In preparation for this Friday’s Opening Celebration of Impressionist and Modern Masters (Dec. 8, 2007–March 9, 2008), the FAC Blog has gathered quotes — words of wisdom, if you will — from some of the artists featured in the exhibition.
I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.
–Auguste Rodin
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
–Edgar Degas
In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.
–Paul Gauguin
Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
–Claude Monet
I do not judge, I only chronicle.
–John Singer Sargent
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
–Camille Pissarro
I think that if you shake the tree, you ought to be around when the fruit falls to pick it up.
–Mary Cassatt
The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
–Pierre Auguste Renoir
Everything starts from a dot.
–Wassily Kandinsky
All good ideas arrive by chance.
–Max Ernst
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
–Georgia O’Keeffe
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
–Henri Matisse
New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements… the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.
–Jackson Pollock
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
–Pablo Picasso
When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.
–Alberto Giacometti
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
–Joan Miro