Impressionists Quotes - Page 2

• The best work of artists in any age is the work of innocence liberated by technical knowledge. The laboratory experiments that led to the theory of pure color equipped the impressionists to paint nature as if it had only just been created.

  Nancy Hale

  Artist, Color, Age

  Nancy Hale (1975). “Mary Cassatt”, Doubleday Books

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• I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.

  Bruce Chatwin

  Chinese, Ceramics, Sculpture

  Bruce Chatwin (1997). “Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969-1989”, p.14, Penguin

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• Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.

  Claude Debussy

  Imbeciles

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• I was never really an impressionist. If there was somebody within my range, maybe I could work on it and do a little exaggeration of them - which I think is really the way to do an impression.

  Kevin Nealon

  Thinking, Littles, Way

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The splitting up of color [as Impressionists did] brought the splitting up of form and contour . . . Everything is reduced to a mere sensation of the retina, but one which destroys all tranquility of surface and contour. Objects are differentiated only by the luminosity that is given them.

  Henri Matisse

  Color, Splitting Up, Tranquility

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• The great French Impressionist painter Renoir, right at the end of his very long life, said to a friend, "I am just now learning to paint." Renoir carried his gift with a humility which realized how much he still had to learn. Anyone who goes deeply into a field in life and realizes this, gains a sense of proportion that can only make you humble.

  Roger Housden

  Humble, Humility, Long

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• While the impressionists make a table to give one particular moment and subordinate the life of the table to its resemblance to this moment, we synthesize every moment (time, place, form, color-tone) and thus build the table.

  Umberto Boccioni

  Color, Giving, Tables

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• There are different kinds of painting, some with lights and some without, but still if you look at any painting here (in the light) and then over here (out of the light) it's an entirely different thing. The consciousness of this came to the Impressionists and I'm very interested in that.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Light, Different, Looks

  Source: cinemagodardcinema.wordpress.com

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• In the work of Seurat, you can see the dots of neutral colors carrying the form and then the dots of more intense color that make the color texture. It is a totally different principle that than of the Impressionists who used broken color to imitate visual effect.

  John French Sloan

  Color, Broken, Principles

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• If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.

  Edward Hopper

  Artist, Expression, Innovation

  "Oral history interview with Edward Hopper". Interview with John Morse, www.aaa.si.edu. June 17, 1959.

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• The Impressionists had to fight the gallery system for many years before becoming accepted. One of their methods of fighting was to band together and hold their own shows.

  Oliver $

  Fighting, Years, Together

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• [Photography is ] likewise even French impressionists. So the Sculls bought pop. It was politics, and they moved with it. And I think that could be happening, to some degree, with photography, too. It doesn't cost as much to do it, either.

  Garry Winogrand

  Photography, Thinking, Degrees

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• I love the Dutch impressionists - Vermeer, Rembrandt. What they were able to do with light was astonishing. As for photographers, I think mostly of the Hungarians: Robert Capa, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jozsef Pesci. In fact, I have one of his photographs hanging in my house.

  Vilmos Zsigmond

  Thinking, Light, House

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I was hoping to do an impressionist painting, but I wanted a good likeness and I wanted to create a feeling of the lady as a person, as a human being rather than as a figurehead for the monarchy and a pomp-and-circumstance sort of formal portrait. I wanted more of a relaxed portrait.

  Rolf Harris

  Feelings, Portraits, Painting

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• In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

  Willem de Kooning

  Art, Ideas, Trembling

  Willem De Kooning, Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) (1969). “Willem de Kooning”

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• In his lifetime the great French impressionist painter Corot painted 2000 canvases. Of that number, 3000 are in the United States.

  Morley Safer

  Numbers, United States, Lifetime

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• I don't know if I'm an impressionist or an expressionist. You can call me an American first... I've been labeled doing neimanism, so that's what it is, I guess.

  LeRoy Neiman

  Style, Firsts, Call Me

  "LeRoy Neiman dies aged 91", www.theguardian.com. June 20, 2012.

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• I don't even consider myself an impressionist, really.

  Will Ferrell

  Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. October 29, 2003.

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• After being an Impressionist, Cubist, and an Abstract Expressionist, I was influenced by realistic artists, including Andrew Wyeth in the late '50s, and I haven't changed my style since.

  Robert Bateman

  Artist, Style, Realistic

  "Robert Batemen: On home life, health, helping wildlife and his art muse". Interview with Carol Crenna, carolcrenna.wordpress.com. December 15, 2012.

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• Growing up I was very into art. In high school I was into the surrealists and impressionists, and I loved Klimt. In '91 or '92 I saw one of those Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled billboards. I was just really arrested by it. It was kind of my first foray into contemporary art. It was a turning point for me as to what art could be and what it meant and the impact it could have.

  Chloe Sevigny

  Art, Growing Up, School

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• All inspired painters are impressionists, even though it be true that some impressionists are not inspired.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Inspired, Being True, Painter

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• Ninety per cent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in . . . Ruskin's Elements.

  Claude Monet

  Elements, Painting, Ninety

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• The so-called 'discoveries' of the Impressionists could not have been unknown to the old masters; and if they made no use of them, it was because all great artists have renounced the use of effects. And in simplifying nature, they made it all the greater.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  Artist, Discovery, Use

  "Renoir - his life and work" by Francois Fosca, Book Club Associates/ Thames and Hudson Ltd, London, (p. 178), 1975.

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• How few of our young English impressionists knew the difference between a palette and a picture! However, I believe that Walter Sickert did - sly dog!

  Aubrey Beardsley

  Dog, Believe, Differences

  Aubrey Beardsley (1921). “Under the Hill: And Other Essays in Prose and Verse”

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• When I used to watch vaudevillian impressionists, people like Rich Little or Frank Gorshin, I always felt like the voice was the only point. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be of the Robin Williams or Jonathan Winters model, where observation and storytelling was important.

  Frank Caliendo

  Winter, Voice, People

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