The Quality Of A Painter Depends On

But When I Am Alone, I Do Not Have The Effrontery To Consider Myself An Artist At All, Not In The Grand Old Meaning Of The Word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya Were Great Painters. I Am Only A Public Clown-a Mountebank. I Have Understood My Time And Have Exploited The Imbecility, The Vanity, The Greed Of My Contemporaries. It Is A Bitter Confession, This Confession Of Mine, More Painful Than It May Seem. But At Least And At Last It Does Have The Merit Of Being Honest.

How Could Michelangelo Have Seen His David In A Block Of Marble? Man Began To Make Images Only Because He Discovered Them Nearly Formed Around Him, Already Within Reach. He Saw Them In A Bone, In The Bumps Of A Cave, In A Piece Of Wood. One Form Suggested A Woman To Him, Another A Buffalo, Still Another The Head Of A Monster.

The People No Longer Seek Consolation In Art. But The Refined People, The Rich, The Idlers Seek The New, The Extraordinary, The Extravagant, The Scandalous.

He Can Who Thinks He Can, And He Can't Who Thinks He Can't. This Is An Inexorable, Indisputable Law.

The Academic Teaching On Beauty Is False. We Have Been Misled, But So Completely Misled That We Can No Longer Find So Much As A Shadow Of A Truth Again. The Beauties Of The Parthenon, The Venuses, The Nymphs, The Narcisusses, Are So May Lies. Art Is Not The Application Of A Canon Of Beauty, But What The Instinct And The Brain Can Conceive Independently Of That Canon.