To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.
The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest.
The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.
I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.
There are some things in painting which cannot be explained, and that something is essential.
There isn’t a single person or landscape or subject which doesn’t possess some interest, although it may not be immediately apparent. When a painter discovers this hidden treasure, other people are immediately struck by its beauty.
It is after you have lost your teeth that you can afford to buy steaks.
In painting, as in the other arts, there’s not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.
My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit.
I look at a nude. There are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver.
There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need to manufacture more.
It’s with my brush that I make love.
I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters.
In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known.
Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and second, it must be inimitable.
And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.
It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.
With all their damned talk of modern painting, I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!
If the professional schools should succeed in producing skilled workers trained in the technique of their craft, nothing could be done with them if they had no ideal.
I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn’t turn out that way, I add more reds and other colors until I get it.