Painters From France

"When I write, I fly to another dimension. Like Eva Luna, I try to live life as I would like it to be, as in a novel. I am always half flying, like Marc Chagall's violinists."

"When I painted Christ's parents I was thinking of my own parents. The bearded man is the Child's father. He is my father. [Chagall stated this in 1950]"

"Only a child had its place on the cross, and that was enough for me [to paint his Crucifixions, earlier].. ..in the exact sense there was no cross but a blue child in the air. The cross interested me less."

"I know I must live in France, but I don't want to cut myself off from America. France is a picture already painted. America still has to be painted. Maybe that's why I feel freer there. But when I work in America, it's like shouting in a forest. There's no echo."

"If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste."

"..In spite of everything, there is still no more wonderful vocation than to continue to tolerate events and to work on in the name of our mission, in the name of that spirit which lives on in our teaching and in our vision of humanity and art, the spirit which can lead us Jews down the true and just path. But along the way, peoples will spill our blood, and that of others."

"But my knowledge of Marxism was limited to knowing that Marx was a Jew, and that he had a long white beard. I said to Lunatcharsky [the political communist commissar for Education, ca. 1918] 'Whatever you do, don't ask me why I painted in blue or green, and why you can see a calf inside the cow's belly, etc. On the other hand you're welcome: if Marx is so wise, let him come back to life and explain it himself'. I showed him my canvases."

"It's only my town (Chagall was born in Vitebsk), mine, which I have rediscovered. I come back to it with emotion. It was at that time that I painted my Vitebsk series of 1914. (Chagall couldn't go back to Paris because of the outbreak of the first World War in 1914) I painted everything that met my eyes. I painted at my window; I never walked down the street without my box of paint."

"Two or three o'clock in the morning. The sky is blue. Dawn is breaking. Down there, a little way off, they slaughtered cattle, cows bellowed, and I painted them. I used to sit up like that all night long. It's already a week since the studio was cleaned out. Frames, eggshells, empty two-sou soup tins lie about higgledy-piggledy.. .On the shelves, reproductions of El Greco and Cézanne lay next tot the remains of a herring I had cut in two, the head for the first day, the tail for the next, and Thank God, a few crusts of bread."

"Listen what happened to me when I was in the fifth form (ca. 1904), in the drawing lesson. An old-timer in the front row, the one who pinched me the most often, suddenly showed me a sketch on tissue paper, copied from the magazine "Niva": The Smoker. In this pandemonium! Leave me alone. I don't remember very well but this drawing, done not by me but by that fathead, immediately threw me into a rage. It roused a hyena in me. I ran to the library, grabbed that big volume of "Niva" and began to copy the portrait of the composer Rubinstein, fascinated by his crow's-feet and his wrinkles, or by a Greek woman and other illustrations; maybe I improvised some too, I hung them all up in my bedroom.."

"My grandfather, a teacher of religion, could think of nothing better than to place my father – his eldest son, still a child – as a clerk with a firm of herring wholesalers, and his youngest son with a barber. No, my father was not a clerk, but, for thirty-two years, a plain workman [in the Jewish ghetto of Vitebsk ]. He lifted heavy barrels, and my heart used to twist like a Turkish pretzel as I watched him carrying those loads and stirring the little herrings with his frozen hands.. .Sometimes my father's clothes would glisten with herring brine. The light played above him, besides him. But his face, now yellow, now clear, would sometimes break into a wan smile."

"..No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris. Beginning with the market – where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber – the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism, everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists."

"Only the great distance that separates Paris from my native town prevented me from going back.. .It was the Louvre that put end to all these hesitations. When I walked around the circular Veronese room and the rooms that the works of Manet, Delacroix and Courbet are in, I desired nothing more. In my imagination Russia [where Chagall was born] took the form of a basket suspended from a parachute. The deflated pear of the balloon was hanging down, growing cold and descending slowly in the course of the years. This was how Russian art appeared to me, or something of the sort.. .It was as if Russian art had been fatally condemned to remain in the wake of the West. (a later quote on his first arrival in Paris, 1910)"

"Christ on the cross – what a symbol. A symbol of love surpassed by sorrow, which lies at the root of human condition, the main symbol of human poetry.. ..but that's enough of that, I'm getting morbid. It's Siredey's fault [his doctor during his last years, when Manet was seriously ill: syphilis]. Doctors always remind me of undertakers. Though I must say, I feel a lot better this evening. [while working on Antonin Proust's portrait in 1881-82]"

"You can deduce everything about a woman from the way she holds her feet. Seductive women always turn their feet out. Don't expect to get anywhere with a woman who turns her feet in."

"What a pelisse! It's tawny brown with an old gold lining – staggering. It will make a wonderful background for some things I'm thinking of doing. Promise that when it's worn out you'll give it to me [Méry promised!]."

"Ah! Women.. .I met one yesterday on the Pont de l'Europe [in Paris, circa 1881 - Manet was walking through the city frequently with his friend Antonin Proust, but then already more or less cripple because of his syphilis]. She was walking the way only a Parisienne knows how to walk, but with an extra something, even more assured. I'll remember that. There are some things that will always be engraved on my mind."

"That's good advice.. ..all the more so since I may well be forced to leave it [the painting] at that, as so often happens when the model doesn't come back. That's always been my principal concern, to make sure of getting regular sittings. Whenever I start something, I'm always afraid the model will let me down.. .They come, they pose, then away they go, telling themselves that he can finish it off on his own. Well no, one can't finish anything on one's own, particularly since one only finishes on the day one starts, and that means starting often and having plenty of days available."

"You would hardly believe, my dear fellow, how difficult it is to clap a solitary figure on a canvas and to concentrate the entire interest on that one solitary figure without it ceasing to be lively and full.. .Your portrait (1880) is an outstandingly sincere work. I remember as though it were yesterday the rapid, summary fashion in which I dealt with the glove of the ungloved hand. And when you said to me, at that very moment, 'Please not another touch', I felt we were so perfectly attuned that I couldn't resist the impulse to embrace you. Ah! Heaven send that no one takes it into his head later on to stick that portrait into a public collection!"

"The Bellevue air [suburb outside Paris with curative waters] has done me a world of good.. .But Alas! Naturalist painting is more in disfavor than ever."

"[Manet's reply:] They're not dancing, they'e skating; but you're right, they do move and when people are moving, I can't freeze them on the canvas. As a matter of fact, sir, I have been told the outlines of 'Olympia' are too well defined, so that makes up for it. Sir Frederick Leighton criticized: It's very good, Monsieur Manet, but don't you think that the outlines [of Manet's painting 'Le Skating' ] are not well enough defined and that the figures dance too much?"

"My dear Duret, I went to see Monet yesterday. I found him heart-broken and completely on the rocks. He asked me to find him someone who would take from ten to twenty of his paintings at their choice, for 111 fr. apiece. Shall we do it between us, making 500 fr. each? Naturally, no one, least of all he, must know that it is we who are doing it.."

"He has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him please to give up painting."

"Only party hacks and the ambitious, the Henry's of this world following on the heels of the Milliéres, the grotesque imitators of the Commune of 1793.. .What an encouragement all these bloodthirsty caperings are for the arts! But there is at least one consolation in our misfortunes: that we're not politicians and have no desire to be elected as deputies."

"I never imagined that France could be represented by such doddering old fools, not excepting that little twit Thiers..."

"Goodbye my dear Suzanne [his wife], your portraits are hanging in every corner of the bedroom, so I see you first and last thing.."

"I spent a long time, my dear Suzanne, looking for your photograph - I eventually found the album in the table in the drawing room, so I can look at your comforting face from time to time. I woke up last night thinking I heard you calling me.. .Every day we're expecting a major offensive to break through the iron ring that surrounds us. We are counting on the provinces, because we can't just send our little [French] army of to be massacred. Those devious Prussians may well try to starve us out."

"You can do plein-air painting indoors, [to his pupil then, Berthe Morisot ] by painting white in the morning, lilac during the day and orange tones in the evening."

"Get it down quickly, don't worry about the background. Just go for the tonal values. You see? When you look at it, and above all when you see how to render it as you see it, thats is, in such a way that its make the same impression on the viewer as it does on you, you don't look for, you don't see the lines on the paper over there, do you? And then, when you look at the whole thing you don't try to count the scales on the salmon, of course you don't. You see them as little silver pearls against grey and pink – isn't thats right? – look at the pink of the salmon, with the bone appearing white in the centre and then grays, like the shades of mother of pearl. And the grapes, now do you count each? No, of course not. What strikes you is their clear, amber colour and the bloom which models the form by softening it. What you have to decide with the cloth is where the highlights come and then the planes which are not in the direct light. Halftones are for the magasin pittoresque engravers. The folds will come by themselves if you put them in the proper place. Ah! M. Ingres, there's the man! We're all just children. There's the one who knew how to paint materials! Ask Bracquemond [Paris' artist and print-maker]. Above all, keep your colours fresh. [instructing his new protegee, the Spanish young woman-painter Eva Gonzales, circa 1869]"

"My dear Zola, - I am making up my mind to hold a private show. I have at least two score pictures to exhibit. I've already already been offered a site in a very good location near the Champ de Mars. I am going to stake the lot and seconded by men like yourself, am hopeful of success. See you soon. Cordially, yours ever, All of us here are delighted with your article, and I am instructed to send you thanks."

"I should be going with Champfleury and Stevens, but they keep putting it off. Anyway, they are bloody bores. Excuse the unseeming language, but since my letter is not for publication, I can say what I please. Touché."

"Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?"

"How I miss you here [his friend in Paris - Manet visited Madrid and the famous museums there], and how delighted you would have been to see Velázquez, who in himself alone is worth the journey.. .He is the painter of painters. He did not astonish me, but delighted me."

"I don't know why I'm here. Everything before our eyes is ridiculous. The light is wrong, the shadows are wrong. When I enter in the studio I feel like I am entering a tomb [in the studio of their common art-teacher Thoman Couture ]. I know we can't make a model undress in the street. But there are fields, and at least in the summer we could do studies of the nude in the country, since the nude appears to be the first and the last word in art."

"So, they'd prefer me to do a nude, would they? Fine I'll do them a nude.. .I'll redo it [his painted copy of Giorgioni's 'Woman with musicians'], with a transparent atmosphere, like those women over there [women bathing in the river, Summer of 1862]. Then I suppose they'll really tear me to pieces. They'll tell me I'm just copying the Italians now, rather than the Spanish. Ah, well, they can say what they like. [the painting Manet means here became his most famous one: 'Déjeuner sur l'herbe']."

"..that the soldiers shooting Maximilian were wearing a uniform almost identical to that of our own troops. Fanciful artists give the Mexicans costumes from comic opera. M. Manet, who truly loves truth, has drawn [in his painting 'The Execution of Emperor Maximilian' their real costumes, which closely resemble those of the [[w:Vincennes|Vincennes'] infantrymen. You can understand the horror and anger of the gentlemen censors. What now! An artist dared to put before their eyes the cruel irony: France shooting Maximilian!"

"Like a true Parisien, he [Manet] brings Paris to the country and is incapable of painting a landscape without including well-dressed men and women. He loses interest in nature once it no longer beras the mark of everyday life."

"Our fathers mocked Courbet, and now we go into ecstasies before him. We mock Manet and it will be our children who go into ecstasies before his canvases."

"When our artists give us Venuses, they correct nature, they lie. Manet asked himself why lie, why not tell the truth; he introduced us Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks."

"At the Nouvelle Athènes, as at Guerbois, Manet was the dominating personality. In 1870 Fantin-Latour painted a famous group of some of the faithfuls of the gathered about Manet who sits before his easel. In this picture, the impression is decidedly that of a master surrounded by his pupils. Cézanne alone continued to express his distrust of the extraordinary facility manifested by the painter of the Olympia. "A good job, though," he would say, in speaking of this canvas which... he tried to match with a new Olympia, more modern in treatment. Manet was equally hostile... as evidenced by his remark to Guillemet about Cézanne: "How can you abide such a foul painting [as An Afternoon at Naples]?" I have asked some of the surviving painters of this period how Manet, who copied the Spaniards, and later abandoned his magnificent blacks to follow the wake of Monet and Impressionism, could have been hailed as the leader of a school. "Because," they would reply, "procedure counts for little in art. What made Manet a veritable prophet in his day, was that he brought a simple formula to a period in which the official art was merely fustian and conventionality. ...""

"Manet sees color and light, after which he no longer worries about the rest. When he has made the 'spot of color' on his canvas that a person or an object makes on the surrounding environment, he feels that this is sufficient. Don't ask anything else of him for the moment.. .His present vice is a sort of pantheism in which a [human] head is esteemed no more than a slipper; in which sometimes more importance is given to a bouquet of flowers, than to the physiognomy of a woman.. ..one scarcely pays attention to the head, although it is full grace.. ..it is lost in the modulation of the coloring."

"Manet's exhibition opens on January 5th. [1884 - c. 8 months after he died] - Manet, great painter that he was, had a petty side, he was crazy to be recognized by the constituted authorities, he believed in success, he longed for honors.. .He died without achieving his desire. Duret, Proust [ Antonin Proust ], have been selected to carry out his last wishes and to give a touch of solemnity to the exhibition, they could think of nothing better than to ask the worst officials, Manet's inveterate enemies, to join the organizing committee, and give an official stamp to the ceremony. All the bourgeois gentlemen will be there.. ..all those who loved and defended the great artist [sarcastic remark]: shocking! Away with them! - Even Fantin-Latour, who, it appears, claims that Manet in his last years had degenerated to such a point that he hoped to change his style through contact with those dilettantes [the impressionists ] who produce more noise than art! That's pretty strong, but not surprising!"

"I am sending you 'Le Figaro' [daily Paris' newspaper], you will read M. Wolff's stupid piece on our poor friend Manet [who died a few days earlier]. I do not have to tell you how indignant I am at the manner in which this gentleman treats the pure-bred artist who shed such glory on this country in an epoch dominated by commercialism. The article in 'L'Intransigeant' is very fine, very just, and worthy of its subject, but the artist's works tell us more about him than anything the journalists can write."

"His agony was horrible, death in one of its most appealing forms, that I once again witnessed at a very close range. If you add to these almost physical emotions my old bond of friendship with Edouard, an entire past of youth and work suddenly ending, you will know that I am devastated."

"The stories of the Manet brothers [Edouard Manet the painter, and his brother: Morisot's future husband Eugène Manet ] tell about all the horrors we are likely to face ([in Paris, during the war between France and Germany] are almost enough to discourage even the bravest of us. [But] you know they always exaggerate, and at the moment they see everything in the blackest possible light."

"..once started, nothing could stop him; from the skirt he went to the bust, from the bust to the head, from the head to the background. He cracked a thousand jokes, laughed like a madman, handed me the palette, took it back; finally by five o'clock in the afternoon we had made the best caricature you have ever seen."

"He [Manet] begged me to go straight up and see his painting ['Le Balcon', exhibited on the Salon of Paris of 1869; Berthe Morisot was Manet's model for the painting], as he was rooted to the spot. I've never seen anyone in such a state, one minute he was laughing, the next insisting his picture was dreadful; in the next breath, sure it would be a huge success."

"It was not until 1869 that I met him [Manet] again, but this time, we became friends immediately. From the first meeting, he invited me to join him every evening in a café of the 'Batignolles' where he and his friends would gather to talk at the end of a day spent at their studios. I would meet there, Fantin-Latour and Cézanne, Degas - who arrived shortly afterwards from Italy, the art critic Duranty, Emile Zola who was just starting-off in the literary world and a number of others. I would take Sisley, Bazille and Renoir. There was nothing more interesting than these discussions with their perpetual differences of opinion. Our mind and souls were stimulated.. ..One would always leave, all the better immersed, the will stronger, our thinking more defined and clear."

"Manet... may not have esteemed the efforts of Cézanne and Renoir, but Monet was a different matter. Seven years earlier he had disdained [Monet's] The Garden of the Princess... Slowly, however, he had come to accept—largely on the evidence of Monet's canvases—that... [w]hat Baudelaire called "modernity" could be captured in situ. He had painted en plein air... [b]ut he seems to have come to the basin in the summer of 1874 with the express aim of abandoning... the "false shadows" of the studio in favor of joining Monet in the "true light" of the outdoors. For the first time... Manet tried to catch the effects of natural light... and, following Monet's lead, replaced the somber colors and sharp contrasts... with a lighter palette of blues, yellows and ochers, which he added... in strokes of pure, unmixed color. He even painted, as a kind of tribute, Claude Monet and his Wife on his Floating Studio... The lighter tones and saturated colors of both Boating and Argenteuil show how Manet had... stepped resolutely into the sunshine. ...Visiting Monet's house ...one afternoon, he began painting The Monet Family in their Garden at Argenteuil. ...Monet ceased gardening at some point ...and began working on Manet Painting in Monet's Garden... Hardly had he begun painting than Renoir arrived... borrowed paints and a canvas from Monet and started... Monet and her Son... The day ended with Manet and Renoir making gifts of their paintings to Monet."

"Le Bain... has proved as defiant in execution as it had been in conception... [H]e abandoned , a technique perfected by Leonardo da Vinci and exploited by successful Salon painters... Manet... did away with most... half-tones—the transitions between highlights and shadows—such that his figures... looked harshly lit. ...Since an optical illusion makes light colors advance and dark ones recede, most artists painted a dark undercoat... la sauce.., a transluscent mixture of linseed oil, turpentine and often bitumen... Manet... after The Absinthe Drinker, working instead on canvases treated with off-white primers... gave Le Bain a greater luminosity... at the expense of... spatial recession [depth]. ...Painters were usually trained to create a subtle relief on the surface... Dark colors, such as... for shadows, were spread very thin while highlights were "loaded" or "impasted"... in thick layers... [T]ogether with the darker undercoat... whites would advance and the darks retreat. ...Manet boldly disregarded this practice in Le Bain... Though a few... as Gèricault and Courbet, had... experimented with this technique, the boldness of Manet's application witnessed... a new direction in art."