French Artist Quotes

Henri Matisse

Claude Monet

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Paul Gauguin

Pierre Auguste Renoir

Edgar Degas

Paul Cézanne

The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.

No one could have less faith in the absolute and definitive importance of the work created by man, because I believe that this world is nothing but a dream...

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there – even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Robert Doisneau

What is called a sincere work [of art] is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas.

Georges Rouault

I cannot now change my style, which I acquired, as you can imagine, by dint of labour.

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

If all creation rests upon a passion, it is for me also an act of love and an attempt to discover in myself an inner world.

Constantine Andreou

One can pass on responsibility, but not the discretion that goes with it.

Benvenuto Cellini

No piece of art can depict feelings if a piece of reality is not included in it.

At first, I thought I had found in this second figure [a bronze Orpheus, Zadkine made just after his return from New York, in 1944] the perfect solution, but a surprise awaited me. One day my coal merchant delivered to me, here in my studio, some wood for heating; among these logs I found a rudimentary but completely mysterious wooden figure of a man. He seemed to be walking in great strides, his torso suggested by only two simple boards which, in their structure, were very much like an ancient lyre. I immediately began working on a new 'Orpheus', in which the instrument had truly become part of the man.

If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's theorems.

You can love a woman. To admire her is hard. You are not dealing with something important.

What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones.

From the vast expanses of its surface waters to its beaches and marshes and tidelands and mangrove swamps, from its many thousands of miles of rocky shores to its deepest and darkest abyss, the sea produces life in fantastic abundance.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and is taking advantage of my notoriety?

Remark recorded by Théodore Duret at the Paris Salon of 1865

I make myself into a new image in order to produce new images.

There are many more languages than we think: and man betrays himself more often than he desires. How things speak! - but there are very few listeners, so that man can only, as it were, chatter on in the void when he pours out his confessions: he squanders his 'truths', as the sun does its light. - Isn't it rather a pity that the void has no ears?

Pierre Klossowski

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

Divisionism is a complex system of harmony, an aesthetic rather than a technique.
The point is only a means.
To divide is to seek the power and harmony of color, through representing colored light by pure elements, and through employing the optical mixture of these pure elements, separated and proportioned according to the essential laws of contrast and graduation.

There is no game of chance more hazardous than marriage.

Jacques-Louis David

There is no "worst" in what is new. Everything that has existed is bad, or else no one would have improved upon it by revolution and change.

I love the abandonment to impulse, I act from impulse only, and I love to madness that others do the same by me.

Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse

Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not. They are pre-psychological expanses, red, for example, presupposing a site radiating heat... All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

The grand manner consists of four elements: subject or theme, concept, structure, and style. The first requirement, fundamental to all the others, is that the subject and the narrative be grandiose, such as battles, heroic actions, and religious themes.

Nicolas Poussin