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Impressionism Quotes

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Impressionism Quotes

“And although it was in a hospital that she lay and I sat next to her—it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it and MIllet and Breton—a light in the darkness, the brightness in the middle of a dark night. And so I hung a large etching after Rembrandt over it, the two women by the cradle, one of them reading from the Bible by candlelight, while the great shadows cast a deep chiaroscuro over the whole room.”

PaintingLettersChristmasDutchImpressionismNativityVan GoghRembrandtMadonna And Child
Book:The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
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“Jestem sama we wrogim świecie. Ludzka twarz jest odrażająca. To dobrze. Chcę rozgłosu i przemocy, i chcę się roztrzaskać jak kamień o skały. Lubię kominy fabryczne i dźwigi, i ciężarówki. Lubię pochody twarzy i twarzy, i twarzy, zniekształconych, obojętnych. Mam dość ładności. Mam dość odosobnienia. Unoszę się na wzburzonej wodzie i zatonę, i nikt mnie nie uratuje.”

LonelinessNihilismDecadenceImpressionismTurpism
Book:The Waves
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“Recently I've been working very hard and quickly; in this way I try to express the desperately fast passage of things in modern life. Yesterday, in the rain, I painted a large landscape with fields as far as the eye can see, viewed from a height, different kinds of greenery, a dark green field of potatoes, the rich purple earth between the regular rows of plants, to one side a field of peas white with bloom, a field of clover with pink flowers and the little figure of a mower, a field of tall, ripe, fawn-coloured grass, then some wheat, some poplars, on the horizon a last line of blue hills at the foot of which a train is passing, leaving an immense trail of white smoke over the greenery. A white road crosses the canvas, on the road a little carriage and some white houses with bright red roofs alongside a road. Fine drizzle streaks the whole with blue or grey lines.”

ArtPaintingLandscapeModern LifeCountrysideImpressionism1890Auvers Sur Oise
Book:The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
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“A thought expressed is a falsehood." In poetry what is not said and yet gleams through the beauty of the symbol, works more powerfully on the heart than that which is expressed in words. Symbolism makes the very style, the very artistic substance of poetry inspired, transparent, illuminated throughout like the delicate walls of an alabaster amphora in which a flame is ignited. Characters can also serve as symbols. Sancho Panza and Faust, Don Quixote and Hamlet, Don Juan and Falstaff, according to the words of Goethe, are "schwankende Gestalten." Apparitions which haunt mankind, sometimes repeatedly from age to age, accompany mankind from generation to generation. It is impossible to communicate in any words whatsoever the idea of such symbolic characters, for words only define and restrict thought, but symbols express the unrestricted aspect of truth. Moreover we cannot be satisfied with a vulgar, photographic exactness of experimental photoqraphv. We demand and have premonition of, according to the allusions of Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, Ibsen, new and as yet undisclosed worlds of impressionability. This thirst for the unexperienced, in pursuit of elusive nuances, of the dark and unconscious in our sensibility, is the characteristic feature of the coming ideal poetry. Earlier Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe said that the beautiful must somewhat amaze, must seem unexpected and extraordinary. French critics more or less successfully named this feature - impressionism. Such are the three major elements of the new art: a mystical content, symbols, and the expansion of artistic impressionability. No positivistic conclusions, no utilitarian computation, but only a creative faith in something infinite and immortal can ignite the soul of man, create heroes, martyrs and prophets... People have need of faith, they need inspiration, they crave a holy madness in their heroes and martyrs. ("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")”

DecadenceDon JuanHamletImpressionismFaustBaudelaireGoetheIbsenDon QuixoteEdgar Allan PoeFalstaffDecadentsSymbolistMaupassantTurgenevFlaubertSancho Panza
Book:Silver Age of Russian Culture
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“I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.”

PeopleArtHateNamesIndividualForgetLivingPainterCollectorsImpressionismCubismNamingCollectClassifyDrawerImpressionistCubist
Book:The Collector
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“It isn't an easy job to paint oneself - at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see - this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph.”

IfsDifferentJobsEasyOpinionAdvantagePaintRatePhotographOneselfDeeperResemblanceImpressionism
Book:Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated)
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“Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art... He declared that he wanted to kill art ("for myself") but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object."”

ThinkingArtWantedFormFoundLanguageVisionCenturyFieldsObjectsChangedMaterialsMovedComplexesDetailsBoundariesVisualsUnitsPersistentPioneersAlteredNew ThoughtFrame Of ReferenceImpressionism
Author:Jasper Johns
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“After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land.”

YearsLandPaintingNotionFinalsStartingBrokeConstraintsLiliesHappily Ever AfterEver AfterSeventeenDelicacyNineteenTamingImpressionismGnarlyMonet
Author:Jerry Saltz
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“The creative force in man recognizes and records these rhythms with the medium most suitable to him, the object, or the moment, feeling the cause, the life within the outer form. Recording unfelt facts, acquired by rule, results in sterile inventory. To see the Thing Itself is essential: the quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism - the casual noting of the superficial phase, a transitory mood.”

MenMomentsFactsFeelingsFormForceCausesResultsCreativityCreativeRecordsObjectsEssentialsDirectMoodMediumsRhythmPhasesSuperficialFogCasualSuitableTransitoryInventoryImpressionismQuintessence
Book:The daybooks of Edward Weston
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