People From Paris

"There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter."

"The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity."

"It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line.... Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak."

"The Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at home. Indeed, in the integrated spectacle it stands as the model of all advanced commercial enterprises."

"What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false."

"Everyone accepts that there are inevitably little areas of secrecy reserved for specialists; as regards things in general, many believe they are in on the secret."

"With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning."

"No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens....spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon."

"Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always."

"Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea."

"The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: "Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear." The attitude that is demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibly, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances."

"The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption ... is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal."

"Philosophy is at once the power of alienated thought and the thought of alienated power, and as such it has never been able to emancipate itself from theology."

"It took me years to figure out that you don't fall into a tub of butter, you jump for it."

"Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? They have the same enemy—the mother."

"In 1867 and 1868, [Manet] painted 'The Execution of Maximilian'.. .Its composition occupied him for many months. He first tried to discover the circumstances and details of the drama. This is why the three victims are painted so close to the execution squad, to accord with what actually occurred. When he was satisfied with the effect he intended, he began to paint his picture, with the help of the infantry platoon lent to him from a barracks, as models for the firing squad. He also asked two friends to pose for generals Mejía and Miramón, although he altered their heads. Only Maximilian's head was painted in the conventional way, from a photograph. When a first composition and even a second appeared not to match the detailed information he was finally able to obtain, he painted the work again, for the third time, in its final and definitive form [1868-69]."

"..that the soldiers shooting Maximilian were wearing a uniform almost identical to that of our own troops. Fanciful artists give the Mexicans costumes from comic opera. M. Manet, who truly loves truth, has drawn [in his painting 'The Execution of Emperor Maximilian' their real costumes, which closely resemble those of the [[w:Vincennes|Vincennes'] infantrymen. You can understand the horror and anger of the gentlemen censors. What now! An artist dared to put before their eyes the cruel irony: France shooting Maximilian!"

"Like a true Parisien, he [Manet] brings Paris to the country and is incapable of painting a landscape without including well-dressed men and women. He loses interest in nature once it no longer beras the mark of everyday life."

"Our fathers mocked Courbet, and now we go into ecstasies before him. We mock Manet and it will be our children who go into ecstasies before his canvases."

"When our artists give us Venuses, they correct nature, they lie. Manet asked himself why lie, why not tell the truth; he introduced us Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks."

"At the Nouvelle Athènes, as at Guerbois, Manet was the dominating personality. In 1870 Fantin-Latour painted a famous group of some of the faithfuls of the gathered about Manet who sits before his easel. In this picture, the impression is decidedly that of a master surrounded by his pupils. Cézanne alone continued to express his distrust of the extraordinary facility manifested by the painter of the Olympia. "A good job, though," he would say, in speaking of this canvas which... he tried to match with a new Olympia, more modern in treatment. Manet was equally hostile... as evidenced by his remark to Guillemet about Cézanne: "How can you abide such a foul painting [as An Afternoon at Naples]?" I have asked some of the surviving painters of this period how Manet, who copied the Spaniards, and later abandoned his magnificent blacks to follow the wake of Monet and Impressionism, could have been hailed as the leader of a school. "Because," they would reply, "procedure counts for little in art. What made Manet a veritable prophet in his day, was that he brought a simple formula to a period in which the official art was merely fustian and conventionality. ...""

"Manet sees color and light, after which he no longer worries about the rest. When he has made the 'spot of color' on his canvas that a person or an object makes on the surrounding environment, he feels that this is sufficient. Don't ask anything else of him for the moment.. .His present vice is a sort of pantheism in which a [human] head is esteemed no more than a slipper; in which sometimes more importance is given to a bouquet of flowers, than to the physiognomy of a woman.. ..one scarcely pays attention to the head, although it is full grace.. ..it is lost in the modulation of the coloring."

"Manet's exhibition opens on January 5th. [1884 - c. 8 months after he died] - Manet, great painter that he was, had a petty side, he was crazy to be recognized by the constituted authorities, he believed in success, he longed for honors.. .He died without achieving his desire. Duret, Proust [ Antonin Proust ], have been selected to carry out his last wishes and to give a touch of solemnity to the exhibition, they could think of nothing better than to ask the worst officials, Manet's inveterate enemies, to join the organizing committee, and give an official stamp to the ceremony. All the bourgeois gentlemen will be there.. ..all those who loved and defended the great artist [sarcastic remark]: shocking! Away with them! - Even Fantin-Latour, who, it appears, claims that Manet in his last years had degenerated to such a point that he hoped to change his style through contact with those dilettantes [the impressionists ] who produce more noise than art! That's pretty strong, but not surprising!"

"I am sending you 'Le Figaro' [daily Paris' newspaper], you will read M. Wolff's stupid piece on our poor friend Manet [who died a few days earlier]. I do not have to tell you how indignant I am at the manner in which this gentleman treats the pure-bred artist who shed such glory on this country in an epoch dominated by commercialism. The article in 'L'Intransigeant' is very fine, very just, and worthy of its subject, but the artist's works tell us more about him than anything the journalists can write."

"His agony was horrible, death in one of its most appealing forms, that I once again witnessed at a very close range. If you add to these almost physical emotions my old bond of friendship with Edouard, an entire past of youth and work suddenly ending, you will know that I am devastated."

"The stories of the Manet brothers [Edouard Manet the painter, and his brother: Morisot's future husband Eugène Manet ] tell about all the horrors we are likely to face ([in Paris, during the war between France and Germany] are almost enough to discourage even the bravest of us. [But] you know they always exaggerate, and at the moment they see everything in the blackest possible light."

"..once started, nothing could stop him; from the skirt he went to the bust, from the bust to the head, from the head to the background. He cracked a thousand jokes, laughed like a madman, handed me the palette, took it back; finally by five o'clock in the afternoon we had made the best caricature you have ever seen."

"He [Manet] begged me to go straight up and see his painting ['Le Balcon', exhibited on the Salon of Paris of 1869; Berthe Morisot was Manet's model for the painting], as he was rooted to the spot. I've never seen anyone in such a state, one minute he was laughing, the next insisting his picture was dreadful; in the next breath, sure it would be a huge success."

"It was not until 1869 that I met him [Manet] again, but this time, we became friends immediately. From the first meeting, he invited me to join him every evening in a café of the 'Batignolles' where he and his friends would gather to talk at the end of a day spent at their studios. I would meet there, Fantin-Latour and Cézanne, Degas - who arrived shortly afterwards from Italy, the art critic Duranty, Emile Zola who was just starting-off in the literary world and a number of others. I would take Sisley, Bazille and Renoir. There was nothing more interesting than these discussions with their perpetual differences of opinion. Our mind and souls were stimulated.. ..One would always leave, all the better immersed, the will stronger, our thinking more defined and clear."

"Manet... may not have esteemed the efforts of Cézanne and Renoir, but Monet was a different matter. Seven years earlier he had disdained [Monet's] The Garden of the Princess... Slowly, however, he had come to accept—largely on the evidence of Monet's canvases—that... [w]hat Baudelaire called "modernity" could be captured in situ. He had painted en plein air... [b]ut he seems to have come to the basin in the summer of 1874 with the express aim of abandoning... the "false shadows" of the studio in favor of joining Monet in the "true light" of the outdoors. For the first time... Manet tried to catch the effects of natural light... and, following Monet's lead, replaced the somber colors and sharp contrasts... with a lighter palette of blues, yellows and ochers, which he added... in strokes of pure, unmixed color. He even painted, as a kind of tribute, Claude Monet and his Wife on his Floating Studio... The lighter tones and saturated colors of both Boating and Argenteuil show how Manet had... stepped resolutely into the sunshine. ...Visiting Monet's house ...one afternoon, he began painting The Monet Family in their Garden at Argenteuil. ...Monet ceased gardening at some point ...and began working on Manet Painting in Monet's Garden... Hardly had he begun painting than Renoir arrived... borrowed paints and a canvas from Monet and started... Monet and her Son... The day ended with Manet and Renoir making gifts of their paintings to Monet."

"Le Bain... has proved as defiant in execution as it had been in conception... [H]e abandoned , a technique perfected by Leonardo da Vinci and exploited by successful Salon painters... Manet... did away with most... half-tones—the transitions between highlights and shadows—such that his figures... looked harshly lit. ...Since an optical illusion makes light colors advance and dark ones recede, most artists painted a dark undercoat... la sauce.., a transluscent mixture of linseed oil, turpentine and often bitumen... Manet... after The Absinthe Drinker, working instead on canvases treated with off-white primers... gave Le Bain a greater luminosity... at the expense of... spatial recession [depth]. ...Painters were usually trained to create a subtle relief on the surface... Dark colors, such as... for shadows, were spread very thin while highlights were "loaded" or "impasted"... in thick layers... [T]ogether with the darker undercoat... whites would advance and the darks retreat. ...Manet boldly disregarded this practice in Le Bain... Though a few... as Gèricault and Courbet, had... experimented with this technique, the boldness of Manet's application witnessed... a new direction in art."

"When I returned to Paris, in January 1882, the first visit I paid was to Manet. He was then painting 'The Bar at the Folies-Bergère' and the model, a pretty girl, was posing behind a table laden with food and bottles. He recognized me immediately, held out his hand and said: 'It's a most irritating, forgive me, I have to remain seated, I've got a bad foot. Do sit down. I took a chair behind him and watched him work. Although he painted his pictures from the model, Manet did not copy nature at all; I became aware of his magisterial simplifications; the head of his woman had a sense of depth, but the modelling was not obtained with the means that nature offered him. Everything was abridged; the tones were clearer, the colours more vivid, the values closer, the tones more varied.."

"The bright blue water continues to exasperate a number of people [in Manet's painting 'Boating', he painted in the Summer of 1874]... Manet has never, thank heavens, known those prejudices, stupidly maintained in the academies. He paints, by abbreviations, nature as it is and as he sees it. The woman, dressed in blue, seated in a boat, cut off by the frame as in certain Japanese prints, is well placed in broad daylight, and her figure energetically stands out against the oarsman dressed in white, against the vivid blue of the water. These are indeed pictures the like of which, alas, we shall rarely find in these tedious Salon."

"In the early 1860s... [Manet] was still battling traditional art by including it in his compositions—in order to undermine it. He was wrenching the past into the present not only by manipulating it, but also by disclosing the signs of his manipulation. This is true of '... of 1862. and Olympia... painted the same year as the Déjeuner (but not exhibited until 1865). His witty game required both past ideals and contemporary realities, each employed to mock the other. He committed himself to neither and, like Offenbach, he challenged authority with the instruments of irony and parady."

"..in his [Manet's] final major Salon piece 'The Bar at the Folies-Bergère', working-class women are represented in juxtoposition to bourgeois male customers.. ..the woman represented in 'The Bar at the Folies-Bergère' were employed not merely to serve and encourage the purchase of drinks, but were themselves objects of consumption as prostitutes. 'The Bar at the Folies-Bergère' is thus a representation of the potential consumption of femininity (the barmaid as prostitute) as well as being itself as [an?] object of visual consumption, activating desire in the viewer through the production of woman as spectacle."

"The leader, the hero of Realism, is now Manet. His partisans are frenzied and his detractors timid. It would seem that, if one refuses to accept Manet, one must fear being taken for a philistine, a bourgeois, a Joseph Prudhomme [JP, created by caricaturist Henri Monnier, was a personification of the vulgar self satisfied bourgeois who grew up under the July Monarchy], an idiot who cares for nothing but miniatures and painted porcelain[-]one examines oneself with a sort of horror[-] to discover whether one has become obese or bald, incapable of understanding the audacities of youth."

"An artist is a deception.. ..an artist is only an artist at certain times, by an effort of will.. ..the study of nature is a cliché; isn't Manet the living proof? For although he prided himself on slavishly copying nature, he was the most inadequate painter in the world, not making a single brushstroke without reference to the old masters; for instance, he refrained from drawing fingernails because Frans Hals did not draw them."

"That Manet, as soon as I started painting dancers, he did them. [Degas' reaction later, after Manet said Degas: 'I was painting modern Paris while you were still painting Greek athletes'. [quoted by George Moore, circa 1879]."

"I put it [a still life painting of a pear, made by Manet] there on the wall, next to Ingres' Jupiter; for a pear like that would overthrow any god."

"Let's not eliminate nature. Too bad if we fail. You see, in his 'Dejeuner sur l'herbe', Manet ought to have added - I don't know what - a touch of this nobility (of the Renaissance painter Giorgione), whatever it is in this picture that conveys heaven to our every sense. Look at the golden flow of the tall woman, the other one's back.. .They are alive and they are divine, (quote after 1898)."

"Here you are, put this somewhere, on your work table. You must always have this before your eyes.. ..It's a new order of painting. Our Renaissance starts here.. ..There's a pictorial truth in things. This rose and this white [in the painting 'Olypmpia' of Manet] lead us to it by a path hitherto unknown to our sensibility, (quote after 1897)."

"He [Manet] hits of the tone.. ..but his work lacks unity and temperament too."

"M. Manet has never seen any Francisco Goya's, M. Manet has never seen any El Greco's.. ..that may seem unbelievable to you, but it's the truth. I myself have been filled with wonder and stupefaction at these mysterious coincidences.. ..He's heard so much about his 'pastiches' of Goya, that he is now trying to see some of Goya's paintings.. ..Every time you try to pay Manet a service, I'll be grateful.. ..quote my letter or at least several lines of it. What I'm telling you is the naked truth."

"We have reached that delightful moment when 'Impressionism' is about to be born, when its light (the formula for which has yet to be found) is still only a hint, a caress, in the silvery snows of Monet or in the pale skies of Pissarro. Ah, how one would like to prolong this moment of hesitation for ever, this moment of transition, when transparent blue shadows are putting black shadows to flight and bitumen disappears!"

"You must always remain master of the situation and do what you please. No school tasks, ah, no! no tasks!"

"In a face, look for the main light and the main shadow; the rest will come naturally — it's often not important. And then you must cultivate your memory, because Nature will only provide you with references. Nature is like a warden in a lunatic asylum. It stops you from becoming banal."

"I am influenced by everybody. [and Willem de Kooning admitted: 'every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there']."

"One must be of one's time and paint what one sees."

"In art, conciseness is both a necessity and a luxury; a concise man provokes thought, a wordy man provokes boredom; always move towards conciseness. In the figure, look for the main light and the main shadow, the rest will come of itself: often, it amounts to very little."