Painters From France

"Life is beautiful, and this work is even more beautiful than life."

"Painting is the most beautiful lie."

"Our poor friend Sisley, alas! will not assist at the final triumph, which is near, and of which he has seen but the dawning: he is gone too soon, and just at the moment when, in reparation for long injustice, full homage is about to be rendered those strong and charming qualities which make him a painter exquisite and original among them all, a magician of light, a poet of the heavens, of the waters, of the trees — in a word, one of the most remarkable landscapists of this day."

"Yesterday Sisley was looking for me everywhere. Madame Latouche told me that he wanted some information about the technique of painting fans. Well, this means my fans are spoken of.. .I only fear one thing: that they will finally say that's all I am good for! [fans!]"

"As for Sisley, I just can't enjoy his work [visiting the Paris Impressionism-exhibition of art-dealer M. Petit, May 1887], it is commonplace, forced, disordered; Sisley has a good eye, and his work will certainly charm all those whose artistic sense is not very refined."

"Picabia felt.. ..that the machine had accomplished its conquest of man.. ..that his diagrams had ceased to inflame the anger of the bourgeois.. ..The Eiffel Tower whose unaesthetic carcass had offered material for so many controversies.. ..was now part of the Parisian landscape. This is why new elements appeared in the painter's work from 1919: collage, the use of solid objects, materials reputed to be non-artistic, like [the use of] Ripolin paint."

"These two pieces ['The Cacodylic Eye' and 'Hot Eyes'] gave rise to more talk than all the other works in the Salon [in Paris, 1921] put together. Here was a fresh paradox: as Francis Picabia's position became more and more definitely independent of the [[w:Dada|Dada group, his personality continued to be more undeniably and obviously the most radically Dadaist of them all."

"Picabia, who at first extracted a profuse plastic inspiration from machines, adopts thereafter [after World War 1.] aspects which are directly photographic; but emptied of their utilitarian signification, Picabia charges them with a new reality, of which he alone is the arbiter, creating an atmosphere of migration which surrealism systematised."

"One does something for six months, a year, and one goes on to something else. That's what Picabia did all his life."

"So Picabia has invented nothing, he just copies. But of course, Picabia copies an engineer's sketch instead of copying apples. Copying apples is something everybody understands, copying a turbine is stupid"

"It is not a recognisable scene [his two paintings 'Dances at the spring', 1912 - Picabia painted the motion and the excitement of a peasant dance while he was on his honeymoon in the countryside of Italy; one version is lost]. There is no dancer, no spring, no light, no perspective, nothing other than the visible clue of the sentiments I am trying to express.. .I would draw your attention to a song of colours, which will bring out for others the joyful sensations and feelings inspired in me on those summer days when I found myself somewhere in the country near the Italian border, where there was a spring in a wonderful garden. A photograph of that spring and that garden would in now way look like my painting 'Dance at a spring' I was shown for the first time at the w:Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1912."

"We are living in the age of the machine. Man made the machine in his own image. She has limbs which act; lungs which breathe; a heart which beats; a nervous system through which runs electricity. The phonograph is the image of his voice; the camera the image of his eye. The machine is his [Picabia's] 'daughter born without a mother'. That is why he loves her. He has made the machine superior to himself. That is why he admires her."

"FRANCIS PICABIA is an imbecile, an idiot, a pickpocket!!! 1921 BUT He saved Arp from constipation! The first mechanical work was created by madam Tzara the Day she put little Tristan into the world, however she didn't know it funny girl Francis Picabia is an imbecilic Spanish professor who has never been dada FRANCIS PICABIA IS NOTHING FRANCIS PICABIS likes the morality of idiots Arp's binocle is Tristan’s testicle FRANCIS PICABIS IS NOTHING!!!!!!!!!! But Arp was Dada before Dada."

"Splendid, it has done me enormous good to finally see and read something in Switzerland that isn't bullshit. All of it is very nice, it is really something; your manifesto expresses every philosophy seeking truth, when there is no truth, only convention."

"Pour que vous aimiez quelque chose il faut que vous l'ayez vu et entendu depuis longtemps tas d'idiots."

"The Cubists want to cover Dada with snow; that may surprise you, but it is so, they want to empty the snow from their pipe to bury DaDa. Are you sure? Positively sure, the facts are revealed by grotesque mouths. They think that Dada can prevent them from practicing this odious trade: Selling art expensively. Art costs more than sausages, more than women, more than everything. Art is visible like God (see Saint-Sulpice). Art is a pharmaceutical product for imbeciles. The table turns thanks to spirit; the paintings and other works of arts are like strong-box tables, the spirit is inside and becomes more and more inspired according to the auction prices. Farce, farce, farce, farce, farce, my dear friends."

"We [ Tristan Tzara and Jean Arp ] found him [Picabia in 1919, in his hotel in Zürich] busy dissecting an alarm-clock.. .Ruthlessly he slashed away at his alarm-clock down to the spring, which he pulled out triumphantly.. ..and soon impressed the wheels, the spring, the hands and other secret parts of the clock on pieces of paper. He tied these impressions together with lines and accompanied the drawing with comments of a rare wit far removed from the world of mechanical stupidity. He was creating antimechanical machines.. ..machines of the unconsciousness.."

"Naturally, form has come to take precedence over color with me, though when I began painting color predominated. Slowly artistic evolution carried from color to form and while I still employ color, of course, it is the drawing which assumes the place of first importance in my pictures."

"'Udnie – I see Again in Memory my Dear Udnie' is no more the portrait of a young girl than 'Edtaonisl' (counterpart of his work 'Udnie'] is the image of a prelate, as we ordinarily conceive of them. They are [both] memories of America, evocations of over there which, subtly set down like musical chords, become representative of an idea, a nostalgia, a fleeting impression."

"For thirty days and thirty nights he remained in a lamentable state.. ..the doctor.. ..to relieve the pain prescribed granulated aconitine, a drug with which it is difficult to get the dosage right and possessing effects that vary according to the patient’s temperament. The doctor warned us to pay great attention to whatever symptoms it might produce and Picabia, apprehensive as always, developed a superstitious fear of the little box, though at the same time attracted by the relief it gave him."

"This visit to America.. ..has brought about a complete revolution in my methods of work.. ..prior to leaving Europe I was engrossed in presenting psychological studies through the medium-ship of forms which I created. Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression."

"Perhaps we'll be able to do beautiful things, since I have a stellar, insane desire to assassinate beauty."

"..giving plastic reality to inner states of the mind."

"The aim of art is to get us to dream, just like music, for it expresses a mood projected onto the canvas, which arouses identical sensations in the viewer."

"I do not consider myself a Cubist either because I have come to the conclusion that cubes are not always made for expressing the thought of the brain and of the feeling of the spirit.. .I capture all these impressions [the visual sensations, Picabia sensed in the modern city] without any hurry to transfer to the canvas. I let them rest in my brain and then, when I'm visited by the spirit of creation, I improvise my paintings just as a musician improvises his music."

"I find my work increasingly more straining, in particular since I have been trying to finish my studies outside."

"[Venice is] somewhat disguised by the artists who usually paint Venice, who have disfigured it by turning it into a city heated by the brightest and hottest sun. On the contrary, Venice, like all luminous cities, has a grey hue, the atmosphere is mild and misty and the sky arrays itself with clouds, just like the sky of our Norman and Dutch regions."

"..my trip to Venice [during 1895] will have been my swansong."

"I regret I no longer have the years of youth needed to create a beautiful series of views of this place, which would in any case be rather difficult to paint due to the monuments, which require a good draughtsmanship and long stays in the city, like Ziem used to do in the past."

"I think I will go back to mahogany [wood, as layer for his paintings], the only stable wood, together with old oak. But mahogany is so heavy. And it has another drawback, it blackens even through the primers if they are not thick enough and applied in several coats."

"Everything that is painted directly and on the spot always has strength, a power, and a vivacity of touch one cannot recover in the studio.. .Three strokes of the brush in front of nature are worth more than two days of work at the easel [in the studio]."

"I am obsessed with the idea of leaving. I must travel, for that would probably relax me."

"I dare not think of the sun-drenched beaches and the stormy skies, and of the joy of painting them in the sea breezes."

"The peasants have their painters, Millet, Jaque, Breton; and that is a good thing.. ..Well and good: but between you and me, the bourgeois walking along the jetty towards the sunset, has just as much right to be caught on canvas, 'to be brought to the light'.. .They too are often resting after a day's hard work, these people who come from their offices and from behind their desks.. .There's a serious and irrefutable argument."

"When I got back [from Le Havre], where I had made several sketches of the harbour exit, I thought of placing the sun in the background. I liked the picture so much that I painted it ten times over, with its three-master and its sun."

"They [the holiday-visitors near Le Havre] love my little ladies [paintings] on the beach, and some people say that there's a thread of gold to exploit there."

"I shall do other things, but I will always be the painter of beaches."

"I have a confession to make. When I came back to.. ..the beach at Trouville.. ..it seeemed nothing more than than a frightful masquerade.. ..If you have passed one month among the people condemned to hard work in the fields, with black bread and water, and you then find that gang of golden parasites with such a triumphant air, you can't help feeling a bit of pity.. ..Fortunately, dear friend, the Creator has spread a little of his splendid and warming light everywhere, and what I reproduce is not so much this world as the element that envelops it."

"I exhaust myself terribly to content the world, and never manage to content myself."

"I am a loner, a daydreamer who has been content to remain in his part of the world and look at the sky. The future will treat me as it does all of us. I am very much afraid it may be oblivion."

"Nature is richer than I represent it.. .Nature is so beautiful that when I am not tortured by poverty I am tortured by her splendor. How fortunate we are to be able to see and admire the glories of the sky and earth; if only I could be content just to admire them. But there is always the torment of struggling to reproduce them, the impossibility of creating anything within the narrow limits of painting."

"To swim in the open sky. To achieve the tenderness of clouds. To suspend these masses in the distance, very far away in the grey mist, make the blue explode. I feel all this coming, dawning in my intentions. What joy and what torment! If the bottom were still, perhaps I would never reach these depths. Did they do better in the past? Did the Dutch achieve the poetry of clouds I seek? That tenderness of the sky which even extends to admiration, to worship: it is no exaggeration."

"Imagine an immense plain.. ..in the middle, a small Gothic chapel surrounded by trees.. ..around that a hundred tents made of white canvas.. ..in open-air kitchens huge pots of boiling soup, incredible ragouts.."

"[I have] done various series of seascapes in different genres, beaches which demonstrated if not great art at least a reasonably faithful reproduction of the people of our age."

"I have too often contented myself with being a hasty improviser: I have spent too much time exploring fleeting effects of the sky and sea."

"If you have had the leisure to acquaint yourself with these meteorological beauties, you will be able to verify, by memory, the exactness of Monsieur Boudin's observations. Hide the legend with your hand, and you will still be able to guess correctly at the season, the hour and the wind. I don’t exaggerate one bit. I've seen it. Ultimately all these fantastically shaped, luminous clouds, this chaotic darkness, these immense expanses of green and pink, each hung and added on to the next, these gaping furnaces, these purple and black satin firmaments, crumpled, rolled or torn, these horizons in mourning or running with molten metal, all these depths, all these splendours, go to my head like an intoxicating liquor or like the eloquence of opium.. ..It's a curious thing, but it never occurred to me once, in front of these liquid or aerial wonders, to complain about the absence of man."

"[dazzled by what Baudelaire called Boudin's 'meteorological beauties']..these studies, so quickly and accurately sketched from what is the most inconstant, the most elusive in its shape and colour, waves and clouds, always bear a marginal note of the date, time and the wind."

"[if other artists would visit Boudin] they would then understand what they [the starting Impressionists in Paris] do not seem to understand, namely the difference between a sketch and a picture.. ..He well knows that all this must be made into a picture by applying poetic impression recalled at will; he is not pretentious enough to claim that his sketches are finished pictures."

"..it was as if a veil had been torn from my eyes. I had understood, I had grasped what painting could be. Boudin's absorption of his work, and his independence, were enough to decide the entire future and development of my painting."

"..I can say from the bottom of my heart that Boudin is not only destined to be a great painter, but can already be considered on a level with the young painters of our new school."