Sculptors

"I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I want only to do simple, very simple art, and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true."

"I do not paint by copying nature. Everything I do springs from my wild imagination."

"I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior."

"I have lingered among the nymphs of Corot, dancing in the sacred wood of Ville-d'Avray."

"[In] painting...all sensations are condensed, everyone...with a single glance [has] his soul invaded by the most profound recollections...everything is summed up in one instant. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses: harmonious colors correspond to the harmonies of sound."

"With what is he concerned? Drawing was at its lowest ebb; it had to be restored. Looking at these nudes, I exclaim, 'Drawing has come back again!' As a man and painter he sets an example. 'Degas' is one of those rare masters who could have had anything he wanted, yet he scorned decorations, honors, fortune, without bitterness, without jealousy."

"Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming."

"If we observe the totality of Camille 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."

"Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?"

"'Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?'"

"Life at Papeete soon became a burden.It was Europe, the Europe which I had thought to shake off — and that under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization.Was I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I had fled?"

"In my figures [of his famous painting 'Vision After the Sermon'] I have achieved a great simplicity, which is both rustic and superstitious... ..In this picture the landscape and the struggle [between Jacob wrestling with the angel ] exist only in the imagination of the people whom the sermon has moved to prayer. That's why there is a contrast between the people, depicted naturally, and the struggle in its unnatural and dis-proportioned landscape."

"I love Brittany; I find wildness and primitiveness there. When my wooden shoes ring on this granite, I hear the muffled, dull, and powerful tone which I try to achieve in painting."

"I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines."

"A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it."

"Don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amide nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result."

"freely and madly; you will make progress.. .Above all, don't sweat over a painting; a great sentiment can be rendered immediately.."

"With this painting, I tried to make everything breathe faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style and great nature with its scream."

"How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible."

"This Cézanne [a 'Still life with Compotier, Fruit and Glass', Cézanne made c. 1879-1882!!], that you ask me for is a pearl of exceptional quality and I already have refused three hundred francs for it; it is one of my most treasured possessions, and except in absolute necessity, I would give up my last shirt before the picture."

"Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will."

"My Dear Mr. Pissarro; - I accept with pleasure the invitation that you and Mr. Degas were kind enough to extend to me. And naturally in that case I shall abide by all the rules that govern your Societe. Based on this decision, I also have the membership dues available. I will probably see you at Miss Latouche's and we will talk about this."

"Their forms had no more influence on me than they did on Matisse. Or Derain. But for them, the masks were sculptures like all others. When Matisse showed me his first African head, he spoke to me of Egyptian art."

"Almost 40 years ago [from 2006] a German official asked Pablo Picasso in front of his painting of the bombing that destroyed Guernica if he had done that. The artist replied, "No: You all did it."

"Picasso... the master... ...being a master: 'I don’t search, I find' ["Je ne cherche pas, je trouve"; a famous quote of Picasso, where he criticizes the 'searching' artists] ... the master, the mastery... ...Producing, producing... He [Picasso!] only knows how to work, can’t do anything else. What lost souls!... The great risk is producing for its own sake. You must never force things. You just have to wait."

"A friend built a modern house and he suggested that Picasso too should have one built. But, said Picasso, of course not, I want an old house. Imagine, he said, if Michelangelo would have been pleased if someone had given him a fine piece of Renaissance furniture, not at all."

"Francis Newton Souza, "Paris Portrait - II" in"

"Picasso was telling Madame C-- that he could paint anywhere and anyhow. That nothing in the world could stop him. That even if he were imprisoned, he would draw on the dust-covered prison walls and on the floor, with his fingers dripped in his own spit. He said he could paint then and there if he wanted to, or if he felt like it."

"Einstein, Picasso, Joyce, gave us our keys; the nature of motion reached us from Proust as from the second-run movie; the Hippodrome girls went down into the eternal lake, Lindbergh had conquered time, Roosevelt had at last spoken openly to us of the demon of our house, and he had named it: fear."

"He's the greatest bull artist in the world—and only occasionally the greatest artist in the world."

"Well some people try to pick up girls And get called assholes This never happened to Pablo Picasso He could walk down your street And girls could not resist his stare and So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole"

"Picasso's great fresco is a monument to destruction, a cry of outrage and horror amplified by the spirit of genius."

"People see Picasso's Guernica. They don't know what that is really about. Guernica was the first bombing of an entire town. The United States backed the real bastards because they were all anti-Red."

"Picasso was one of my favorite studies."

"J. Robert Oppenheimer: [[w:Ernest_Lawrence|[Ernest] Lawrence]], you embrace the revolution in physics, can’t you see it everywhere else? Picasso, Stravinsky, Freud, Marx..."

"Sexuality in art, Picasso’s included, is always an effect of representation: it is produced conventionally, through pictorial signs, and never traceable directly to the artist’s feelings or fantasies about particular women or woman in general. Picasso may be unremittingly macho in his life, but in his work, with rare exceptions, as in the period in the Thirties when he was obsessed with the youthful Marie-Thérèse Walter, his visual construction of gender is interestingly ambiguous."

"Years later he [Picasso] would tell the French writer André Malraux of something else that shaped his [[w:Les Demoiselles d'Avignon|"

"When he [Picasso] paints as an cubist, putting one tone next to another, the arrangement of planes is fine and the result very strong. But those who imitate him achieve nothing worthwhile."

"incluso su firma es una obra de arte."

"even his signature is a work of art."

"As a little female kid in Ohio, It was hard to identify with Picasso: his life with his babes And my life with my cat were rather different."

"Dora Maar is always being referred to as Picasso’s lover, and actually what I want to do is scream and say Dora Maar was an incredible street photographer and Surrealist, and she was amazing. But how often does her name come up in telling his story?"

"..[Picasso had] a depth of understanding and insight into the inwardness of things.. ..doing very exceptional things of a most abstract psychic nature.."

"There's no doubt but that without this liberté, égalité and fraternité there could not have been a Monet, Modigliani, Picasso, or Giacometti."

"...they [Picasso and Georges Braque ] began working together, each understood and accepted the perspectival ambiguity implicit in Cézanne's colored planes, which they saw as acting simultaneously in two different positions: one an illusion, a colored equivalent for the position of the natural object in depth, the other actual, as an area for color on the surface of the picture."

"I have in front of me photographs of all Picasso’s best works. The mere I admire them the further I feel myself removed from all art, it seems so easy, so limited! We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing."

"I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now naturally I am with Picasso."

"Picasso - never at a loss for words: 'What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet...Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it... painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.'"

"Picasso said, “You can have all the perspectives at once!” What a hero. But tell me, are any of those perspectives a woman’s? Well, then I’m not interested."

"[A]lthough the sculpture made by painters is traditionally regarded as a way of giving material presence to two-dimensional imagery, Picasso was much more concerned with dematerilization, and the possibility of creating "non-space," in both mediums. This issue was especially germane to Picasso's sculpture, and it is also a crucial element of his Painter and Model. ...Picasso ...aspired to a very different type of spatial construction, literally creating a visual "nothingness." Such ideas were no longer Cubist ...but rather were ways of creating signs not simply for things but also for paradoxes—for contradictions as well as for assertions, for states of suspension and nonbeing as well as for being."