Quotes by French Authors - Page 115

I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted
Max Ernst
The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.
Jean Baudrillard
Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.
Pierre Bourdieu
Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.
Rémy de Gourmont
Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.
Albert Camus
The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
Gustave Flaubert
In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.
Marc Chagall
He has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him, please, to give up painting.–--Manet to Monet, on Renoir---
Edouard Manet
... Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion!..."Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust.
Émile Zola
Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.
Muriel Barbery
Every great artist has the sense of provocation.
Arthur Cravan
All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a 'personal share' in the Water Company.
Marcel Proust
But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.
Dominique De Menil
Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.
Paul Gauguin
I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.
Pierre Bourdieu
The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.
Alfred Jarry
An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
Man Ray
You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.
Henri Matisse
Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.
Marc Chagall
I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.
Marcel Duchamp
Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.
Marcel Duchamp
All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.. the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp
Art is a harmony parallel with nature
Paul Cézanne
When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best -- that is inspiration.
Robert Bresson
The Beautiful is always strange.
Charles Baudelaire
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Jean Cocteau
(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.
André Breton
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
Marcel Proust
His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.
Victor Hugo
If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.
Gustave Flaubert
If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art.
Gustave Flaubert
To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.
Marcel Duchamp
Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau
I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.
Gustave Flaubert
A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows
Mati Klarwein
When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.
Max Ernst
Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.
Émile Zola
I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.
Roman Payne
The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.
Marcel Duchamp
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
Paul Cézanne
As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
Gustave Flaubert
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus
I want to be famous but unknown!
Edgar Degas
It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Marcel Duchamp
Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.
Robert Bresson
I’ve decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I’ve been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head.
Roman Payne
Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it.
Edgar Degas
The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
Albert Camus
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
Albert Camus
Art is science made clear.
Jean Cocteau
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Eugène Delacroix
In art as in love, instinct is enough.
Anatole France
[…] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.
Albert Camus