Painters From Spain

"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."

"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."

"Cézanne made a cylinder out of a bottle. I start from the cylinder to create a special kind of individual object. I make a bottle — a particular bottle — out of a cylinder."

"Gris confounds expectations of the nature of materials. He usually depicts the glass objects as transparent and the others as opaque but does not hesitate to betray this faithfulness to the properties of objects when formal demands intercede."

"I always pet a dog with my left hand, because if he bit me, I'd still have my right hand to paint with."

"Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind."

"Painting for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with one set of threads as the representational, esthetic element, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural, or abstract element. These threads are interdependent and complementary, and if one set is lacking the fabric does not exist.A picture with no representational purpose is to my mind always an incomplete technical exercise, for the only purpose of any picture is to achieve representation."

"No work which is destined to become a classic can look like the classics which have preceded it. In art, as in biology, there is heredity but no identity with the ascendants. Painters inherit characteristics acquired by their forerunners; that is why no important work of art can belong to any period but its own, to the very moment of its creation. It is necessarily dated by its own appearance. The conscious will of the painter cannot intervene."

"I try to make concrete that which is abstract."

"If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives."

"When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. I'm not crazy about those cocks and asses and flying violinists and all the folklore, but his canvasses are really painted, not just thrown together. Some of the last thing's he's done in Vence [where Matisse painted his late frescos in the chapel] convince me that there's never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has. [Picasso is reacting to Chagall's daughter Ida, 1952]"

"When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso."

"Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive weapon in the defence against the enemy."

"Almost every evening [in their common early-Cubist years, in Paris], either I went to Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other's paintings. A canvas wasn't less both of us fear p. 311"

"You don't need to show them to me [the notes of the complete interview which Christian Zervos], editor of 'Cahiers d'Art' showed Picasso after their conversations at Boisgeloup: Picasso's country place then]. The essential thing in our period of weak morale is to create enthusiasm. How many people have actually read Homer? All the same the whole world talks of him. In this way the Homeric legend is created. A legend in this sense provokes a valuable stimulus. Enthusiasm is what we need most, we and the younger generation. [Boisgeloup, 1935]"

"The painter goes through states of fullness and evacuation. That is the whole secret of art. I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions. People seize on painting to cover up their nakedness. They get what they can wherever they can. In the end I don't believe they get anything at all. They've simply cut a coat to the measure of their own ignorance. They make everything, from God to a picture, in their own image. That is why the picture-hook is the ruination of a painting. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934]."

"Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don't they try to understand the song of the birds? Why do they love a night, a flower, everything which surrounds man, without attempting to understand them? Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves. Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time. Gertrude Stein, overjoyed, told me some time ago that she had finally understood what my picture represented: three musicians. It was a still life!! [Boisgeloup, winter 1934]."

"When we did Cubist paintings [Picasso and Georges Braque, in their early Cubist period in Paris], our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets [a.o. Appolinaire and Cendral] followed our endeavor attentively but they never dictated it to us. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934]."

"Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been deceived... The beauties of the Parthenon, Venuses, Nymphs, Narcissuses are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon."

"I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly."

"How can you expect a beholder to experience my picture as I experienced it? A picture comes to me a long time beforehand; who knows how long a time beforehand, I sensed, saw, and painted it and yet the next day even I do not understand what I have done. How can anyone penetrate my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thought, which have taken a long time to fashion themselves and come to the surface, above all to grasp what I put there, perhaps involuntary."

"It is not what the artist does that counts. But what he is. Cézanne would never have interested me if he had lived and thought like Jaques-Emile Blanche, even if the apple he had painted had been ten times more beautiful. What interests us is the anxiety of Cézanne, the teaching of Cézanne, the anguish of Van Gogh, in short the inner drama of the man. The rest is false. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934]."