Neminem Manet Quotes

Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety? ~ Edouard Manet

Manet did not do the expected. He was a pioneer. He followed his individual whim. Told the public what he wanted it to know, not the time worn things the public already knew and thought it wanted to hear again. The public was very much offended. ~ Robert Henri

The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there. ~ Edouard Manet

Even Émile Zola was reduced to disingenuously commenting on the work's formal qualities rather than acknowledging the subject matter. He paid tribute to Manet's honesty, however, "When our artists give us Venuses, they correct nature, they lie. Édouard Manet asked himself why lie, why not tell the truth; he introduced us to Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks. ~ Emile Zola

In a face, look for the main light and the main shadow; the rest will come naturally - it's often not important. And then you must cultivate your memory, because Nature will only provide you with references. Nature is like a warden in a lunatic asylum. It stops you from becoming banal. ~ Edouard Manet

He has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him, please, to give up painting.

–--Manet to Monet, on Renoir--- ~ Edouard Manet

What is art? Art is tar, rearranged. Art is tar on canvas or tar on tarp or tar on a naked body. Art is a bird chirping changed into something visual. Art is an image of a thousand beaks breaking into the office of a quack doctor. I know that doctor, and I've personally spoken to ten of those beaks. Art is rhythm, two hands clapping at a urinal while a third shakes off pee to the beat. Good art stays with you your whole life, especially if that good art is a tattoo. Good art is my name, written backwards, inked on your upper lip in a furry font. Art imitates life, just as life imitates Orafoura. Art can be anything from a Manet to a Monet to a painting of money to a missile. Art can save the world, or devastate it. (We could drop another big bomb on Japan, though I'm not advocating dumping Basquiat paintings on Hiroshima). Art rhymes with a bodily function, and everybody should let their creativity rip everywhere from the privacy of their bathrooms to small heated boxes with four of their closest friends. Art is thinking outside that box, and desperately trying to escape. ~ Jarod Kintz

Every new painting is like throwing myself into the water without knowing how to swim. ~ Edouard Manet

It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more. ~ Edouard Manet

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions. ~ J.G. Ballard

Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit; occidentis telum est.

A sword is never a killer; it is a tool in the killers hand. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

It may well be that the pictures of Courbet, Manet, Monet and their like contain beauties which escape the notice of such old romantic heads as ours, already streaked with silver threads. ~ Theophile Gautier

Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky . The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet. ~ Arthur Koestler

The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me ... People don't realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted. ~ Edouard Manet

The reproach that superficial people formulate against Manet, that whereas once he painted ugliness, now he paints vulgarity, falls harmlessly to the ground, when we recognize the fact that he paints the truth. ~ Stephane Mallarme

The principal person in a picture is light. ~ Edouard Manet

Manet also had an argument with Degas, the end result being that they each returned paintings that they had previous given to each other. ~ Doris Lanier

Monet, Manet, Sisley, Renoir, Van Gogh and others went outside to paint for one simple reason - it looks different outside. ~ Mike Svob

I would kiss you, had I the courage. ~ Edouard Manet

No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else. ~ Edouard Manet

Before my sister, Sara, and I went to bed at night, my mom would show us books on Manet and other artists. Even then I was always really interested in how the women looked in the images. ~ Erdem Moralioglu

There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug. ~ Edouard Manet

There's no symmetry in nature. One eye is never exactly the same as the other. There's always a difference. We all have a more or less crooked nose and an irregular mouth. ~ Edouard Manet

I paint as I feel like painting; to hell with all their studies. ~ Edouard Manet

I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

I need to work to feel well. ~ Edouard Manet

Black is not a color. ~ Edouard Manet

Steel is such a nice material to use. It can move. It's terribly easy, you just stick it or you cut it off, and bang! you're there: it's so direct. I think Manet was very direct, he didn't prepare his canvases like Courbet, he just put paint straight on and it's very like that with steel. ~ Anthony Caro

Perhaps I'll call it Luncheon on the Grass, then," said Manet. "Since I've clearly forgotten to paint the model wet enough. ~ Christopher Moore

One must be of one's time and paint what one sees. ~ Edouard Manet

I paint what I see and not what others like to see. ~ Edouard Manet

Die young, stay pretty. Blondie, right? We think of it as a modern phenomenon, the whole youth thing, but really, consider all those great portraits, some of them centuries old. Those goddesses of Botticelli and Rubens, Goya's Maja, Madame X. Consider Manet's Olympia, which shocked at the time, he having painted his mistress with the same voluptuous adulation generally reserved for the aristocratic good girls who posed for depictions of goddesses. Hardly anyone knows anymore, and no one cares, that Olympia was Manet's whore; although there's every reason to imagine that, in life, she was foolish and vulgar and not entirely hygienic (Paris in the 1860s being what it was). She's immortal now, she's a great historic beauty, having been scrubbed clean by the attention of a great artist. And okay, we can't help but notice that Manet did not choose to paint her twenty years later, when time had started doing its work. The world has always worshipped nascence. Goddamn the world. ~ Michael Cunningham

You would hardly believe how difficult it is to place a figure alone on a canvas, and to concentrate all the interest on this single and universal figure and still keep it living and real. ~ Edouard Manet