Rubens Quotes
![I recommend [the students] that you should work actively at the Hermitage and study the artistic structures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Watteau, Poussin, and other painters, even Chardin, where he is an artist. Study very closely their dabbing manner of execution and try to copy a small piece of canvas, just one square inch. (Kazimir Malevich)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/13/kazimir-malevich-artist-canvas-155913.webp)
For – to say a few words on technique – whereas the curved line was used predominantly for reasons of beauty, (Phidias, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens) it has been used more and more economically for reasons of truth (Millet, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne) until it will end as the straight line for reasons of Love. This will enable the art of the future to create an international form; a form understandable to all and vital enough to the expression of a general feeling of love in a monumental way. Such is the future.
Theo van Doesburg
My work may be balanced on the second side [the Romantic tendency].. ..- but I believe it has some elements of order & unity, some design, even balance & abstract qualities, some tenseness. When its all classical, its too obvious & cold & deadly perfect - when its all romantic, its too loose uncontrolled wildly chaotic & shapeless – But in my opinion – Gothic sculpture – Mexican, all primitive sculpture, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Tintoretto, El Greco, Rubens, Michelangelo, Masaccio, are all more romantic than classic [Moore is reacting here on Stanley Casson's critic in 'The Listener' 25 Aug. 1937.
Henry Moore
I made my examination in Berlin in 1915. And I must say also that Berlin was for me in another way very important. At the time there were all these new movements – 'Die Brücke'...... the 'Der Blaue Reiter', Walden of the 'Storm' Gallery. Then Kassierer who bought the Chagalls, the first Chagall's that were ever seen in Europe were there. And there was 'Die Brücke'. Rottluff, Heckel, and Kirchner. You know we saw all that. Which was good. You see, Kassierer was then the man who bought the modern French painters. He had particularly Degas who I consider still today a very good painter, one of the best. But, anyway, in spite of my teaching my art was my concern. On the little money I had collected I lived in Berlin very cheaply, ate very cheaply. And already in 1920 I saved the first salaries I received to go to Munich... So for the first time I saw the old masters, Rubens and all at the Alte Pinakothek.
Josef Albers
It was the White Race who produced men like Columbus who crossed the unknown Atlantic; men like Magellan who first circumnavigated the globe; men like Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Bernini, Rubens, Raphael and thousands of other geniuses who created beautiful and exquisite productions in the fields of sculpture and painting; geniuses like Beethoven, Bach, Wagner and Verdi who created beautiful music; men like James Watt who invented the steam engine; men like Daimler who invented and built the reciprocating internal combustion engine; production geniuses like Henry Ford, inventors like Thomas Edison; such a prodigal genius as Nikola Tesla in the field of physics and electricity; literary geniuses like Shakespeare, Goethe and thousands of others, untold geniuses in the fields of mathematics, in the fields of chemistry and physics.
Ben Klassen
Rubens, when past fifty years of age, used the time he did not give to the business of his mission to the King of Spain in copying the superb Italian originals he found in Madrid.. .Accuracy of the eye, sureness of the hand, the art of carrying the picture on from the indications of the lay-in to the rounding out of the work, and so many other matters which are all of primary importance, demand application at every moment, and the practice of a lifetime.
Eugène Delacroix
.. that famous idea of 'beauty', which is, as everybody says, the goal of the arts. If it is their only goal, what becomes of the men like Rubens, Rembrandt, and all the northern natures generally, who prefer other qualities? Demand purity, In a word beauty... In general the men of the north tend less in that direction. The Italian prefers ornament.
Eugène Delacroix
The Natural History Museum is open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays. Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; extraordinary animals! Rubens rendered them marvellously. I had a feeling of happiness as soon as I entered the place and the further I went the stronger it grew. I felt my whole being rise above commonplaces and trivialities and the petty worries of my daily life.
Eugène Delacroix
If you make the light dominate too much, the breadth of the planes leads to the absence of half tints, and consequently to discoloration; the opposite abuse is harmful above all in big compositions destined to be seen from a distance, like ceilings, etc. In the latter form of painting, Paul Veronese goes beyond Rubens through the simplicity of his local color and his breadth in handling the light... Veronese had greatly to strengthen his local color in order that it should not appear discolored when immunized by the very broad light he threw on it.
Eugène Delacroix
In general, it is possible to say that in artists as deliberate, as careful as [Durer and Holbein], drawing is particularly tight and the color is as cold as the verity of mathematics. In other artists, on the contrary, in those who are the poets of the heart, like Raphael, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, line has more suppleness and color, more winning tenderness. In others whom we call realists that is to say, whose sensibility is more exterior, in Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, for example, line has a living charm with its force and its repose, and the color sometimes bursts into a fanfare of sunlight, sometimes fades into mist.
So, the modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them drawing and color are better or worse than in others.
Auguste Rodin
[I]magination... is the faculty... the common root from which science and literature... spring and grow and flourish together. ...the great ages of science are the great ages of all the arts... [P]owerful minds have taken fire from one another... without asking... to tie their imagination to falling balls or a haunted island. ...When Galileo was looking through his telescope at the moon, Shakespeare was writing The Tempest and all Europe was in ferment, from Johannes Kepler to Peter Paul Rubens, and from the first table of logarithms by John Napier to the Authorized version of the Bible.
Jacob Bronowski
How many years had he taken to admit a notion of what Michael Angelo and Rubens were driving at? He could not say; but he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres - perhaps at Lourdes - possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles - but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology.
Henry Adams
I should not base it [ the mural-painting 'Madonna della Vallicella' Rubens painted c. 1607] on the estimate of Rome but leave it to the discretion of His Highness [the Duke of Mantua].... though the figures [but withdraw it for the light in the church was to strong there] are saints, they have no special attributes or insignia that could not be applied to any other saints of similar rank.
Peter Paul Rubens
The one whom I honor most of all is Rembrandt. Rubens and Velasquez painted better than Rembrandt, but he was the greatest of all painters because he was most powerful humanly. His grasp of all things was from within out. He had something that surpassed all other painters-a great humanity. He is perhaps the only one who could have painted the Christ.
Fritz von Uhde
[.. feel interested in] Things that are not overworked, that are in essence light. In other words, the great Cezannes that are not all filled in.... while I can recognize a master piece that is heavily painted or darkly painted or painted in layers as great and sublime, it would not be my choice to hang a - [inaudible] - for five years if I could instead perhaps have a Cezanne of the kind I just described. Or a certain kind of Matisse. Or one of those large Rubens sketches, where the first breath of feeling is the picture, rather than the labor and the gift.
Helen Frankenthaler
On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are.. ..culminating in Courbet at his mightiest [paintings] (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion).
Gustave Courbet
Rembrandt was already deeply involved in his attachment to Rubens - at once adopting him as his model and fighting to have the differences noticed. His [painting] 'Descent from the Cross', also painted in 1631 for the Stadholder, was directly taken from the engraving after Rubens's greatest masterpiece in Antwerp Cathedral', while at the same time being a calculated Protestant response to the immense diapason of the [catholic] Flemish master's altar-piece.
Rembrandt
