Impressionists Quotes

• Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.

  Henri Matisse

  Art, Soul, Newspapers

  "Matisse". Book by Pierre Schneider, 1984.

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• I didn't become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I always have been one.

  Claude Monet

  Long, Remember, Has Beens

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• I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Believe, Belief

  "Marcel Duchamp: a riotous A-Z of his secret life" by Thomas Girst, www.theguardian.com. April 07, 2014.

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• Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.

  Edgar Degas

  Beauty, Dance, Art

  "The shop-talk of Edgar Degas".

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• I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Inspirational, Good Night, Art

  Vincent van Gogh (1959). “Complete Letters: With Reproductions of All the Drawings in the Correspondence”

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• Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks.

  Claude Monet

  Thinking, Singers, Instinct

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• Art flows more easily when you are not thinking about what 'should' be in it or how it 'should' be done. The Impressionists taught us to look and see, not assume.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Art, Thinking, Taught Us

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• It took some time before the public learned that to appreciate an Impressionist painting one has to step back a few yards, and enjoy the miracle of seeing these puzzling patches suddenly fall into one place and come to life before our eyes.

  Ernst Gombrich

  Fall, Eye, Appreciate

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• I don't really consider myself an impressionist.

  Rachel Dratch

  Interview with Steve Heisler, www.avclub.com. October 19, 2009.

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• As I see it, all of them - Tachists, Action Painters, Informel artists, and the rest - are only part of an Informel movement that covers a lot of other things as well. I think there's an Informel element in Beuys, as well; but it all began with Duchamp and chance, or with Mondrian, or with the Impressionists. The Informel is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism - the age of kings, or clearly formed hierarchies.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Kings, Thinking

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• I wasn't really qualified to be on Saturday Night Live - I'm not like an impressionist or anything.

  Victoria Jackson

  Night, Saturday, Qualified

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• The chief concern of the French Impressionists was the discovery of balance between light and dark.

  Stephen Gardiner

  Dark, Light, Discovery

  Stephen Gardiner (2002). “The house: its origins and evolution”, Constable & Company Limited

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• Art is a creation of a higher order than a copy of nature which is governed by chance.... By the elimination of all muddy colors, by the exclusive use of optical mixture of pure colors, by a methodical divisionism and a strict observation of the scientific theory of colors, the neo-impressionists insures a maximum of luminosity, of color intensity, and of harmony- a result that has never yet been obtained.

  Paul Signac

  Art, Order, Color

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• I also became inspired by impressionist painters such as Renoir, and wanted to do the same sort of thing with music-portray whatever mood strikes me the way Keith Jarrett does on piano.

  Lenny Breau

  Music, Piano, Doe

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• How many impressionist painters painted the same damned thing? How many actors have played the same part in renditions of a play or dancers do the same dances.

  Paul Provenza

  Play, Dancer, Actors

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• For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

  Paul Cezanne

  Photography, Art, Creativity

  "Beyond Visual Perspective". Book by Gaetano Curreri-Alibrandi, Yvonne Markowitz (p. 148), 1996.

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• I find impressionists slightly annoying, really.

  Steve Coogan

  Annoying

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.slate.com. June 3, 2011.

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• Comedians and impressionists used to be two different showbiz animals entirely, but now there's no such thing as a comedian who doesn't do impressions.

  John Podhoretz

  Animal, Two, Comedian

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• Gauguin flew into a frenzy! He held my head under the X-ray machine for ten straight minutes and for several hours after I could not blink my eyes in unison." — "If The Impressionists Had Been Dentists

  Woody Allen

  Eye, Rays, Machines

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• I went out with a promiscuous impressionist. She did everybody.

  Jay London

  Funny, Hilarious, Women

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• I started out as an impressionist and that’s all about observing, how people move, their voice quality, their attitudes and quirks.

  Eddie Murphy

  Attitude, Moving, Voice

  FaceBook post by Eddie Murphy from Feb 01, 2014

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• Like the Impressionists, I enjoy the effects of light, and especially natural light on the figure. If I could, I would take each viewer along to my favorite places along the seacoasts or in the mountains to the secret places of nature.

  Ariana Richards

  Light, Secret Places, Mountain

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• I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

  Henry Adams

  Art, Mean, Literature

  Henry Adams, Worthington Chauncey Ford (1969). “1892-1918”

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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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• 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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