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A fat lot of good it would do if I told you that Titian's courtesans make you want to caress them. Some day you'll see the Titians for yourself, and if they have no effect on you, then you don't understand the first thing about painting. And I wouldn't be able to help you.
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I've spent my life making blunders.
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I just keep painting till I feel like pinching. Then I know it's right.
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I have no rules and no methods... no secrets.
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Why should beauty be suspect?
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You don't talk about paintings, you look at them.
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The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.
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There isn't a single person or landscape or subject which doesn't possess some interest, although it may not be immediately apparent. When a painter discovers this hidden treasure, other people are immediately struck by its beauty.
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An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature.
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The most important element in a picture cannot be defined.
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I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn't turn out that way, I add more reds and other colors until I get it.
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I have a horror of the word 'flesh', which has become so shopworn.Why not 'meat'whilethey're about it? What I like is skin, a young girl's skin that is pink and shows that she has a good circulation.
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People will keep on taking them for theorists, when all they wanted was to paint in gay, bright colours, like the old masters.
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What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.
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Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.
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On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette.
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It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.
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What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.
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Nothing costs so little, goes so far, and accomplishes so much as a single act of merciful service.
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I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.
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About 1883 something like a break occurred in my work. I had reached the end of 'impressionism,' and I had come to realize that I did not know how to paint or draw.
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You haven't time to think about the composition. In working directly from nature, the painter ends up by simply aiming at an effect, and not composing the picture at all; and he soon becomes monotonous.
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If the professional schools should succeed in producing skilled workers trained in the technique of their craft, nothing could be done with them if they had no ideal.
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Be a good craftsman; it won't stop you from being a genius.