Picture Quotes - page 22
The medium is as unimportant as I myself. Essential is only the forming... I take any material whatsoever if the picture demands it. When I adjust materials of different kinds to one another, I have taken a step in advance of mere oil painting, for in addition to playing off color against color, line against line, form against form etc., I play off material against material, wood against sack clothes.
Kurt Schwitters
One needs a medium. The best is, one is his own medium. But don't be serious because seriousness belongs to a passed time. This medium, called you yourself will tell you to take absolutely the wrong material. That is very good, because only the wrong material used in the wrong way, will give the right picture, when you look at it from the right angle. Or the wrong angle. That leads us to the new ism: Anglism. The first art starting from England [the country of Schwitters' forced stay, when he wrote this quote], except the former shapes of art.
Kurt Schwitters
Nobody at Magnum decides for the other what he should do and everyone is free to tell someone else: "Well, what about this story? I don't like it for this and that reason - because of this picture.” It is extremely fruitful to have somebody to talk to as an equal. This give and take is a most profitable thing because we keep learning from each other. I keep learning from the younger members just as I learned from Bob [Robert] Capa and Chim [David Seymour] how to make picture stories. Cornell Capa, for instance, has a very keen journalistic sense; and as for the other photographer, each makes his own contribution. Everybody in Magnum has full freedom; there's no doctrine, there is no school, but there is something that unites all of us very strongly - I can't define it; it may be a certain feeling of freedom and a respect for reality.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Perfect knowledge of the space an object should occupy in a picture, and of the space that separates one object from another, establishes a new astronomy of things attached to our planet by the magic law of gravity. Canons of the Metaphysical aesthetic lie in the minutely-accurate and precisely-estimated use of surfaces and volumes.. ..We are building in paint a new Metaphysical psychology of things.
Giorgio de Chirico
The compression of the modern picture, its variety, its breaking up of forms.. .It is certain that the evolution of the means of locomotion and their speed have a great deal to do with the new way of seeing. Many superficial people raise the cry 'anarchy' in front of these pictures because they cannot follow the whole evolution of contemporary life that painting records.
Fernand Léger
![From the day that the impressionists liberated painting, the modern picture set out at once the structure itself on contrasts; instead of submitting to a subject, the painter makes an insertion and uses a subject in the service of purely plastic means.... [the contemporary painter] must prepare himself in order to confer a maximum of plastic effect on means that have not yet been used. He must not become an imitator of the new visual objectivity, but be a sensibility completely subject to the new state of things. (Fernand Léger)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/00/fernand-l-ger-contemporary-299200.webp)
These new means [in the modern film, 1920's] have given us a new mentality. We want to see clearly, we want to understand mechanisms, functions, motors, down to their subtlest details. Composite wholes are no longer enough for us – we want to feel and grasp the details of those wholes – and we realise that these details, these fragments, if seen in isolation, have a complete and particular life of their own.. .Close-ups in the cinema are a consecration of this new vision.. .A shoe as beautiful as a picture. A picture as beautiful as an X-ray machine.
Fernand Léger
An example: if I compose a picture using as objects a scrap of bark, a scrap of butterfly wing and a purely imaginary form, you probably won't recognise the bark, or the butterfly wing, and you'll say: 'What does this stand for? It is an abstract picture. No it's a representational picture'.. .There is no such thing as 'abstract', or 'concrete' either. There is a good picture and a bad picture. There is the picture that moves you and the picture that leaves you cold.. .A picture has a value in itself, like a musical score, like a poem.
Fernand Léger
There are necessities and impossibilities in reality which do not obtain in fiction, any more than the law of gravity to which we are subject controls what is represented in a picture. ... It is the same with pure good; for a necessity as strong as gravity condemns man to evil and forbids him any good, or only within the narrowest limits and laboriously obtained and soiled and adulterated with evil. ... The simplicity which makes the fictional good something insipid and unable to hold the attention becomes, in the real good, an unfathomable marvel.
Simone Weil
Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same shield; they are different shields.
W. E. B. Du Bois
Everything takes place in an infinitely greater field than what is framed by the size of the picture or by what is materially in the picture. This matter [door/window/wall] is but a support inviting the viewer to participate in the much larger game of a thousand and one visions and feelings; it is the talisman lifting or sinking walls into the deepest recesses of our spirit, opening and at times closing windows in the construction of our impotence, our bondage, or our freedom. The 'subject-matter' then may be found in the picture or it may exist solely inside the spectator's head.
Antoni Tàpies
Towards the end of 1958, I greatly increased.. ..the works done with what is called poor material. I felt the need to persist and go deeper with the entire message of what is insignificant, worn or dramatised by time.. .In fact, it was the most conscious resumption of subjects that had often attracted me. In my research, I had discovered this material, one I find loaded with strange suggestions, which is cardboard. A grey, anonymous material that won't be easily manipulated, for which very reason the slightest mark of the hand torments it and destroys it. But the piece of cardboard, the box, the lid, the tray.. ..dirty clothes (socks, T-shirt, underpants...), old furniture, everyday objects; not used as a representation or theme in the picture but as real bodies, objects.
Antoni Tàpies
The sky is the 'source of light' in nature, and governs every thing. Even our common observations on the weather of every day, are suggested by them, but it does not occur to us. Their difficulty in painting both as to composition and execution is very great, because, with all their brilliancy and consequence, they ought not to come forward, or be hardly thought about in a picture... I know very well what I am about, and that my skies have not been neglected, though they have often failed in execution, no doubt, from an over-anxiety about them, which will alone destroy that easy appearance which nature always has in all her movements.
John Constable
I had on Friday a long visit from Mr. --- alone; but my pictures do not come into his rules of whims of the art, and he said I had "lost my way." I told him that I had, perhaps other notions of art than picture admirers have in general. I looked on pictures as 'things to be avoided,' connoisseurs looked on them as things to be 'mitated'; and that, too, with such a defence and humbleness of submission, amounting to a total prostration of mind and original feeling, as must serve only to fill the world with abortions... But he was very agreeable, and endured the visit, I trust, without the usual courtesies of life being violated. What a sad thing it is that his lovely art is 'so wrested to its own destruction!' Used only to blind our eyes, and to prevent us from seeing the sub shine - the fields bloom - the tree blossom - and from hearing the foliage rustle; while old - black - rubbed out and dirty canvases take the place of God's own works.
John Constable
No, Mr. Williams, certainly not; if Mr. Drake [a solicitor of the English Railway Company] has purchased a 'Turner', he ought to know it is a Turner; I was once silly enough to look at a picture that I was told had been painted by me, and I found myself soon after stuck up in a witness-box, giving evidence about it; I then said I'll never be so silly again.
J. M. W. Turner
