Degas Quotes - page 2

Degas was discussing poetry with Mallarmé; "It isn't ideas I'm short of... I've got too many", said Degas. "But Degas," replied Mallarmé, "you can't make a poem with ideas. ... You make it with words. (Stéphane Mallarmé)
Seurat's art is an astonishing achievement for so a young painter. At thirty-one - Seurat's age when he died in 1891 - Degas and Cézanne had not [yet] shown their measure. But Seurat was a complete artist at twenty-five when he painted the 'Grande Jatte'. View quote
Georges Seurat
The impressionist paintings of Manet, Cezanne and Monsieur Degas, express with exemplary sincerity the new sensations, the new world our eyes experience. Now here the successors to these artists [Seurat & Pissarro ] are trying to perfect the forms created by them. They found in the notes of Delacroix, in the scientific discoveries of Chevreul and Rood, the suggestion for a type of painting in which color impressions are ordered by the combining of little multi-colored brush strokes. But while they were attentive to such improvement of the means, they forgot the true end of art, the sincere and complete expression of vivid sensations. The works of these painters - Pissarro and Seurat are the most notorious - are interesting only as the exercises of highly mannered virtuosos. Their paintings are lifeless for the painters did not strive for sincerity, being too taken up with external formulas. View quote
Georges Seurat
Degas was discussing poetry with Mallarmé; "It isn't ideas I'm short of... I've got too many" [Ce ne sont pas les idées qui me manquent... J'en ai trop], said Degas. "But Degas," replied Mallarmé, "you can't make a poem with ideas. ... You make it with words." [Mais, Degas, ce n'est point avec des idées que l'on fait des vers. . . . C'est avec des mots.]. View quote
Stéphane Mallarmé