French Artist Quotes

I painted the very people who had been present at the interment, all the townspeople.

Gustave Courbet

Change only what you can't live with, but try to accept who you are, and say yes to what makes you unique. Your confidence will make you sexier than any beauty product or accessory you could possibly buy.

As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live.

Look closely at the Japanese; they draw admirably and yet in them you will see life outdoors and in the sun without shadows...

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.

A rapid rendering of a landscape represents only one moment of its existence. I prefer, by insisting upon its essential character, to risk losing charm in order to gain greater stability.

One must have a high opinion of a work of art - not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working.

Cézanne showed us forms living in the reality of light; Picasso gives us a material report of their real life in the mind. He establishes a free, mobile perspective, in such a way that the shrewd mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced an entire geometry.

Art is no longer a purely visual experience.. it is a work of our intellect triggered by nature... the imagination again become the queen of our strengths and we liberate our sensitivity.

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

I do not consider myself a Cubist either because I have come to the conclusion that cubes are not always made for expressing the thought of the brain and of the feeling of the spirit... I capture all these impressions [the visual sensations, Picabia sensed in the modern city] without any hurry to transfer to the canvas. I let them rest in my brain and then, when I'm visited by the spirit of creation, I improvise my paintings just as a musician improvises his music.

Francis Picabia

The means of expression is the optical mixture of tones, of tints (of local color and the illuminating color: sun, oil lamp, gas, etc.), that is, of the lights and of their reactions (shadows) following the laws of contrast, of gradation, of irradiation.

I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that's all I would have asked for, for I know I'm worth as much as they.

The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints.

Nature is richer than I represent it... Nature is so beautiful that when I am not tortured by poverty I am tortured by her splendor. How fortunate we are to be able to see and admire the glories of the sky and earth; if only I could be content just to admire them. But there is always the torment of struggling to reproduce them, the impossibility of creating anything within the narrow limits of painting.

Love is a disease which fills you with a desire to be desired.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There's only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

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

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.

The word "art" means harmony for me. I never speak of mathematics and never bother with the Spirit. My only science is the choice of impressions that the light in the universe furnishes to my consciousness as an artisan which I try, by imposing an Order, and Art, an appropriate representative life, to organize...

Robert Delaunay

The concept of Abstract painting is not a passing abstraction, good only for a few initiates, [but] the total expression of a new generation whose necessities it experiences and to all of whose aspirations it constitutes a response.

Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits. Is not that all an artist should wish for?

Camille Pissarro

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.