Painters From France

"In the years that followed [i.e. 1905 onwards], Derain made a great series of compositions with life-size figures. Some of them he exhibited in the ['Salon des] Indépendants' – a bullfight, a painting with bathers. The bathers were luckily bought and remain preserved for us. Derain burnt all the others in 1908, you see. Not even photographs of them are in existence. Thus the most important original material for the investigation of his development in 1907 is missing.. .[During the 1905–1907 period] he pursued an entirely different path."

"Neither Derain, nor myself, were what was conveniently called in this period the bohemians, the bad men: we were simply nonconformists, the outsiders"

"The Japanese see things that way. They don't paint sunlight, they don't cast shadows that perplex one and falsify the true shape of things. The Egyptian figures have simplicity, dignity, directness, unity; they express motion almost as if by a conventional formula, like writing itself, so direct it is. So I seek a logical method of rendering my idea."

"These Africans being primitive, uncomplex, uncultured, can express their thought by a direct appeal to the instinct. Their carvings are informed with emotions. So Nature gives me the material with which to construct a world of my own, governed, not by literal limitations, but by instinct and sentiment."

"What, after all, is a pretty woman? It's a mere subjective impression – what you yourself think of her. That's what I paint, another kind of beauty of my own."

"[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."

"There is often more psychic appeal in a so-called ugly woman than there is in a pretty one; and, in my ideal, I reconstruct her to bring that beauty forth in terms of line or volume."

"If I paint a girl in the sunlight, it's the sunlight I am painting, not the real girl; and even for that I should have the sunlight on my palette. I don't care for an accidental effect of light and shade, a thing of 'mere charm'."

"There is only one kind of painting: landscape. It is the most difficult. It has also, I believe, the most simple kind of composition. Because no one can stop us from imagining the world in the way that pleases us most."

"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."

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

"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.."

"I have found a boat, small with two sails, that would make me happy. Unfortunately, I need one hundred francs.. ..and I haven't got it! If you want, I could give you two canvases which you could sell, just to make you some many and you could give me the hundred francs.. .Kahnweiler [Paris' art-dealer] is the only one who gives me money, and just what we need to live on."

"[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."

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

"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.."

"[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."

"[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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Daumier highlighted socioeconomic distinctions in the newly modernized urban environment in a group of paintings executed around 1864 that illustrate the experience of modern rail travel in first-, second-, and third-class train compartments. In 'The First-Class Carriage', there is almost no physical or psychological contact among the four well-dressed figures, whereas 'The Third-Class Carriage' is tightly packed with an anonymous crowd of working-class men and women."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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!"

"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."

"'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."

"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."

"Paul Sérusier's story was exciting. From his summer vacation in Pont-Aven, in Brittany [Summer 1888], where he had briefly encountered Paul Gauguin, he had brought back a small landscape painted under Gauguin's direction. Gauguin had asked him, (as Sérusier told his Nabis friends October 1888 in Paris): 'How do you see these trees? They are yellow. Well then, put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue? So render it with pure-ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermilion.'"

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

"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"

"In Rouen, I bought a copy of Champfleury's 'Histoire de la Caricature', an invaluable book with illustrations by Daumier. In it the whole story of Daumier is told. Looking through this book you see at once that Daumier was the man his drawings show him to be, a convinced, a true republican. And you feel in his drawings the sweep of a great artist who marched towards his goal but did not cease to be an artist in the most profound sense, so that even without legends and explanations his drawings are beautiful."

"Brother Nabi - to a philosophical letter [he received from Denis ] a philosophical answer.. .[but] first of all, forgive the incoherence of my last letter. I am feeling remorsed about what I told you about Gauguin. There is no humbug about him, not, at any rate, with respect to those he knows are capable of understanding him. I have lived with him for the past fifteen days in the closest association [in Pont-Aven]. We share a room. I have told him what I dislike about his work; what I said can be regarded as a sally against the ingrained habits of contemporary painting. But let's go back to our philosophy.. ..(a:) Immutable principles exist in art. There is a science, namely aesthetics, that teaches them. Today this science is dead. It was alive in the days of the beatific primitives..."

"What part should nature play in a work of art? Where should the line be drawn? And from the standpoint of practical procedure - should one work directly from nature or merely study and remember it? Too much freedom frightens me, poor imitator that I am, and yet my head is filled with so many images evoked by what I see around me at all times that nature seems insignificant and banal."

"These principles [in art], forgotten over time, were rediscovered by a few geniuses such as Rembrandt, Vélazquez, Délacroix, Corot and Manet. These principles can be deduced from innate principles within us, ideas of harmony, common to all unspoiled men.. ..these are the laws of harmony and color."

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

"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."

"[..according to Gauguin ] the impression of nature must be wedded to the aesthetic sentiment which chooses, arranges, simplifies and synthesizes. The painter ought not to rest until he has given birth to the child of his imagination.. ..begotten in a union of his mind with reality. Gauguin insisted on a logical construction of composition, on a harmonious apportionment of light and dark colors, the simplification of forms and proportions, so as to endow the outline's of forms with a powerful and eloquent expression.. ..He also insisted upon luminous and pure colors."

"I respect personality; it is an abstract entitity. A certain number of lines and colors constituting a harmony, can be arranged infinite ways. The literary side in painting is a second element of personality; it may exist – it must exist – but only as a pretext; if it dominates, one fall into the realm of illustration. You see that I do not wish to legislate personality."