What is the modern conception of pure art? Creating a suggestive magic containing both the subject and the object, the world around the artist, and the artist himself.
Baudelaire, poet/writer,
What I should like to write is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style.
Gustave Flaubert, writer, 1852
The close of the past century was full of a strange desire to get out of form…I now feel the impulse to create form.
W.B Yeats, writer, 1903
It was-truly-like an opening world
Ford Maddox Ford, painter, on the years before 1914
I must tell you as a painter I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature, but with me the realisation of my sensations is almost painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I do not have the magnificent richness of colouring that animates Nature. Here on the bank of the river the motifs fly…
Cezanne 1906, a few weeks before he dies (Impressionism)
I had shown two studies by Cezanne to a client. And right away he said: ‘Don’t want any of those things with all the empty spaces..’
Ambroise Vollard, highly influential Parisian art dealer, art publisher
We now come to the most stupefying room of this salon which is already rich in sources of astonishment. Here, any description, any account, like any comment, all become impossible, as what we are shown here has-aside from the materials used-no relation to painting whatsoever; Here we find nothing more than formless coloured streaks and dabs; blue, red yellow, green, stains of colour juxtaposed any which way, the crude and naïve games of a child who is experimenting with a box of coloured pencils or paints that he has been given as a present.
A review of the Fauves room at the Salons des Refuses, by ‘Journal de Rouen’, 20th November 1905, (treasured by Vlaminck)
What I couldn’t do in life, except by throwing a bomb-which would have led me to the scaffold-I have tried to achieve in art, by using pure colour to a maximum.
Maurice de Vlaminck, painter, (Fauvism)
If I write it is to infuriate my fellow: to get talked about and make a name for myself. When one has a name, one has success with women and in business
Arthur Craven, ex-boxer and raconteur, c.1907
On African tribal wood carvings:
Abstract art properly defined, is drawn from nature, an abstract of nature…it could thus be made to apply to all that large field of art which lie beneath the non-representational and the naturalistic-a field of which includes almost all African art.
William Fagg/Margaret Plass, African sculpture: An Anthology
On Cubism: Let the picture imitate nothing and let it present nakedly its raison d’etre’.
Metzinger and Gleizes, 1912, (Cubism)
Cubism? There is no such thing as Cubism..
Picasso, non-Cubist painter
Some might be tempted to think I have something against Cubism. Not at all: I prefer the eccentricities of even a banal mind to the boring, predictable work of a bourgeois imbecile.
Arthur Craven, ‘Oscar Wilde’s nephew’
The function of Art is to disturb. Science re-assures.
Georges Braque, painter, Sketchbook, 1948
I want nothing but emotion given off (by the painting)…There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality.
Picasso
Painting is stronger than I am, it can make me do whatever it wants.
Picasso, a note written in the back of one of his sketchbooks
When discussing his often difficult relationship with Picasso during the Cubist period:
..It was a little like rope-work in mountain climbing..
Georges Braque, ‘not Madame Picasso’
For a portrait to be a work of art, it must not resemble the sitter…the painter has within himself the landscapes he wishes to produce. To depict a figure, one must not paint that figure; one must paint its atmosphere.
Umberto Boccioni, Technical Manifesto of Futurist painting, 1910
War camouflage was the work of the cubists: it was also, if you like, their revenge.
Jean Paulhan, writer
On the outbreak of World War I: On that day, lightening struck the hearts of men
Joseph Delteil, writer
Picasso was the first person to produce figurative paintings which overturned the rules of appearance; he suggested appearance without using the usual codes, without respecting the representational truth of form, but using a breath of irrationality instead, to make representation stronger and more direct; so that form could pass directly from the eye to the stomach without going through the brain.
Francis Bacon, painter, discussing his influences in the 1960’s
What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race.
Amedeo Modigliani
Seek the strongest color effect possible..the content is of no importance.
Henri Matisse, painter, (Fauvism)
Art cannot be modern.. Art is primordially eternal.
Egon Schiele, painter (Vienna Succession with Gustave Klimt)
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