Painters From France

"There is only one impressionist among the group of revolutionaries Impressionists, and that is Berthe Morisot.. .Her painting has all the freedom of improvisation, truly the 'impression' experienced by a sincere, honest eye, rendered by a hand that does not cheat."

"I quite agree with you, the Mademoiselles Morisot are charming. What a pity they are not men. All the same, they could serve the cause of painting, in their capacity of women, by each marrying an academician and bringing trouble to those old bogeys in the enemy-camp. Or perhaps that's asking too much sacrifice."

"I am often with you, my dear Berthe, in my thoughts. I follow you everywhere in your studio and I wish that I could escape, were it only for one quarter of an hour to breathe again that air in which we lived for many years."

"She uses pastel with the freedom and charm that Rosalba Carriera first brought to the medium in the eighteenth century.. .Here is a delicate colorist who succeeds in making everything cohere into an overall harmony of shades of white which it is difficult to orchestrate without lapsing into sentimentality."

"We also consider that Miss Berthe Morisot's name and talent are too important to us to do without."

"They [the sisters Berthe and Edma ] will become painters. Are you fully aware of what that means? It will be revolutionary – I would almost say catastrophic – in your bourgeois society. Are you sure you won't curse Art, because once it is allowed into such a respectable and serene household, it will surely end by dictating the destinies of your two children."

"Since it is not necessary to have had a long training in draughtsmanship at the Academy to paint a copper pot, a candlestick and a bunch of radishes, women succeed quite well in this domestic type of painting. Miss Berthe Morisot brings to the task really a great deal of frankness with a delicate feeling for light and colour."

"My ambition is limited to capturing something transient."

"There are works for exhibition, others for the studio, you need to follow the public's taste if you want to succeed.. ..with some works you make your reputation with the artists, with others you do good business if possible"

"My dearest little Julie, I love you as I lie dying; I shall still love you when I am dead. I beg of you, do not cry; this parting was inevitable. I would have liked to be with you until you married – Work hard and be good as you have always been; you have never caused me a moment's sorrow in you little life [Julie is 16, then]. You have beauty, good fortune; use them well. I think the best thing would be to live with your cousins in the Rue de Villejust, but I do not wish to force you to do anything. Give a memento of me to your aunt Edma [Berthe's sister] , and to your cousins too; and give Monet's [painting] 'Bateaux en reparation' to your cousin Gabriel. Tell M. Degas that if he found a museum he is to choose a Manet [of her Manet paintings]. A keepsake for Monet; one for Renoir, and one of my drawings for Bartolomé. Give something to the two concierges. Do not cry, I love you more than I can tell you."

"I would also point out two landscapes by Mesdemoiselles Morisot, - doubtless two sisters [Berthe and Edma]. Corot is sure to be their master. These canvases show a freshness and naivety of expression and atmosphere that provided some respite from the suave, mean-minded work lapped up with such enthusiasm by the crowds. The artists must have painted these studies quite deliberately on the spot [in open-air] determined to reproduce what they saw."

"..'new charm, infused by feminine vision'"

"Music and painting should never be literary, a very subtle distinction according to Renoir. As soon as I try to represent an individual, their physiognomy and attitudes, I become a literary artist."

"I do not think any man would ever treat a woman as his equal, and it is all I ask because I know my worth."

"Your phrase: 'I am working hard at growing old', is absolutely me. What if you were always to speak in my place.."

"Another stroll along the quays with Julie asking questions all the time. We stood for a long time examining the sun and the planet at a mapmaker's.. ..There in the Tuileries Gardens.. ..sitting down I began to ponder over my painting of the garden, watching the shadows on the sand and on the roof of the Louvre, and trying to find the relationship between light and shade. Julie saw pink in the light and purple in the shadows."

"I saw the passers-by on the avenue clearly and simply, in the way they are in Japanese prints [she saw some earlier, together with Mary Casatt in the 'Ecole des Beaux Arts', Paris]. I was thrilled, I knew definitely why I had been painting badly and why I would never paint that way again. I mean to say, I am fifty years old and once a year at least I have the same joy and the same hope."

"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."

"He [Renoir] is a subtle and brilliant draughtsman.. ..all these preliminary drawings [in Renoir's studio] would astonish the public who obviously imagine the 'Impressionists' work at tremendous speed. I don't believe one can go further [in making sketches as studies] than this in the study of form in a drawing. I am charmed by his 'Nude Bathers' quite as much as those by Ingres. He [Renoir] tells me that he thinks the nude is absolutely indispensable as an art form."

"I say, 'I should like to die', but that's not true at all, I should like to get younger.. ..youth and old age are similar in more ways than one, and they are the two moments in life when one can feel one's own soul which would be a proof that it exists."

"I have descended to the depths of suffering, and it seems to me that after that one cannot help being raised up. But I have spent the last three nights weeping. Pity! Pity! Remembrance is the true imperishable life.. .I should like to live my life over again, to record it, to admit my weaknesses; no, this is useless; I have sinned, I have suffered, I have atoned for it. I could write only a bad novel by relating what has been related a thousand times."

"It is odd that Edouard [Manet] with his reputation as an innovator, who has survived such storms of criticism, should suddenly be seen as a classicist. It just proves the imbecility of the public, for he has always been a classic painter."

"This project [an Impressionist exhibition in Paris] is very much up in the air. Degas' perversity makes it almost impossible of realization; there are clashes of vanity in this little group [of impressionists] that make any understanding difficult. It seems to me that I am the only one without any pettiness of character. This makes up for my inferiority as a painter.. ..the truth is that our value [of woman] lies in feeling, in intuition, in our vision that is subtler than that of men, and we can accomplish a great deal provided that affectation, pedantry and sentimentalism do not come to spoil everything."

"..scumbled froth.. ..capable of indicating a mouth, eyes, a nose with a single stroke of the brush, the rest of the face modeled by the perfect accuracy of these indications."

"Would you do us the great favour, you and Mademoiselle Geneviève, of coming to dine next Thursday? Monet will be there, Renoir also.."

"With what resignation we arrive at the end of life, resigned to all its failures on the one hand, all its uncertainties on the other, for so long I have hoped for nothing, and the desire for glorification after death seems to me an overblown ambition; my own ambition has been confined to a desire to fix something of all that passes, oh! Something, the least little thing, well! That ambition, too, is overblown."

"Her watercolors, her pastels, her paintings all show.. ..a light touch and unpretentious allure that we can only admire. Mademoiselle Morisot has an extraordinary sensitive eye..[and].. succeeds in capturing fleeting notes on her canvases, with a delicacy, spirit, and skill that ensure her a prominent place at the center of the impressionists' group."

"Painting is an act, a sequence of movements one bears within oneself, whose source is one's inner being."

"Total abstraction was something intellectual to me. I didn't feel it.. ..I saw a Dubuffet show at Pierre Matisse [the son of Henri Matisse who run an art-gallery in New York then] in the late forties and came back with a new vocabulary."

"The very troubling intensity of Dubuffet's portraits is not the effect of an exact resemblance, but on the contrary, comes from extreme deformation, from a game of occultations which preserves the effigy on its apparition. The painting agitates like a mechanism of image variation which insidiously deforms physiognomy to the limits of denaturalization.."

"By claiming to recognize in the madman, the child, the visionary, and man in general, a common function, the function of art, the same in all cases, Dubuffet satisfied the demand for an art which was authentically that of man, and no longer the privilege of a certain group or class. A demand whose simultaneously historical and utopian character, which is to say the critical relationship it maintains with contemporary society, he did not underestimate.. ..Dubuffet connects with the Gauguin of the Marquesas Islands. But there is no longer any need, today, to flee to the antipodes of the globe to invent a modern art: this can very well be done in Paris, and even in Vence."

"In my estimation these heavily impastoed 'haute pâte' [thick paste paintings, Dubuffet made c. 1945-46] ..which introduce base materials (e.g., sand, asphalt, and pebbles) into high art, are not simply attempts to shock, or to achieve succès de scandale, by returning figuration to a more 'primitive' or infantile state (as many of Dubuffet's early critics and detractors claimed). They also reflect, albeit negatively, an historically specific phenomena—namely, the classicizing 'rappel à l'ordre' [turning back to the order and nationalistic retour à la terre [return to the earth] mentalities rampant in France at the time. Dubuffet's writings from this period are replete with explicit and implicit denunciations of this 'return' to classicism via the Renaissance.. .For instance.. .. Dubuffet lambastes this return of 'Greekeries, post-Greekeries, and neo-Greekeries' in contemporary art, and elsewhere [he] describes himself as staunchly 'anti-Humanist'."

"Because it was indeed a wager made by the creator of the 'Vues de Paris' [Views of Paris] and 'Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie'. A wager on the aesthetic scope of means of representation and materials held as unworthy, and which he would be the first to use in a no longer occasional, but rather systematic and exclusive way: soils and white lead, clinker, tar mixed with grit, tow, shavings, scratches, incisions and scrapings, imprints and reliefs, which one will find precisely named in the invaluable working notes of the painter. A wager, more adventurous still, on the effectiveness that the spectator would be able to recognize in these representations that are certainly barbaric, but also completely devoid of the picturesque."

"I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of the forces that tend to work against his action"

"Fautrier's exhibition [in Paris 1945] made an extremely strong impression on me. Art had never before appeared so fully realised in its pure state. The word 'art' had never before been so loaded with meaning for me."

"I took a great deal of pleasure in it, and I still feel nostalgic about it. However, I felt that it had led me to live in a parallel world of pure invention, shut inside my solitude. Naturally, it was precisely for that purpose that it was made and that was why I took pleasure in it, but I wanted to regain body and roots."

"I have observed that very often I gain access to a little secret that I have sought for a long time by way of a fortuitous encounter quite unrelated to the matter: for example six months I try to draw a camel in a way that satisfies me, and I make a thousand attempts without ever managing to do it. Then one day it is a drawing of a plump on the label of a pot of jam or the shadow thrown by an ink pot, or something or other equally unrelated to the matter that provides me with the solution. This kind of thing has happened so often that I have acquired the habit of always being on the outlook, and when I want to draw a camel I no longer limit myself, as I once did, to looking (only, fh) at camels.."

"I had given up [around 1950] any ambition of making a career as an artist.. .I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure."

"It was around 1935 or 1936 that I first had the idea of compiling a history of art – not in the usual way, but considering only the fads that have succeeded one another down through the ages. For example, the infatuation in Roman times with broken pleats and heads turned in profile.. ..or during the epoch of Pérugin and Raphael, a certain blue that appears everywhere. I wanted to draw up an inventory of these vogues. To this end I visited museums, took notes in little notebooks, and made demonstrative sketches of paintings. For this purpose I preferred bad paintings, by which I mean those held to be mediocre by aesthetes, but in which these fads that interested me were clearly in evidence."

"Art should be born from the materials."

"..I have never managed to grasp what exactly 'pataphysics' consisted of; but in short what I have always seen in it is a desire to disconnect philosophy from the discipline of logic, and to admit incoherence as a legitimate component of it. [comment on visiting frequently the Collège de 'Pataphysique']"

"I associated it [the word 'Hourloupe', as title of his longest series of work he made exclusively from 1962 to 1974] by assonance with 'hurler' (to shout), hululer (to howl), loup, (wolf), 'Riquet à la Houppe' and the title of Maupassant's book ‘Le Horla’, inspired by mental distraction."

"Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name; it loves to go incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called."

"Starting from a drawing, a pure creation of the mind, I expand it in space by giving it three dimensions, by giving it a material body [in polystyrene] and then enlarge it to the proportions of a site where it can evolve. In this way, instead of having only the drawing before you while remaining anchored in the everyday world, you can finally leave the world and penetrate into drawing, and thus inhabit the creation of the mind instead of merely looking at it prudently in a frame on the wall. The experience consists, therefore, in abstracting yourself totally from the natural everyday world in order to feed your eyes solely on your own mental elaborations."

"..to challenge the objective nature of being. The notion of being is presented here as relative rather than irrefutable: it is merely a projection of our minds, a whim of our thinking. The mind has the right to establish being wherever it cares to and for as long as it likes. There is no intrinsic difference between being and fantasy."

"Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom."

"[children's art] is completely opposed to what interests me, because it's an effort to assimilate culture.."

"At present [around 1960-1970] I make objects (whether a type-writer, wheelbarrow, bed or fishingboat..) very 'hourloupés' [like his painting: Courre Merlan (Whiting Chase), 1964. What I mean is that I am swimming upstream against the 'l'Hourloupe' current. I am approaching it from the opposite direction: instead of starting out with indeterminate lines that eventually give me a wheelbarrow, I start out with the idea of making a wheelbarrow and then add my indeterminate lines. In effect what I am doing is making the current run simultaneously in both directions at the same time."

"It pleased me (and I think this predilection is more or less constant in all my paintings) to juxtapose brutally, in these feminine bodies, the extremely general and the extremely particular, the metaphysical and the grotesque trivial. In my view, the one is considerably reinforced by the presence of the other. [on his series 'Corps de Dame']"

"A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person's being.. ..It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state."