Printmakers

"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.."

"[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."

"Vlaminck is entirely possessed by Vlaminck. It is his strength; dare I say, his virtue."

"[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."

"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.."

"[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."

"[T]ranslated by instinct, without any method, not merely an artistic truth but above all a human one."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.."

"[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."

"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."

"..a revolt against an established order in painting, a revolt against an established order in society, a same spirit of provocation.."

"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."

"this fantastic work called Young Mother Sewing by Mary Cassatt."

"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."

"..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."

"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."

"..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."

"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."

"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."

"O how wild I am to get to work, my fingers farely itch & my eyes water to see a fine picture again."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In Bonnard's work, Impressionism becomes insipid and falls into decline."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"'The swarm of ducks so darkens the sky that poor Europe does not know which way to go'"

"'We have not died in vain'"

"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."

"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!"