Edgar Degas Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• There is no such thing as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing.

  Edgar Degas

  Intelligence

  5 Copy quote

• It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.

  Edgar Degas

  Battle, Details, Lines

  Robert Hale Ives Gammell, Edgar Degas (1961). “The shop-talk of Edgar Degas”

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• Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Stupid, Thinking

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• The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Strong, Mean

  "The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas". Book edited by R. H. Ives Gammell, 1961.

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• Realism is more important than the sentiment of the picture.

  Edgar Degas

  Important, Realism, Sentiments

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• Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.

  Edgar Degas

  Long, Has Beens, Finished

  Edgar Degas, Jean Sutherland Boggs (1988). “Degas [exposition]”, p.222, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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• People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.

  Edgar Degas

  People, Dancer, Wish

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• A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.

  Edgar Degas

  Vices, Knavery, Add

  Robert Hale Ives Gammell, Edgar Degas (1961). “The shop-talk of Edgar Degas”

  9 Copy quote

• The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy. If then two or three natural accents can be added, obviously no harm is done. The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Two, Air

  8 Copy quote

• There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.

  Edgar Degas

  Success, Panic, Kind

  "Degas Parle (My Friend Degas)". Book by Daniel Halevy translated and edited by Mina Curtiss (p. 119), 1964.

  8 Copy quote

• So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run.

  Edgar Degas

  Running, Telephones, Rings

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• Drawing is your understanding of form.

  Edgar Degas

  Drawing, Understanding, Form

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• One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Movement, Hundred

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• And even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes.

  Edgar Degas

  Heart, Shoes, Dancing

  Nathalia Brodskaya, Edgar Degas (2012). “Edgar Degas”, p.125, Parkstone International

  29 Copy quote

• I put it [picture "A still life of a pear" by Edouard Manet] there [on the wall, next to the picture "Jupiter and Thetis" by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres], for a pear like that would overthrow any god.

  Edgar Degas

  Wall, Artist, Jupiter

  Edgar Degas' remark in a conversation with the writer Moore (circa 1875), as quoted in Sue Roe "The Private Lives of the Impressionists" (p. 117), 2006.

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• Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Philosophy, History

  Robert Hale Ives Gammell, Edgar Degas (1961). “The shop-talk of Edgar Degas”

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• In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

  Edgar Degas

  Mean, Ideas, Giving

  "The Royal Academy". Walter Sickert, English Review, June 1912.

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• Art is really a battle.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Battle, Art Is

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• What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.

  Edgar Degas

  Two, Drawing, Different

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• One must have a high opinion of a work of art - not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Future, Creating

  Edgar Degas (1995). “Edgar Degas: Paintings”

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• A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.

  Edgar Degas

  Work Out, Deception, Crime

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• I would like to be famous but unknown.

  Edgar Degas

  Fame

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• I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Reflection, Doubt

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• I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Attitude, Brutality

  "Degas: An Intimate Portrait" by Ambroise Vollard, translated by Randolph T. Weaver. Dover, (p. 43), 1986.

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• There are some women who should barely be spoken to; they should only be caressed.

  Edgar Degas

  Women, Should

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