Gustave Courbet Quotes

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings

It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both.

The artist is called a creator.

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Braque always said that the only thing that counts, in painting, is the intention, and it's true. What counts is what one wants to do, and not what one does. That's what's important.

I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.

In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something.

Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

I really want to make art. I want to create something that's going to have a lasting impact.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.

Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more humane world.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

We have our brush and colors - paint Paradise and in we go.

The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.

In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.

The aim of art is to create space.