Gustave Courbet Quotes

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

We may call painting the grandchild of nature.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

I tried to find a language for the film - not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time.

A picture is the expression of an impression

Painting doesn't have a function, not in the way that music or film does... I mean, you can dance to music. Music can be used for a soundtrack, so it has a function in that sense, beyond itself. But painting doesn't... But I do believe that painting has a purpose.

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.

The plastic artist may or may not be concerned with presenting a superficial appearance of reality, but he is always concerned with the presentation - if not the representation - of the plastic values of reality.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.