Quotes

Zola
He paints, without discouragement, without lassitude, walking straight ahead, obedient
to his nature. 418
He had it on the tip of his tongue, you might say, the new word he was to
contribute, but he was unable to utter it. 420
He spoke a language that he had made his own and that henceforth would be
indeed his. 420
it occurred to him quite naively one fine morning that it was up to him to try to
see nature as it is without considering it through the works and opinions of
others. Once he had grasped this idea, he took any kind of object, whether a
being or a thing, placed it at the end of his studio, and began to reproduce it on a
canvas in accord with his faculties of vision and understanding. 420-21
The artist thus achieved a work that was his own flesh and blood, Certainly this work
belonged to a great family of human works [] but it was beautiful with a beauty of its
own; it lived, I mean, with a personal life. The different elements that composed it,
possibly drawn from here and there, were fused into a whole with a new flavor and an
individual aspect [look up French] [] he saw with his own eyes; he had to give us in
each of his paintings a translation of nature in the original language he had just
discovered in the depths of himself. 421
see nothing but nature, face to face, such as it is; finally, seek in the works of Edouard
Manet only a translation of reality, peculiar to a temperament, beautiful in its human
interest. 421
the science that I call modern aesthetics 421
Each great artist has come to give us a new and personal translation of nature.
Reality is the fixed element in this, and varied temperaments are the creative
elements that have given works their different characters. [] the theme would
always be the same nature, the same reality; the variations would be the
individual and original ways by which the artists had rendered Gods great
creation. 422
Beauty lives within us, not outside ourselves. 422
That which interests me, a man, is humanity [] In human creations, in works of art, I
seek to find behind each an artist [] The work, thus seen, tells me the story of a heart
and a body, speaks to me of a civilization and of a locality. 422
The entire personality of an artist consists in the way his eye is organized: he
sees blond and sees in masses. 424

I can affirm that the painter has never committed the foolishness, practiced by so many
others, of wanting to put ideas into his paintings. 424
Let us take any painting by the artist and look for nothing more than what it
contains: lighted objects, real creatures. The general aspect, I have said, is a
luminous blondness. In the diffuse light, faces are cut into large flesh-colored
planes, the lips become simple strokes, all is simplified and rises from the
background in the powerful masses. [] The artist uses only the brush and uses it
quite prudently; there is no piling up of colors, but a unified layer. 424-25
Do not ask of him anything but a justly literal translation. 425
He is a child of our time. I see him as an analytical painter. 425 (the exact
observation of facts)(a simple analyst 426)
art is a human product, a human secretion. It is our bodies that exude the beauty of the
works. 428
Our fathers laughed at Courbet, and now we go into ecstasies over him. We
laugh at Manet, and our children will go into ecstasies over his canvases. 430
avant-gardism
Mallarm
Misunderstanding of realism. it sought to impress itself upon the mind by the lively
depiction of things as they appeared to be, and vigorously excluded all meddlesome
imagination. 231
the Intransigeants, now the Impressionists 232
Each time he begins a picture, says he, he plunges headlong into it, and feels
like a man who knows that his surest plan to learn to swim safely, is, dangerous
as it may seem, to throw himself into the water. 232
Each work should be a new creation of the mind [] It should abstract itself from
memory, seeing only that which it looks upon, and that as for the first time 232
Spanish (Velasquezian) wonderful atmosphere + Flemish brilliant tones - these two
aspects which reveal the truth, and give paintings based upon them living reality instead
of rendering them the baseless fabric of abstracted and obscure dreams. 233
Freshness and a coordination of widely-scattered elements (eclecticism) 233
the painters aim very exactly [] to impress upon his work a natural and a general law,
to seek out a type rather than a personality, and to flood it with light and air: and such
air! air which despotically dominates over all else. theory of the open air 234
Le Linge It is deluged with air. Everywhere the luminous and transparent
atmosphere struggles with the figures, the dresses, and the foliage, and seems to take
to itself some of their substance and solidity [] Air reigns supreme and real. 235-36

artists must adopt air almost exclusively as their medium 236 theory of immersion
originality 237
the clear and durable mirror of painting, that which perpetually lives yet dies
every moment, which only exists by the will of Idea, yet constitutes in my domain
the only authentic and certain merit of nature - the Aspect. 242