Claude Debussy Quotes

Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD.

The word 'impressionism' as applied to art has been abused, and in the general acceptance of the term has become perverted.

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

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

I find impressionists slightly annoying, really.

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.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

Modernistic-Abstractionist-Art consists of 75% explanation and 25% God knows what!

The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle pictures of the Sunday newspapers.

Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule completely mistaken.

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe.

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.

Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don’t quite know where it comes from.

Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.

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.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena.... But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

I've never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.

Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour.

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.

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.