also highly original examples of the etcher's art."

"You appear not to know that he was a reluctant ally of the tory faction, and that his heart was always on the side of whiggism and liberty. He did not "desert to the tories," but was pressed into their service, by an unfortunate concurrence of circumstances. He had unluckily got himself into the Ecclesiastical Court for producing a politico-scriptural caricature, which he had entitled "The Wise Men's Offspring:" and while threatened on the one hand with pains and penalties, he was bribed by the Pitt party on the other with the offer of a pension, to be accompanied by absolution and remission of sins both political and religious, and by the cessation of the pending prosecution. Thus situated, he found, or fancied himself obliged to capitulate."

"He never appeared to me to be that lover of low society and gross mirth which you describe; but silent and reserved he was, till he discovered that his companions upon any given occasion were frank and liberal. His own patriotism and free principles then began to peer forth, and occasionally rose to enthusiastic fervour. I remember being assembled with him and a few other artists, most of whom are since dead, at the Prince of Wales coffee-house (then newly opened): the purpose of the meeting was to form a fund and institute a Society for the relief of decayed artists, &c., where Gillray discovered no deficiency either of good sense, benevolent feeling, or gentlemanly propriety of conduct; yet there was an eccentricity about him, which being no unusual concomitant of genius, was felt to be agreeable. After business and supper were concluded, we drank toasts; and when it came to his turn to name a public character, the Juvenal of caricature surprised those who knew him but superficially, by proposing that we should drink David! (the French painter). He was by this time a little elated, having become pleased with his associates, and having drowned his reserve in the flow of soul, and, kneeling reverentially upon his chair as he pronounced the name of the (supposed) first painter and patriot in Europe, he expressed a wish that the rest of the company would do the same. This was after our artist had transferred his nominal allegiance to the Pitt party;—before David had been guilty of the worst of those revolutionary atrocities which stain his character, and while his artistical reputation in this country stood much higher than since we have had ocular opportunity of appreciation his professional merit."

"There have been artists before you who dabbled in caricature. There have also been caricaturists who dabbled in art. But you, sir, are the first considerable artist who made caricature his full-time occupation... You were the first to realise that the principles of art, selection and emphasis, could be adjusted to a new balance in a new type of draughtsmanship, neither the representation of reality nor mere grotesque invention, but the discriminating exaggeration of what is true... If Hogarth was the grandfather of the modern cartoon, YOU were its father."

"I cannot think of anyone with whom I should have had more rows—crusted old reactionary that he was... Gillray was a supreme caricaturist of personalities, with a clear sense of the cartoonist's function, which was, of course, to disturb complacency."

"The main objection [of the Victorians] to Georgian caricaturists was their indulgence in personality: their bitter attacks; scurrility; impugning of individual character; and ruthless exploitation of private vices to damn public figures. James Gillray was the main culprit. Even the Prince of Wales (later George IV) and Napoleon did not deserve the derision which Gillray regularly visited upon them. In 1851, the Morning Chronicle carefully distinguished between modern cartoons, which were satires, and Gillray's caricatures, which had been "libels" on the subject; they were unfair, damaging, and destructive."

"I first came across Gillray at about the age of eight. My sister brought home an Illustrated History of Britain, and I nicked it. The book was full of images by Gillray and other artists, and it became my primer in cartooning. I love Gillray's 'F*** you' attitude... I love Gillray's hearty contempt, especially when he shows Pitt as Midas shitting money on the Commons. Gillray really goes for it – he's full of scatological exuberance, and here he punches the solar plexus by saying money is shit."

"He attacked powerful people in a most ferocious way, with brilliant draughtsmanship. Gillray opened the whole thing up. I share his scatological humour and obsession with movements of the body. Gillray also seemed to notice every wrinkle and crease – he's equally good at extremes of girth and thinness. I love Pitt as Death on a Pale Horse in Presages of the Millenium, galloping over the "swinish" advocates of peace with France, because it's so wild. I once drew Mrs Thatcher as the top bitch at Cruft's, with Heath as a tiny turd on the ground beside her."

"Hogarth's honesty of purpose was as conspicuous in an earlier time, and we fancy that Gillray would have been far more successful and more powerful but for that unhappy bribe, which tuned the whole course of his humour into an unnatural channel."

"It was, indeed, Gillray who excelled all others, at this period, in the production of this sort of thing. Savage in temperament, and at times extremely coarse, he had extraordinary vigour."

"Gillray was morose and angry, a sort of savagely perverted moralist, to whom mankind was hateful."

"Certainly, the private life of James Gillray was disastrous; yet so clear-sighted was he, so ruthless in his regard for truth as he saw it (even in himself), that his drawings have a bitter verity almost unknown elsewhere in British art: a cruel rigour that makes him seem, in spirit, closer to the satirists of the Continent, where his art was, in fact, much admired. However remote the politics of Gillray's day may seem, to look at his caricatures is to be caught up, almost in spit of oneself, in the frenzies of this patriotic radical."

"Gillray tells us more about the eighteenth century than most written histories."

"[A]t the outrageous height of his career, he had been rightly regarded as the greatest exponent of lacerating caricature anywhere in Europe. Gillray revolutionised the art of satire, pushing himself to such extremes of savage, unfettered inventiveness that his admirers, and even his enemies, became addicted... [H]e is now increasingly seen as one of the finest British artists of his time. Cartoonists across the world are indebted to his brilliantly visual spleen. They include British practitioners Steve Bell, Peter Brookes, Martin Rowson, Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman... They recognise that Gillray's work, far from succumbing to the ephemerality of most topical cartoons, contains some of the most enduring and astonishing images from a turbulent period in European history."

"It is the intention of this book to offer as complete an insight into the works and times of James Gillray as may be consistent with the limits of one volume...and...not losing sight of the responsibility of rejecting such subjects and matters as, after consideration, seem either too ephemeral and uninteresting to deserve preservation, or too boldly coloured with the coarseness of an age which did not hesitate, in its most polished circles, to treat of subjects that modern refinement has decided to pass over in silence."

"I paint people because figuration is a better vehicle for my ideas and is more accessible to the viewer, especially in Zimbabwe. I use my art to re-create the world on my own terms; taboos become exposed and the hidden is given prominence. In my work, women are more than just powerless beasts of burden and the male body becomes objectified for the delight of the voyeur. In this world there is no black and white but it is full of everything in between'"

"I believe that the image I create must contain within it everything man concerns himself with: his hopes, his fears, his tears. And I find that a great deal of the imagery in use today precludes most of these concerns."

"There is a cliché that the artist is the person who best reflects his time. I am not ready to accept that definition of the artist, nor the idea that the art is best which best reflects its time. The function of the artist is a little more than to reflect; he has to refract, to set things off in another direction."

"Every artist would like to communicate, but often he fails to ask himself with whom he is trying to do it."

"I think the term "self-expression" ought to be forbidden. It's finished. A person, if he has a gram of honesty, naturally does nothing but express himself. Self-expression is as much part of the artist as teeth are to the dentist; it is part of his life, his work."

"I look upon my work as a craftsman. I am one of many who practice a craft. I am one of many who have beliefs and fears and hopes, and I want to incorporate those, with all the tools I have learned to use over many years, into what I will call a piece of work. But not a masterpiece-I'd be terrified of that. There is a tendency for the artist to take himself seriously. But if I ever sat down before a canvas with the feeling that I was now creating a masterpiece, I'd lay an egg."

"I am a painter; I am not a lecturer about art nor a scholar of art. It is my chosen role to paint pictures, not to talk about them."

"I would not ordinarily undertake a discussion of form in art, nor would I undertake a discussion of content. To me, they are inseparable. Form is formulation-the turning of content into a material entity, rendering a content accessible to others, giving it permanence, willing it to the race. Form is as varied as are the accidental meetings of nature. Form in art is as varied as idea itself. It is the visible shape of all man's growth; it is the living picture of his tribe at its most primitive, and of his civilization at its most sophisticated state. Form is the many faces of the legend-bardic, epic, sculptural, musical, pictorial, architectural; it is the infinite images of religion; it is the expression and the remnant of self. Form is the very shape of content."

"I think that it can be said with certainty that the form which does emerge cannot be greater than the content which went into it. For form is only the manifestation, the shape of content."

"However glorious the history of art, the history of artists is quite another matter. And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a good many devoted art lovers to rout."

"Whoever would know his day or would capture its essential character must maintain such a degree of detachment."

"The artist occupies a unique position vis-à-vis the society in which he lives. However dependent upon it he may be for his livelihood, he is still somewhat removed from its immediate struggles for social status or for economic supremacy. He has no really vested interest in the status quo. The only vested interest-or one might say, professional concern-which he does have in the present way of things rests in his ability to observe them, to assimilate the multifarious details of reality, to form some intelligent opinion about the society or at least an opinion consistent with his temperament. That being the case, he must maintain an attitude at once detached and deeply involved."

"In art, the conservative is the vigorous custodian of the artistic treasures of a civilization, of its established values and its tastes-those of the past and even those present ones which have become accepted. Without the conservative we would know little of the circumstances of past art; we would have lost much of its meaning; in fact, we would probably have lost most of the art itself. However greatly the creative artist may chafe at entrenched conservatism, it is still quite true that his own work is both sustained and enriched by it."

"each of them [artists] stands out as an island of civilized feeling in an ocean of corruption. Civilization has freely vindicated them in everything but their nonconformity."

"I have always held a notion of a healthy society as one in which the two opposing elements, the conservative and the creative (or radical, or visionary, or whatever term is best applied to the dissident), exist in a mutual balance. The conservative, with its vested interest in things as they are, holds onto the present, gives stability, and preserves established values (and keeps the banks open). The visionary, always able to see the configuration of the future in present things, presses for change, experiment, the venture into new ways. A truly creative artist is inevitably of this part of the society."

"Nonconformity is the basic pre-condition of art, as it is the pre-condition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people. The degree of nonconformity present-and tolerated-in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health."

"Conformity is a mood and an atmosphere, a failure of hope or belief or rebellion."

"Today's conformity is, more than anything else, the retreat from controversiality. Tomorrow's art, if it is to be at all stirring, will no doubt be performed upon today's forbidden territory."

"it is always in the future that the course of art lies"

"What is it about us, the public, and what is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?"

"One's education naturally begins at the cradle. But it may perfectly well begin at a later time too. Be born poor... or be born rich... it really doesn't matter. Art is only amplified by such diversity."

"I believe that there is no kind of experience which has not its potential visual dimension or its latent meanings for literary or other expression. Know all you can mathematics, physics, economies, and particularly history. As part of the whole education, the teaching of the university is therefore of profoundest value."

"freedom itself is a disciplined thing. Craft is that discipline which frees the spirit; and style is the result."

"It [art] communicates directly without asking approval of any authority. Its values are not those of set virtues, but are of the essential nature of man, good or bad. Art is one of the few media of expression which still remains unedited, unprocessed, and undictated. If its hazards are great, so are its potentialities magnificent."

"I think that one of the great virtues of the university lies in its being a community in the fullest sense of the word, a place of residence, and at the same time one of personal affirmation and intellectual rapport."

"There are, roughly, about three conditions that seem to be basic in the artist's equipment: to be cultured, to be educated, and to be integrated."

"The book is the clearest, most forceful statement on art by an artist of our time that I have read."

"The character of his art, in which a very varied and lively inventiveness predominates, reflects the very otherwise ingenious taste of E. Delacroix, with whom he shares the dynamic and excited research, the chiaroscuro contrasts and the traits of environmental realism, without attempting to compete with him in creative richness and originality. (Valerio Mariani)"

"The orientalist vision of the Holy Scriptures even becomes popular with the illustrated editions of the Bible, from that of Gustave Doré of 1866, imaginative but with precise oriental references, to the very widespread one edited by James Tissot, who he inserts views of the cities, maps, architectural reconstructions and topographical surveys of the sacred stations with the aim of making biblical archeology reliable, otherwise distorted, as the curator claims, by the fervent imagination of the artists. In one sense or another, the drive to seek the living testimonies of the Holy Scriptures in the Eastern reality of the moment, and to permeate a disenchanted West, was relaunched in the second half of the nineteenth century by the neo-spiritualist attempt to reaffirm the primacy of faith in the era of scientific materialism . (Attilio Brilli)"

"Everything comes from drawing out my ideas."

"Things Fall Apart."

"Popular culture is one part of teeming life that everybody, all of us, are involved in,"

"Everything I have done and experienced gets into the work somehow or another—my childhood, my family life, my grad-school days."

"My work is very much about being in the city. It's very much about the streets and the buildings and the feeling of enclosure. And in that sense New York is very conceptual. I'm not an intellectual, not by any means. I admire those minds very much. But New York is about enclosure and the energy of enclosure, and has a kind of a tough irony. I mean, it's a city of complete contrasts and some bitterness, conflict, anger, and it's also a … place of enormous hope."

"Non dolet ipse Dolet, sed pia turba dolet."

"And as we talked, there gathered at the gate People, as me thought, of very poor estate, With bag and staff, both crooked, lame and blind, Scabby and scurvy, pock-eaten flesh and rind, Lousy and scald, and pillèd like as apes, With scantly a rag for to cover their shapes, Breechless, bare-footed, all stinking with dirt, With a thousand of tatters drabbling to the skirt, Boyes, girles, and luskish strong knaves, Diddering and daddering, leaning on their staves."

"I still delight in it when people find pleasure in my work. To paint is to reach out, hoping that one will touch. One wants to be understood."

"Her brushwork and color choice became more expressive and less consistent with her earlier works, using angular features and colored shapes to both her landscape paintings and portraits."

"She singled out Franz Marc of Der Blaue Reiter and Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff and Pechstein of Die Brücke as significant to her personality, although she would claim not to have been influenced by them."

"Maggie Laubser was often influenced by exotic beauty and her various travels within South Africa. Her portraits of young Indian and African women, in which flower motifs are employed as decorative surrounds, are some of her finest. Comparable works include Young girl with head scarf holding a protea, Pondo woman and Indian girl with poinsettias."

"I have been preoccupied with 'forensic' methods of observation and perception for many years. Much of my work requires viewers to take on the persona of a kind of detective, deconstructing and unravelling clues and references that may not announce themselves outright. These clues are invested in the subject matter and iconography I employ but also live firmly in the media in which I choose to work."

"When working through ideas, I don't draw; I make collages. These can be visual, or more often they take the form of bits of conversations, observations and sampled words from pretty much anywhere. For this series, we decided to experiment with exposing photo-based images onto polymer plates, effecting a photogravure process, but combining this with a photolitho process."

"Working with films in this way was very interesting, considering that they were originally shot on film, processed and printed, and now transferred onto VHS or digitized onto DVD for home consumption. This process underwent a curious inversion in this work, as I photographed countless frames off my laptop screen as the DVD played."

"Watching films is no longer an exclusively public experience in cinemas. With the kinds of technologies available today, I am able to indulge my interests in capturing what lies beyond the between frames in films at my leisure, in my private space. These 'autopsied' images seem to give rise to other hidden, secret narratives when characters are caught in freeze-frame, or in the background, apparently unnoticed when not taking centre stage."

"The printmaking process for me is all about seriality - the ability to reproduce, copy, and repeat systematically. I like to think of it as a kind of failed forgery; failed as there really was no 'original' to begin with, just the possibility of many of the same."

"Monroe strikes me as being the quintessential symptom of modern society; displaced, alienated, capable of (and required to) taking on a range of personae without a basis in the understanding of self and agency. On another level, her story is also the iconic intersection of celebrity, causality and death, not to mention conspiracy. For someone whose identity is inextricably tied to her image and nothing more, it seemed right to recast her with a host of screen characters that more accurately reflected on her private experiences rather than her public persona."

"The images I am working with are taken from our daily media coverage of recent and almost commonplace happenings in newspapers, on TV and on radio of social and criminal acts of violence and ongoing unnecessary deaths – occurrences so frequent that they no longer raise an outcry from our public, yet they still constitute disaster in peacetime."

"The portraits are made with the deposits of carbon from candle smoke on white paper. They are exceedingly fragile and can be easily damaged, disintegrating with physical contact as the carbon soot is dislodged from the paper. She was interested in the extremely fragile nature of these human lives and of all human life, attempting to translate this fragility into portraits made from a medium as impermanent as smoke itself."

"The technique of using ash as a drawing medium developed from printmaking. Texture and tone in etching is produced when rosin dust is sprinkled onto an etching plate to create an aquatint."

"Victor made another series of large smoke drawings of farm animals on glass called "Brief Lives", which were displayed in an abandoned abattoir. The glass drawings deal with the loss of body and identity and the nature of the smoke speaks of the transience of life."

"Victor's smoke portraits explore subjects often overlooked, for example South African prisoners awaiting trial and missing children. These portraits capture individuals caught in a vulnerable moment, an idea reinforced through the impermanent nature of the medium used."

"The fragile and ephemeral process of candle smoke Victor felt was an appropriate medium for the portraits of the primates rendered fragile and impermanent by mankind."

"I am trying to reconstruct a vision of District Six as it was in the 1960s,"

"As far as was possible, I worked from old archival photos of the district, first engraving, then inking up the areas with etching ink, and finally cleaning the ink from the surface, so that only the ink in the lines remained. I used a tin of ink I discovered in my studio, dating from the 80s and made by the incomparable T E Lawrence of London."

"Standing at the window through many different weathers, trying to reconstruct that vanished landscape, many visitors to the gallery came up to me to chat, and recall their memories of District Six, or asked me what exactly I was doing."

"I enjoyed these encounters. As an artist, one so seldom knows what the reaction of visitors to a gallery really is, or if they understand what one is trying to do."

"Trained as a printmaker, Williamson also works in video, photography and installation. Her work addresses the media, social issues and aspects of contemporary history."

"Williamson also writes and lectures about art, and is the author of the classic ‘Resistance Art in South Africa’ (1989). In 2009, she published ‘South African Art Now’ (HarperCollins, New York)."

"Throughout her career artist Sue Williamson has asked viewers of her photos, videos, urban graffiti and other pigeonhole-resistant labours to critically think about how and where they live."

"Williamson is a social commentator and combines slick aesthetic devices with hard, cutting edge facts of life. This is almost contradictory, yet it is precisely in this tension, that we are both lured into the artwork and then come away thinking about the issues, the image thus returns to text as it were."

"Williamson ran a series of workshops where she explored the power of place and its identity to various citizens. At the end of the workshop, a consensus was reached on how best to exemplify their feelings around that particular place."

"Dear Reader, you may take it from me, that however hard you try — or don't try; whatever you do — or don't do; for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; every way and every day: . So it is no good bothering about it. When the little pests grow up they will certainly tell you exactly what you did wrong in their case. But never mind; they will be just as wrong themselves in their turn."

"The chief thing I learnt at school was how to tell lies. Or rather, how to try to tell them; for, of course, I did it very badly."

"Ladies were ladies in those days; they did not do things themselves."

"You can have no idea, if you have not tried, how difficult it is to find out anything whatever from an encyclopaedia, unless you know all about it already."

"I have defined Ladies as people who did not do things themselves. Aunt Etty was most emphatically such a person."

"In my grandparents' house it was a distinction and a mournful pleasure to be ill. This was partly because my grandfather was always ill, and his children adored him and were inclined to imitate him; and partly because it was so delightful to be pitied and nursed by my grandmother."

"The first religious experience that I can remember is getting under the nursery table to pray that the dancing mistress might be dead before we got to the Dancing Class."

"I, Estellina, the wife of my lord and husband, the honourable teacher master Abraham Conat (may he see offsprings and length of days, amen) wrote this Epistle on the Examination of the World with the assistance of the young man Jacob Levi from Tarascon in Provence, long may he live, amen"

"Sometimes, someone in Venice will ask me, "What is it like in Des Moines?", and sometimes, someone in Des Moines asks, "What is it like to live in Venice?" I respond with the same answer - You can't imagine. It is another world."

"I have been a resident of Venice since 2004. For the past five years I have arranged my schedule so that I spend a full six months a year in Venice and a bit under six months in Des Moines. Approximately every two months, I go from one home and existence to the other. Sometimes I feel that I am living two completely different lives, but they are connected, and I love both of them."

"I began coming to Venice regularly in 1989, when Matilde Dolcetti, director of the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia (SIGV), a school of printmaking and graphic design, invited me to come to the school as a visiting artist. In subsequent years, I taught classes in burin engraving, drawing, and the history of prints there. My involvement with the SIGV connected me with the printmakers, book printers and bookbinders of Venice. Those artists became my core group of friends in Venice, and the SIGV has long been my base and point of reference."

"We live near Campo San Giacomo de l'Orio, in the sestiere of Santa Croce. Our palazzo is visible in Jacopo de' Barbari's 1500 bird's eye view of Venice. In the Campo, during the day the elderly sit on the benches under the trees, the retired men stand and chat, and friends meet to drink coffee, wine, and spritz at the cafés. In the afternoon, babies toddle, kids rollerblade and kick soccer balls, and parents chat. On Wednesday evenings, I often attend Incontri, a weekly gathering for artists only, organized by the painter Maria Morganti. We meet at the Fondazione Bevilacqua LaMasa on Rio San Barnaba. Artists present talks on their work to other artists."

"We have a boat, and my husband has become really good at rowing, Venetian-style. He goes out rowing almost every evening through the year, even around midnight. He rows through the canals late at night because there is almost no one else out at that hour. It is very dark on the inner canals, but it is an amazing thing to see Venice this way. Sometimes I go along as a passenger. I often take a notebook and draw while we go through the canals. The drawings have to be really fast since we are constantly moving. He is willing to stop and tie up every once in a while so I can make a drawing from a fixed spot."

"I draw almost every day in drawing books made by a Venetian bookbinder, Renato Polliero, using an old pump fountain pen that I can fill with my own waterproof India ink. I love the flexibility of the point of a good old writing pen. For most of my life, I made drawings for completely private purposes and rarely showed or published them. They served only to generate ideas for my engravings. Since I started my drawing blog in 2006, I now draw also in order to share my images anonymously with the world on the Internet."

"In Venice, I work on my engravings on a big old oak kitchen table I bought for this purpose. The table has a very large drawer, a pullout board for rolling out pasta, and still has its pull out, meter-long rolling pin. For plate prep and proofing, I use the facilities at the Scuola di Grafica."

"My laptop computer is on a desk between my engraving table and the terrace door. There is a seven-hour time difference between Venice and Des Moines. Around 4 PM, as my colleagues are arriving at the Des Moines Art Center where it is 9 AM, I log in remotely to the museum's server. From Venice, I can literally work on the computer and printer on my desk in my office in Des Moines. Email is the same whether sent from the office next door or 6000 miles away. Work keeps going in Des Moines until around 5 PM, or midnight in Venice."

"In Des Moines, we live on a quiet street in a beautiful old wooded neighborhood. Our house is surrounded by a large yard with three century-old oak trees, bushes, and perennials. I have my own study with all my print history books. My printmaking studio is in the basement of our house. I have a 36 x 60" American French Tool etching press. From 1970, when we moved to Des Moines after graduate school, until 1997 I worked primarily as an artist and a teacher of printmaking, design, and art history. In 1974, I began to curate exhibitions on the history of prints for the DMAC, then was invited to do projects for other museums. In 1997, after I had been doing guest curatorial projects for 20 years, the DMAC finally created my part-time position as curator of prints (now prints and drawings). My responsibilities at the museum include organizing three or four exhibitions a year on prints and drawings, writing gallery guides and labels, gallery talks, doing research on works in the permanent collection, recommending acquisitions, advising on conservation, working as part of the curatorial team, cultivating collectors and donors, etc. We don't have a public print room, so there is no public access to the collection. I am staff liaison for the Des Moines Art Center Print Club, a very active group of print collectors, artists, and people interested in prints. They organize monthly programs, commission prints, and purchase works for the collection."

"My arrangement with the museum is that my schedule is mine to figure out. There are times when I have to be present in Des Moines, such as a month or so before the installation of a new exhibition. When I am in Des Moines I work very intensely, plan, and do much in advance to enable myself to be away for my regular two-month absences."

"I draw more frequently when I travel (and especially, when I am in Venice), than when I am in Des Moines. Besides an infinite number of drawings made in Italy, I have major bodies of work from time I have spent in Japan, France, Russia, Turkey (Istanbul), India and England. I have some drawings from my travels around the US too. I also make drawings while killing time in trains, planes, and airports."

"Since I am usually doing research on some aspect of the history of prints, I try to make appointments to visit the print rooms of museums in cities that I happen to visit. When we lived in London on a sabbatical in 1986-87, I enrolled in a year-long class to study lettering engraving at Sir John Cass College, City of London Polytechnic, a college that trained young engravers to pass the Guild exams and become certified engravers. I did this because I knew how to engrave pictorially, but had no sense of how to engrave words or inscriptions so I could print them. As an art historian, I had become curious about the extraordinary calligraphic inscription on an engraving of a Vanitas personification by the Dutch Mannerist engraver, Jan Saenredam. A curator friend at the British Museum suggested that I look at the British Library's collection of engraved calligraphy writing manuals from the 16th and 17th century. After years of research on what became an utterly absorbing topic for me, I ended up writing a long article about this subject (“Calligraphic Inscriptions in Dutch Mannerist Prints,” in Goltzius Studies: Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 1993). In addition to my art historical discoveries on this topic, I was able to incorporate the technical experience I had gained by studying lettering engraving."

"Here is a recent example of how curatorial travel influences my work as an artist: On January 21, the day after Barack Obama's inauguration, I flew to Washington DC on a courier trip. Walking up the hill past the US Capitol, I saw that it was still completely set up for the inauguration, but the two million people had all gone home. It was amazing to stand in that place on the day after the inauguration. After I did my research at the Library of Congress, I walked back down the hill, stood in front of the Capitol, and drew the scene. (To see the drawing, please click here.) The next day at 7 AM, I boarded an art shipper's truck at the National Gallery of Art and accompanied several paintings on a 19-hour ride back across the US to Des Moines."

"The delight I take in crossing barriers and mixing things up may date from my experiences as a child. I grew up in The Bronx where I attended elementary and junior high school with many kids whose parents were WWII refugees. Many of my friends did not speak English at home. During the summers of 1959 and 1960, when I was 12 and 13, my father, a NYC school principal and science educator, taught National Science Foundation summer institutes for black science teachers at Virginia State College in Petersburg, VA. This was still the era of segregation, and we spent those two summers as the only white family living on the black college campus. As a teenager attending the High School of Music and Art, I absorbed the cultural richness, variety, and excitement of the city."

"The Afro-Cuban group from the Santa Marta neighborhood (at the far, far end of Dorsoduro) is great fun. The idea of this nutty group of Rasta-haired Venetian guys singing topical songs in Venetian really appeals to me. I understand Venetian dialect and I follow the local issues that Venetians are concerned about. Santa Marta is probably the Bronx of Venice. Not the most elegant part of Venice but a great place to grow up."

"The Oxford Project was a great thing to become involved in. It was created by two University of Iowa professors, Peter Feldstein and Steven G. Bloom. Peter started photographing everyone in Oxford, Iowa in 1984 in part as Conceptual Art and for sociological reasons, but also it was Peter's attempt to be accepted by the residents of this tiny Iowa town that he had moved to. He started rephotographing the same people 21 years later, in 2005, and Steve Bloom interviewed the portrait subjects. Feldstein and Bloom proposed The Oxford Project as an exhibition to the Des Moines Art Center. I was basically assigned the job of evaluating whether it was worth doing at our museum. I was intrigued and organized a selection of the works for an exhibition in 2007. The public response was incredible. The exhibition was also shown in Padova, Italy, where it was very well received. Italian viewers understood that these amazing stories were not just American, they were universal."

"For over 600 years, artists have been drawing Venice. It is the most-drawn and painted city in the world. How can anyone find something new and fresh to say? All I could do was to draw the reality of my own existence there. I drew what I wanted to understand, or where I wanted to explore or spend time. By just remaining in a place and drawing, you see so much more. You experience the life of the place, you become part of it. Because of my constantly drawing in Venice and keeping notebooks, I feel that I understand what Canaletto was doing and experiencing with his drawings."

"Last March, I stood on the loggia of San Marco, by the reproduction horses, and made a drawing I'd been thinking about doing for a while--the entire sweep of Piazza San Marco from above. It was cold, but I stood still for two hours and became completely immersed in the making of the drawing. It is a wonderful thing to experience ... a total absorption ... and a strange sense of power that I can do this."

"Very much so. Being a curator and an artist is bad in one way. In deciding to work as a curator, I sacrificed my public persona as an artist. There are many conflict of interest issues that can arise. Although my museum has many of my prints in its permanent collection (these were acquired before I became a curatorial staff member), I certainly can't ever include my own work in an exhibition. Also, I feel extremely reluctant to try to promote my work to curatorial colleagues in other museums. That is really up to the gallery that represents my work. (I do have prints in numerous museum collections, but probably could have had a lot more). A museum would like to organize a retrospective of my work, but here again, I barely have time to prepare for it. Being a curator means no longer having all day to work in the studio. Sometimes, I come home and work from after dinner until midnight in the studio."

"On the other hand, being a print curator gives me amazing access to museum collections and original art objects. I learn so much. I do not feel unconnected from history, but rather part of a continuum. I don't try to emulate artists who have gone before or who are working now, but I certainly do measure myself against them."

"Sometimes work I have done as an artist gives me an idea for an exhibition, even though I can't incorporate that fact into what I write about it. For example, right now I am preparing the exhibition, Art in Ruins, for the Des Moines Art Center. But it is really my own experience of drawing in the wreckage of a relative's house destroyed by fire and making engravings of this, and witnessing a small plane crash and later engraving it, that made me interested in this subject."

"The Des Moines Art Center is an extraordinary institution with a terrific collection, a great work environment, and wonderful colleagues. I have an enviable work arrangement. I feel I still have something to contribute in the way of teaching about prints. So I will undoubtedly continue to commute from Venice to Des Moines for the foreseeable future"

"Process work doesn’t appeal to me. That’s why I like drypoint and not just an etching. I’ve done only twenty-five bitten etchings in my life because I don’t care for all that business that goes on that gets between you and the work. I love drypoint and I think that actually it gives you the same wonderful satisfaction that carving in stone must give to a person. You’re really making something with great effort. And I think that effort is very important in the production of any work of art. If it’s too easy, if you’re just gliding around on a wax surface and then biting it in acid, it doesn’t give you that sensation of making something … That wonderful feeling that you have for the material and the real strength that you have to employ to get the line the right depth and richness and to do the cross-hatching so that the metal doesn’t break down but still you get a rich black. It gives you, oh, a great sensation"

"Pin-head, parsimoniously covered with thin dark hair, on a short, dumpy body. Small features, prominent nose, chipmunk teeth and no chin, conveying the sharp, weak look of a little rodent. Absent-minded eyes with a half-glimmer of observation. Prim, critical mouth and faint coloring. Personality lifeless, retiring, snippy, quietly egotistical. Lacks vigor and sparkle."

"More and more, we are being required to know what are the implications of living in a society that is increasingly diverse through the arrival of immigrants from all walks of life and very different parts of the planet. I would like to think that our work is a tangible example of what people can achieve when they work together."

"[A] painting presents its own battle, its own requirements. And a print is never a reproduction of a painting. It makes its own demands, it has its own life, its own thing going for it."

"When you're painting, nobody else knows what you're doing and you're the only one who understands it. You've got to have faith in what you're doing and in humanity."

"I couldn't imagine painting anyone I didn't like. When people do appear in my paintings, they're always people for whom I have a special feeling."

"Being an artist is submitting to the learning that comes from being a mother. It's all the better for the work in the end. It enriches your field of understanding of human nature, all the hards bits and the good bits, the whole thing...Ultimately, the way forward is to be grateful for the blessings that come from accepting those challenges."

"A consistent thread in my work is that it’s made in response to place, and what’s happening around me – physical and social environments provide the raw material, the inspiration, the starting point."