Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Quotes

My models, my human figures, are never like extras in an interior. They are the main theme of my work. I depend absolutely on my model.

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

I like to paint nudes mostly.

I don't have anything to say about other people's art and their work.

As an artist, I will always give art more importance and preference than pure entertainment.

To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Christian schools, Christian parents, and Christian pastors often have turned off young people at just this point. Because the schools, the pastors, and the parents did not make a distinction between technical excellence and content, the whole of much great art has been rejected with scorn and ridicule. Instead, if the artist's technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this, even if we differ with his world view. Man must be treated fairly as man.

I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.

The romantic artist expects people to ask, 'What has he got to say?' The classical artist expects them to ask, 'How does he say it?

I think art is not an ornament or refinement at the fringes of human intelligence, I think it's at the center. It's at the core.

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

Art breathes into life a surplus that is both vital and extraordinary.

I think in any work of art, there always will be randomness about what is good, what is bad.

Artists make our lives livable and enjoyable.

I don't enjoy art.

Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.

It is through the human figure that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.

Every art critic and every writer doesn't have a frame to start off from. If I made a statement saying, "This is Abstract Expressionism," they could go, "Well, he failed miserably," or, "Fantastic, this is a new genius!" But in art history, I don't see any of the artists I like spewing bullshit. I don't see anyone recording it or pronouncing what they were doing.

A drawing should be a verdict on the model. Don't confuse a drawing with a map.

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.

Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.

I didn’t see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn’t make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it’s art, that’s great, but I’ll let history decide.