Painters From France

"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."

"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."

"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.."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"Le vieux con!"

"I have always been a pencil."

"Love is a disease which fills you with a desire to be desired."

"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..."

"I paint things as they are. I don't comment. I record."

"Robert wanted to look straight at the midday sun, the absolute disk.. ..he closed his eyelids and focused in his retinal reactions. Back home, what he tried to commit to canvas was what he had seen with his eyes open and his eyes shut."

"Never had the critics been so violent as they were at that time. From which it became clear that these paintings - and I specify the names of the painters who were, alone, the reluctant causes of all this frenzy: Jean Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and myself - appeared as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever."

"I can see the black spots of the sun [remark to Sonia Delaunay, his wife and female artist]."

"This happened in 1912. Cubism was in full force. I made paintings that seemed like prisms compared to the Cubism my fellow artists were producing. I was the heretic of Cubism. I had great arguments with my comrades who banned color from their palette, depriving it of all elemental mobility. I was accused of returning to Impressionism, of making decorative paintings, etc.. .I felt I had almost reached my goal.[6]"

"He [Robert Delaunay] gives movement itself [in his pictures], the Futurists only illustrate movement.."

"It used to be said of a woman: why she's a Velázquez infanta! Now it is said: she's a Renoir blonde! I have no doubt that, in the future, it will be proclaimed: she's as exuberant as a Delaunay, as noble as a Le Fauconnier, as beautiful as a Georges Braque or Picasso."

"When my pencil starts moving, it must be allowed its head or - bang! - nothing more happens."

"As long as art cannot get free from the object, it will continue to be a description."

"What they are saying is okay [the Futurist artists like Severini, Carra and Russolo, who debated in Paris intensively with the Cubist artists]."

"'Simultaneousness' is a technique. Simultaneous contrast is the most up-to-date honey of this technique in this field. Simultaneous contrast is visible depth – Reality, Form, construction, representation. Depth is the new inspiration. We live in depth, we travel in depth. I’m in it. The senses are in it. And the mind is too."

"The need for a new subject has inspired the poets, launching them onto a fresh path and bringing to their attention to poetry of la Tour [the Eiffel tower in Paris], which communicates mysteriously with the whole world. Rays of light, waves of symphonic sounds. Factories, bridges, iron structures, airships, the numberless gyrations of aeroplanes, windows seen by crowd simultaneously."

"On the other hand, the artist has much to do in the realm of color construction, which is so little explored and so obscure, and hardly dates back any farther than to the beginning of Impressionism."

"Light in nature creates movement in color. The movement is provided by the relationships of uneven measures, of colors contrasts among themselves and constitutes Reality [In this quote Delaunay is referring to his series 'Window'-paintings', which he had started in 1912]."

"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."

"The woman of City of Paris' [Delaunay painted in 1910 – 1912] sums up the [his] Cubist period.. ..'The Cardiff team' [he painted in 1913] is more significant in the expression of colour, less shattered. The yellow poster in the complete picture contrasts with the blues, greens and orange."

"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?"

"[Pissarro is] one of the three of four great painters of the time. He possesses solidity and breadth of touch, he paints handsomely, following tradition, like the masters."

"This [painting, Jalais Hill, Pontoise] is the modern countryside. One feels that man has passed by, turning and cutting the earth.. .And this little valley, this hill have a heroic simplicity and forthrightness. Nothing would be more banal were it not so grand. From ordinary reality the painter's temperament has drawn a rare poem of life and strength."

"While he warned his friends to avoid the influence of Gauguin, van Gogh and the neo-impressionists, Cézanne liked to speak of his former comrades, praising Renoir and especially Monet, evoking with particular tenderness the "humble and colossal" Pissarro. When he was invited by a group of Aix artists to exhibit with them in 1902 and again in 1906, Cézanne—now over sixty and acclaimed by the new generation as their undisputed leader—piously affixed to his name: pupil of Pissarro. Pissarro never learned of this tribute, just as he never learned that Gauguin, in spite of his sarcasm and longing for independence, had remained conscious of his debt of gratitude."

"It's still misery for - may I say it? - us other impressionists. I tried the overdoors again at Mme. Boivin's, but she says it is her husband and he says it is she who does not want them [buying Pissarro's paintings], even after having read your letter, he did not want me to hang a painting very high so that he might judge the effect. Thus I can do only one thing, which is to send you the enclosed 500 francs in advance on the business that we will do.. .When Miss Rogers comes, I shall show her all my paintings [of Pissarro]. . ..he must buy a painting of yours and not the least expensive. She ought to be able to afford a fine painting at the customary price and she must not let us down. Best regards from me and my wife, also to Mme. Pissarro. When you have something new, let me know."

"Try telling M. Pissarro that trees are not purple, or the sky the colour of butter; that the things he paints cannot actually be seen anywhere in nature.. ..try to explain to M. Renoir that a woman's torso is not a rotten mass of flesh, with violet-toned green spots all over it, indicating a corps in the final stage of decay."

"What dreadful weather always raining the poor flowers were hardly open when the rain killed them our big red poppies didn't even have time to appear before they disappeared and the roses, poor roses it's so sad and what mud, impossible to put your feet out of doors. ..it's so cold that the asparagus haven't come out, nor have the peas or the beans I planted. Most of them have rotted I'll have to plant them all over again. Luckily we are not ready to eat them yet, by the grace of God. Write to us and tell me what you are doing."

"It was then [c. 1873], as I remember that Paul Cézanne began to paint with vertical divisions and Papa adopted the long brush to paint in little comma's. A peasant who had watched them side by side at Auvers, remarked that 'M. Pissarro at working, made little stabs at the canvas ('il piquait'), and M. Cézanne laid on the paint like plaster ('il plaquait')."

"Pissarro wants to achieve delicacy by means of adjustments of nearly like tones; he keeps from juxtaposing two distant tones and does without the vibrant note which such contrast gives, but strives on the contrary to diminish the distance between two tints by introducing into each one of them intermediate elements which he calls 'passage'. But the neo-impressionist technique is based precisely on this type of contrast, for which he feels no need, and on the violent purity of tints which hurts his eye. He has kept of divisionism only the technique, the little dot, whose raison d'etre is exactly that it enables the transcription of this contrast and the conservation of this purity. So it is easy to understand why he [Pissarro] gave up this means, insufficient as it is by itself."

"Your mother asks me to write to you to come and have dinner with us today. Because this is the evening when we celebrate 'la fete de Kipur' and on this solemn occasion the whole family should be together – and tomorrow not work, we should pass that day together."

"Van Gogh] felt a growing desire to see the paintings by the impressionists of which Theo spoke so often in letters. He also began to be preoccupied by the problems of simultaneous contrast and complementaries, which formed the basis of Seurat's theories. ...Theo took it upon himself to introduce his brother to the painters with whom he had dealings. ...Van Gogh's work had hitherto been very dark, with scarcely any color, and he was at first bewildered by the rich coloring and the light which he discovered in the impressionist pictures. But when Pissarro explained to him the theory and technique of his own paintings, van Gogh began to experiment and immediately took to the new ideas with great enthusiasm. He completely changed his palette and his execution, even adopting for a while the neo-impressionist dot, although he used it without systematic ."

"M. Camille Pissarro has painted a field bathed in sunlight, whose forms, colors and reflections are admirably synthesized. It is more field than any field we have ever seen. We cannot understand what interest the brutal paintings of M. Claude Monet and the simplicist works of M. Renoir can have. Both these artists have taken the wrong path."

"The impressionist paintings of Manet, Cezanne and Monsieur Degas, express with exemplary sincerity the new sensations, the new world our eyes experience. Now here the successors to these artists [ Seurat & Pissarro] are trying to perfect the forms created by them. They found in the notes of Delacroix, in the scientific discoveries of Chevreul and Rood, the suggestion for a type of painting in which color impressions are ordered by the combining of little multi-colored brush strokes. But while they were attentive to such improvement of the means, they forgot the true end of art, the sincere and complete expression of vivid sensations. The works of these painters - Pissarro and Seurat are the most notorious - are interesting only as the exercises of highly mannered virtuosos. Their paintings are lifeless for the painters did not strive for sincerity, being too taken up with external formulas."

"If we observe the totality of 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."

"Until the war, as you know, my life was a mess. I wasted it. It was only at l'Estaque, (1870-1871) when I thought things over, that I really understood Pissarro, a painter like myself.. .He was a determined man. I was overcome by a passion for work. It wasn't that I hadn't been working before, I was always working. But what I always missed, you know, was a comrade.."

"I've started two little motifs of the sea, for Monsieur Chocquet [one of them became his painting 'The Sea at L'Estaque'], who had talked to me about it. It's like a playing card. Red roofs against the blue sea.. .There are the olive trees and the pines that always keep their leaves. The sun is so fierce that objects seem to be silhouetted, not only in black or white, but in blue, red, brown, violet. I may be wrong, but this seems to be the very opposite of 'modeling' How happy the gentle landscapists of Auvers would be here, and that [con, or 'bastard'?] Guillemet."