Quotes & Sayings About Impressionism

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe. — G.K. Chesterton

America does not concern itself now with Impressionism. We own no involved philosophy. The psyche of the land is to be found in its movement. It is to be felt as a dramatic force of energy and vitality. We move; we do not stand still. We have not yet arrived at the stock-taking stage. — Martha Graham

I've never really understood the term 'Post-Impressionism' as more than a label for Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh. — Nigel Hamilton

No, mes amis, impressionism is not charlatanry, nor a formula, nor a school. I should say rather it is the bold resolve to throw all those things overboard. — Joaquin Sorolla

One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

About 1883 something like a break occurred in my work. I had reached the end of 'impressionism,' and I had come to realize that I did not know how to paint or draw. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

'Impressionism' was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision). — John Singer Sargent

Impression - I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it ... and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape. — Claude Monet

Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks. — Claude Monet

On the other hand, the artist has much to do in the realm of color construction, which is so little explored and so obscure, and hardly dates back any farther than to the beginning of Impressionism. — Robert Delaunay

I'm going to start these art museums that are basically converted homes, and I have one for modern art, and I have one for 19th century European art, and one for French impressionism. I've got Japanese. — Larry Ellison

I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever. — John Baldessari

It isn't an easy job to paint oneself - at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see - this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph. — Vincent Van Gogh

Roger Fry is painting me. It is too like me at present, but he is confident he will be able to alter that. Post-Impressionism is at present confined to my lower lip ... and to my chin. — E. M. Forster

All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much. — Marcel Duchamp

Pictures aren't made out of doctrines. Since the appearance of impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green, and red ... But peppermint or chocolate, they are still confections. — Claude Monet

Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD. — Terence McKenna

The very name Impressionism is taken from an Atlantic Ocean painting - that of Monet, of sunrise in the harbor of Le Havre, done in 1872. — Simon Winchester

I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more. — John Fowles

I want to give colors intoxication, fullness, excitement, power by trying to forget Impressionism. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

To see the Thing itself is essential: the quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism ... This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock. Significant presentation - not interpretation. — Edward Weston

From the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like those states which I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps. — Anne Rice

I'm very much involved in art. I started buying art a few years ago and really like the work of T.C. Cannon, who is a native American artist. Then I was introduced to Soviet-era Russian impressionism and started collecting that, especially Gely Korzhev. — Ronnie Dunn

A good impression is lost so quickly ... — Claude Monet

Cricket is an art. Like all arts it has a technical foundation. To enjoy it does not require technical knowledge, but analysis that is not technically based is mere impressionism. — C.L.R. James

The word 'impressionism' as applied to art has been abused, and in the general acceptance of the term has become perverted. — Childe Hassam

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Impressionism was not just a style of painting, it was a new attitude to art and life; it is this attitude that marks the beginning of modern art. — Neville Weston

I wanted to kill art for myself ... ... a new thought for that object. — Marcel Duchamp

I was doing something that the officials or art commission probably didn't consider important ... I was experimenting with different kinds of realistic art, impressionism and the more decorative compositions of different forms of painting, which took away from the earlier photographic realism that I was doing. — E. J. Hughes

The habit of breaking up one's colour to make it brilliant dates from further back than Impressionism - Couture advocates it in a little book called 'Causeries d'Atelier' written about 1860 - it is part of the technique of Impressionism but used for quite a different reason. — John Singer Sargent

The autonomy of art that emerged through Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Mondrian, and the Russian Constructivism had seen painting develop independent of imitations or decoration, and so the content of art became much closer to that of music. — Neville Weston

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting. — Robert Delaunay

Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art ... He declared that he wanted to kill art ("for myself") but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object". — Jasper Johns

The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root. — Marc Chagall

Impressionism means taking inspiration directly from nature, trusting your senses rather than what you think you know. — Michael McClure

After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land. — Jerry Saltz

The creative force in man recognizes and records these rhythms with the medium most suitable to him, the object, or the moment, feeling the cause, the life within the outer form. Recording unfelt facts, acquired by rule, results in sterile inventory. To see the Thing Itself is essential: the quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism - the casual noting of the superficial phase, a transitory mood. — Edward Weston

Impressionism came about because it suddenly became apparent that pure colours mix in the eye in a more dazzling way than they have ever been mixed in paint. — Joseph Plaskett

A one woman cabaret of emotional impressionism — Alexander Polinsky

Wingate sighs thoughtfully. "Hard to say. He's not static. He began with almost pure Impressionism, which is dead. Anyone can do it. But the vision was there. Between the fifth and twelfth paintings, he began to evolve something much more fascinating. Are you familiar with the Nabis?"
The what?"
Nabis. It means 'prophets.' Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard?"
What I know about art wouldn't fill a postcard."
Don't blame yourself. That's the American educational system. They simply don't teach it. Not unless you beg for it. Not even in university. — Greg Iles

Impressionism is not a movement, it is a philosophy of life. — Max Lieberman

Is it Abstract, Fauvism, Expressionism, Mannerism, Impressionism? Close but no, this is Naturalistic Fantasy. A movement where science, fantasy, philosophy and art come together. Is it possible to mirror our fantasy, which often is based on nature, then turn it to an art work, which once is complete become nature again? Should we call it Fantaisie Naturaliste? — J.M.K. Walkow

The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe. — Childe Hassam

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul — Henri Matisse

Light is impressionism. — Gae Aulenti

I want to be famous but unknown! — Edgar Degas

Impressionism took Paris under its arms and stroked it until it blushed. — Anders Henriksson

What I am trying to do is something different an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism , a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner , the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art. — Claude Debussy

My knowledge of art ended at impressionism. — Peggy Guggenheim

The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio's chiaroscuro with Renoir's impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment. — Ella Leya

A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark. — John Singer Sargent

What seems most significant to me about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir