A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter...
If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.
One gets into a state of creativity by conscious work.
All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone.
The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance.
Creation is the artist’s true function; where there is no creation there is no art.
Art is an escape from reality.
All art worthy of the name is religious.
Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation – I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances.
Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn’t build upon hatred, but upon love.
One must, of course, have one’s entire experience behind one and not have lost the freshness of instinct.
I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation.
The wall around the window does not create two worlds.
What’s so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn’t understand. A painter doesn’t see everything that he has put in his painting.
Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.
The sign for which I forge an image has no value if it doesn’t harmonize with other signs, which I must determine in the course of my invention and which are completely peculiar to it.
Truly, I’m not joking when I thank my lucky stars for the awful operation I had, since it has made me young again and philosophical which means that I don’t want to fritter away the new lease on life I’ve been given.
I shan’t get free of my emotion by copying the tree faithfully, or by drawing its leaves one by one in the common language, but only after identifying myself with it.
The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.
Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture’s execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.