LIFE QUOTES BY THE FAMOUS ARTISTS AND GREAT PAINTERS - a selection
Here you find selected life quotes by famous artists of modern art (click the name you want to read):
KAREL APPEL - HANS / JEAN ARP - MAX BECKMANN - JOSEPH BEUYS - GEORGES BRAQUE - CARLO CARRA - PAUL CEZANNE - MARC CHAGALL - GIORGIO DE CHIRICO
artist KAREL APPEL, his life quotes
* The wastelands belong to my youth. When I was young (before 1940) I played in the outskirts of the city (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), watching the cranes at the harbor. There was no law but garbage, grass and wildflowers like boys and girls, rough, hot and sexual and full of hidden pleasures. Life and death are overlapping in the wastelands like in my paintings.
* One of my first sculptures was made of bicycle parts. I was living at that time (c. 1947) in an attic in the red light district of Amsterdam. I started to work without any specific materials; I was looking in the street, like when I was a boy in the garbage cans, for ropes, wires and paint.
* Every day I have to be awake to escape… …The whole world is sleepy. It is a real fight to be awake, to see everything new, for the first time in your life.
* After the war (after 1945) everybody wanted to make money again and live a good life, and art was seen as an illness. If you said you were an artist people stepped out of your way. Nobody cared. Only a few came to my studio and gave me cigarettes in exchange for some paintings. I was living like a bum - homeless and hungry. Then a friend provided me with that attic, and I slept between the sculptures.. …there was actually no floor. I put in some wooden planks I had stolen from the piers.
* In the fifties I had the angst (fear) to survive materialistically. In a city like Paris (1950′s), it was a battle, la guerre. I painted with a knife and I called the results ‘human landscapes’, abstract landscapes with human faces here and there. Today (1990′s) I can do without fight or struggle; every brush stroke now is ready, goes by itself… …I am not fighting anymore. I am floating, surfing on the wind.
(more of his life quotes you can find in artist quotes, Karel Appel)
artist HANS ARP, his life quotes
* Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While guns rumbled in the distance, we (the Dada-artists) sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men’s minds.
* There (in the Bauhaus of Schwitters, c. 1920, fh) we glued together our paper pictures,, and as I tossed away one of my glued-together works one morning, Schwitters asked, ‘You don’t like it? Can I have it?’ – ‘What do you want with this failed piece of toast?’ Schwitters took a good look at it and said, ‘I’ll put what’s on top on the bottom, I’ll stick a little Merz nose in this corner and I’ll sign the bottom Kurt Schwitters.’ And, yes indeed, this collage became a wonderful picture by Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters was a wizard, just as Hokusai was a wizard…
* I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris) because their attitude revolted against ‘art’ and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada’s. (1929)
* Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill, I would guillotine it. My collages came undone, they became blistered. I then introduced death and decay in my compositions. I reacted (c 1932) by avoiding any precision from one day to another. Instead of cutting the paper, I would tear it with my hands.
(more of his life quotes you can find in artist quotes, Hans / Jean Arp)
artist MAX BECKMANN, his life quotes
* Yesterday we came across a cemetery (World War 1, c. 1915) that had been completely destroyed by shellfire. The graves had been blown up, and the coffins lay about in the most uncomfortable positions. The shells had unceremoniously exposed their distinguished occupants to the light of day, and bones, hair, and bits of clothing could be seen through cracks in the burst-open coffins.
* I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture.
* Sept. 1944, Sat: made 5 sketches, two ‘Departures’ (became later his famous triptych, fh), ‘Yellow Lillies’, ‘Negerbar’, and ‘Two Women’. ‘Frankfurt Train Station’ is finished…. …already all kinds of nonsense boils up within me demanding a form - perhaps the story of David - or something, we’ll see! // Wed. Oct 25, 1944: furiously (I) finished ‘Pink woman with Playing Cat’ - sketched six or seven Caliente paintings…
* Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam (c. 1943), an enormous old tobacco storeroom is again filled in my imagination with figures from the old days and from the new, like an ocean moved by storm and sun and always present in my thoughts. Then shapes become beings and seem comprehensible to me in the great void and uncertainty of the space which I call god.
(more of his life quotes you can find in artist quotes, Max Beckmann)
artist JOSEPH BEUYS, his life quotes
* After I am dead I would like people to say: “Beuys understood the historical situation. He altered the course of events”. I hope in the right direction.
* When I was seven or eight, I got interested in research already done. I had teachers who were also close to this interest and I had a kind of laboratory all the time until fifteen years of age, when I developed really and factually a laboratory which was involved with physics, chemistry, zoology, botany and such things
* I saw (as a young child) the relationship between people, I saw their thoughts, I saw their kind of expressionistic behaviour in every difficult situation. I saw all the time the unclearness in the psychological condition of the people. You know, that was the time of the Roaring Twenties and I felt that this expressionistic behavior, this unformed quality of soul power and emotion of life, I saw it, that it would lead to a kind of catastrophe. That was my general feeling (during his youth, fh).
* The only hope I had was when I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.
(more of his life quotes you can find in artist quotes, Joseph Beuys)
GEORGES BRAQUE, his life quotes
* At that time (c. 1907/08) I was very friendly with Picasso. Our temperaments were very different, but we had the same idea. Later on it became clear, Picasso is Spanish and I am French; as everyone knows that mean a lot of differences, but during those days the differences did not count… …We were living in Montmarte, we used to meet every day, we used to talk… …In those years Picasso and I said things to each other that nobody will ever say again, that nobody could say any more… …It was rather like a pair of climbers roped together.
* When we were so friendly with Picasso, there was a time when we had difficulty in recognizing our own pictures. Later, when the revelation went deeper, differences appeared. Revelation is the one thing that cannot be taken from you. But before the revelation took place, there was still a marked intention of carrying painting in a direction that could re-establish the bond between Picasso and ourselves.
* I started to introduce letters into my pictures (c. 1911/12). These were forms which could not be deformed., because, being two-dimensional, they existed outside three-dimensional space; their inclusion in a picture allowed a distinction to be made between objects which were situated in space and those which belonged outside space.
(more of his life quotes you can find in artist quotes, Georges Braque)
CARLO CARRA, his life quotes
* Boccioni, Russolo and I all met in the Porta Vittoria café (Milan), close to where we all lived, and we enthusiastically outlined a draft of our appeal (the Manifesto of Futurist Painters, late February 1910, fh). The final version was somewhat laborious; we worked on it all day, all three of us and finished it that evening with Marinetti and the help of Decio Cinti, the group’s secretary.
* The idea for this picture (‘Uscita dal teatro / Leaving the theatre’, c. 1910, fh came to me one winter’s night as I was leaving La Scala. In the foreground there is a snow sweeper with a few couples, men in top hats and elegant ladies. I think that this canvas, which is totally unknown in Italy, is one of the paintings where I best represented the concept that I had the time about my art.
* I was walking along the Boulevard des Italiens (Febr. 1912, during a group exhibition of Futurist painters in Paris, fh), when, as I passed in front of a newspaper stand, I had the pleasant surprise of seeing on the front page of the Journal the reproduction of my picture ‘The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli’ (c. 1910)
* Stumbling into the midst of anarchists, barely 18 years old, I too started to dream of ‘inevitable changes inhuman society, free love, etc.
(more of his life quotes you can find in artist quotes, Carlo Carrà)
PAUL CEZANNE, his life quotes
* I’ve ripped it (an early portrait he made c. 1861 of his friend the writer Zola which Cezanne didn’t accept as a good result, fh) to pieces; your portrait, you know. I tried to work on it this morning, but it went from bad to worse, so I destroyed it…
* At Aix I am not free; whenever I want to return to Paris, I always have to put up a fight, and, although your (his father’s, fh) opposition may not be absolute, I am always deeply affected by the resistance that I encounter from you. I sincerely want my liberty unfettered… …; it would give me great pleasure to work in the Midi, some aspects of which offer many resources to the painter; there I would be able to attack some of the problems that I wish to solve…(c. 1865)
* Listen, monsieur Vollard, I worked a lot out of doors at Estaque. Except for that there was no other event of importance in my life during the years 1870-71. I divided my time between the field and the studio… …Zola closed his letter by urging me to come back to Paris too (in 1872 Cezanne went back to Paris, fh)… …but all the same, something told me to go back to Paris. It was too long since I had seen the Louvre. But understand, Monsieur Vollard, I was working at that time on a landscape which was not going well. So I stayed at Aix (en Provence? fh) a little while longer to study on my canvas.
* You wretch (portraying Vollard who changed his pose, fh)! You’ve spoiled the pose. Do I have to tell you again you must sit like an apple? Does an apple move?
* Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything… …A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together… …but no programme, no instruction in painting… …drawing is still alright, it doesn’t count, but painting – the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting.
* Alas! The memories that are swallowed up in the abyss of the years! I’m all alone now. I would never be able to escape from the self-seeking of human kind anyway. Now it’s theft, conceit, infatuation, and now it’s rapine or seizure of one’s production. But Nature is very beautiful. They can’t take that away from me. (the last conversation Vollard had with Cezanne in winter 19050
(more of his life quotes you can find in artist quotes, Paul Cézannne)
MARC CHAGALL, his life quotes
* Only the great distance that separates Paris from my native town prevented me from going back… …It was the Louvre that put end to all these hesitations. When I walked around the circular Veronese room and the rooms that the works of Manet, Delacroix and Courbet are in, I desired nothing more. In my imagination Russia (where Chagall was born, fh) took the form of a basket suspended from a parachute. The deflated pear of the balloon was hanging down, growing cold and descending slowly in the course of the years. This was how Russian art appeared to me…
* ‘There you are’, said Efros (Granovsky, director of the State Jewish Chamber Theater in 1920), leading me into a dark room, ‘These walls are all yours, you can do what you like with them’. It was a completely demolished apartment that had been abandoned by bourgeois refugees. ‘You see”, he continued, ‘the benches for the audience will be here; the stage there.’ To tell the truth, all I could see there was the remains of a kitchen… …And I flung myself at the walls. The canvases were stretched out on the floor. Workmen, actors walked over them… …piles of shavings lay among my tubes of paint, my sketches. At every step one dislodged cigarette-ends, crusts of bread.
* It’s only my town, (Vitebsk is the town of Chagall’s youth) mine, which I have rediscovered. I come back to it with emotion. It was at that time that I painted my Vitebsk series of 1914. (Chagall couldn’t go back to Paris then, because of the outbreak of the first World War, fh) I painted everything that met my eyes. I painted at my window; I never walked down the street without my box of paint.
* Two or three o’clock in the morning (in his studio, around 1911, in ‘La Ruche’ an old factory where many foreign artists as Soutine, Archipenko, Léger, Modigliani had their studio, fh). The sky is blue. Dawn is breaking. Down there, a little way off, they slaughtered cattle, cows bellowed, and I painted them. I used to sit up like that all night long. It’s already a week since the studio was cleaned out. Frames, eggshells, empty two-sou soup tins lie about higgledy-piggledy.. ..On the shelves, reproductions of El Greco and Cézanne lay next tot the remains of a herring I had cut in two, the head for the first day, the tail for the next, and Thank God, a few crusts of bread.
(more of his life quotes you can find in artist quotes, Marc Chagall)
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, his life quotes
* I remember one vivid winter’s day at Versailles. Silence and calm reigned supreme. Everything gazed at me with mysterious, questioning eyes. And then I realized that every corner of the palace, every column, every window possessed a spirit, an impenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes, motionless in the lucid air, beneath the frozen rays of that winter sun which pours down on us ‘without love’, like perfect song.
(more of his life quotes you can find in artist quotes, De Chirico.)
