Auguste Rodin Quotes
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Painting, literature, music, are more closely allied than the public usually admit. They are merely different means of expression.
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The sculptor must learn to reproduce the surface, which means all that vibrates on the surface: spirit, soul, love, passion - life. ... Sculpture is thus the art of hollows and mounds, not of smoothness, or even polished planes.
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Drawing is but a means to an end. One imagines that drawing can be beautiful-it is not the lines which are beautiful, but what they signify, the sentiments which they translate. In reality, there is no such thing as beauty in drawing, or color beauty lies alone in revelation of truth.
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I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I do not need.
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No sudden inspiration can replace the long years of arduous labor necessary to train the eye to observe, the hand to reproduce.
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It is too evident that if the drawing is bad, the color false, the deepest emotion must fail to express itself.
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Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
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I am not a rhetorician, but a man of action.
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If in looking at a picture you have been profoundly moved by it, but have not noticed the color or drawing, you may be sure that they are technically perfect.
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A critic recently denounced my Victor Hugo, declaring the treatment belonged not to sculpture but to music. He said it reminded him of a symphony by Beethoven. Heaven grant that he spoke the truth!
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The biblical times have come back again, the great invasions of the Medes and the Persians. Has the world, then, reached the point where it deserves to be punished for the egotistical epicureanism in which it has slumbered?
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Of course, there is drawing in art as there is style in literature. Style that is mannered, that strains after effect, is bad. No style is good except that which effaces itself in order to concentrate all the attention of the reader upon the subject treated, upon the emotion rendered.
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But to-day, mankind believes itself able to do without Art. It does not wish to meditate, to contemplate, to dream; it wishes to enjoy physically. The heights and the depths of truth are indifferent to it; it is content to satisfy its bodily appetites. Mankind to-day is brutish - it is not the stuff of which artists are made.
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Nobody does good to men with impunity.
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I admit, that the commonplace man can never, by copying, produce a masterpiece; he notes every detail but he does not really see - the artist penetrates below the surface into the very heart of nature; for him everything is beautiful because beauty in art consists of character.
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To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature.
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Were this thoroughly understood, industrial art would be entirely revolutionized - industrial art, that barbarous term, an art which concerns itself with commerce and profit.
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The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who wishes to attract praise to his style, resemble the soldier who plumes himself on his unif onn but refuses to go into battle, or the farmer who polishes the ploughshare instead of driving it into the earth.
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I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age.
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Barye... did not teach us much ; he was always worried and tired when he came, and always told us that it was very good.