Occupation: Painter Birth: April 20, 1840 Death: July 6, 1916
The Artist submits from day to day to the fatal rhythm of the impulses of the universal world which encloses him, continual centre of sensations, alw….
My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined..
What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art..
The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on..
The artist yields often to the stimuli of materials that will transmit his spirit..
I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left ….
My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible..
I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories..
True art lies in a reality that is felt..
Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas..
It is precisely from the regret left by the imperfect work that the next one can be born..
The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence..
Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious..
Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate..
I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops..
I am repelled by those who voice the word 'nature', without having any trace of it in their hearts..
I am certain about what I will never do - but not about what my art will render..
All my originality consists?in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility..
The good work proceeds with tenacity, intention, without interruption, with an equal measure of passion and reason and it must surpass that goal the ….
While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt..
It is difficult to judge one's contemporaries; perhaps it is impossible to understand them..