FAMOUS FRENCH ARTISTS PAINTERS: their quotes on modern art, paintings and sculpture of 19th & 20th century + biography facts
Here follows a list of famous French artists names – modern painters & sculptors – with biography notes and a link to their artist quotes: just follow the link in the short biography of each artist, down here. Not all artists are born in France but because of their stay in Paris they became an essential part of French modern art history
Artist names for biography down here:
Hans Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Andre Breton, Paul Cezanne, Marc Chagall, Camille Corot, Edgar Degas, Eugene Delacroix, Robert Delaunay, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Vincent van Gogh, Yves Klein, Fernand Leger, Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Renoir, Jean Tinguely, Bram van Velde
ed: Fons Heijnsbroek
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French modern artists and painters with their meaningful quotes on art & life
Paris has been the most famous and inspiring city of art in the whole world for centuries; this fame and radiation culminated in the period of modern art movements starting with the impressionism painters, and continued during first half of the 20th century in an unprecedented fertile mix of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Orfism, abstract art, Surrealism, Purism – all starting and developing its growth in these two / three decades after 1900 and all interacting and debating with a huge energy. Not a dialogue, ‘trialogue’ but a real ‘multilogue’ by images, talks and art theory. In this same consistency you will find here the famous artists and painters with a French nationality OR born abroad but having a long decisive stay in for instance the famous artists-factory ‘La Ruche’ in Paris where you could find those days Chagall, Soutine, Modigliani, Zadkine and many other less famous artists having there a studio and a place to live. You can imagine that energy and exchange of ideas and images in a atmosphere of ‘new” and experimenting art.
On this website you can find descriptions of the modern art movements of this energetic period; they are taken from the writing of Jacob Bendien, a contemporaneous Dutch artist with the Mondrian in Paris or Hans Arp. For young and curious Dutch artists those days with a lot of curiosity and sensing the ‘new’ it was just natural to go to Paris and have there a long stay. So I hope to explain you well why you find here all kind of artists as ‘French artists’ with an important stay in Paris and interacting with the other Paris painters, artists, important art theoreticians as Appolinaire debating with the futurist artist Boccioni and important courageous art dealers as Daniel Kahnweiler, Ambroise Vollard and Leopold Zborowski. Picasso or Juan Gris are the most famous examples of this input from abroad into the melting furnace of modern French art. It was the Spanish Picasso starting Cubism painting in cooperation with Georges Braque, by commenting, inspiring them in daily interaction and exchange of new images and pictures, of course with a strong impact of ideas of the famous French senior painter of Aix, Paul Cézanne. Or the example of the sculptor Calder (inventor of the ‘mobile’) who visted one day the Paris studio of Mondrian; this visit had such an impact on Calder that it was the start of a serious artistic approach of ‘Space”.
HANS JEAN ARP: 32 of his modern art quotes by the Swiss French Da da abstract sculptor artist, famous for his organic sculpture
name: HANS JEAN ARP (1886 – 1966), a Swiss-born French sculptor artist, first in Swiss and German Dada and later in French Surrealism who created modern abstract sculpture art in characteristic organic forms. Arp created moreover artworks like poems, paintings, Dadaist collages and writings, partly together with his wife Sophie Arp Tauber. He was a founding member of early Swiss and German Dada. Later in his artistic life he participated in French Surrealism. When Hans Arp spoke in German he referred to himself as ‘Hans’; in French he referred to himself as ‘Jean’
Hans Arp /Jean Arp was sculptor, painter, poet and a founding member of early Dada. He strived to achieve an art which was highly anonymous, general and impersonal, as appeared in his art-cooperation with Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (read Arp’s quotes) As a consequence of this art-option he made also a lot of collage and graphic art, together with Sophie Arp-Taeuber, whom he married in 1922.
After his Da da involvement Hans / Jean Arp engaged himself with French Surrealism and lived and worked in Paris and in Zurich with his wife. Between 1927 and 1929 both stayed in Strasbourg where they cooperated with Theo van Doesburg in his architectural ‘Aubette’ project. It was Ellsworth Kelly, the American Hard Edge artist who visited the Arp’s a lot in Paris during the war; so the young American artist Kelly got encouraged in his new developing Hard Edge ideas by the European artists Hans Arp and Sophie Tauber!.
Hans Jean Arp: click for 31 of his artist’s quotes about Dada art and Surrealism & biography notes
Georges Braque (George): 57 of his modern art quotes by the French Cubist painter artist, famous for starting Cubism with Picasso
name: Georges Braque (George) (1882 – 1963), artist quotes / biography facts of the Cubist painter artist, creating still life & landscape paintings and collage art. Georges Braque is famous for starting Cubism circa 1908 with Picasso in Paris with their landscape paintings. It was Cézanne who had strong influence on their early Cubism.
After a short Fauvist period – the Cubist painting style started circa 1908- 1909. In the summer of 1908 Braque painted his first cubist landscapes in Estaque where Cezanne painted his decisive paintings around 1880 in which he broke his former impressionism painting style. In the summer of 1911 Braque and Picasso painted their landscapes side by side in Céret in the French Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings which are difficult to distinguish from the other artist. The influence of the ideas of Cézanne is very recognizable in these early artworks: Cubism was born definitely!
In World War I Georges Braque got severely wounded; when he resumed his artistic career in 1917 he developed a more personal style in Cubism, characterized by brilliant colors, subtle lines and textured surfaces; he painted many still life’s. During his recovery his life and mind changed a lot and Braque became a close friend of Juan / Jean Gris, also a Spanish Cubist artist in Paris. In the period between the wars, Georges Braque exhibited a looser and freer approach to Cubism, intensifying his color use combined with a looser rendering of objects. Later in his life -after 1950 – he started to paint landscape again, but then with just very simple motifs as a plow in the field.
Georges Braque: click for 57 of his artist’s quotes about Cubism art, Picasso & biography notes
Andre Breton: 55 of his modern art quotes by the founder of French Surrealism and writer of Surrealist Manifesto
name: ANDRE BRETON (1896 – 1966), artist quotes / biography facts of the founder of French Surrealism artist. Breton was famous as founder and theoretician of Surrealism and as novel writer of Surrealist novels and poetry
ANDRE BRETON (1896 – 1966) was leading artist of the French Surrealism art movement and inventor of the concepts of the ‘Surreal’ & automatic writing / drawing / painting. He wrote the famous Futurist Manifesto here presented. Breton was connected with most of the famous artists of French Surrealism like Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp Picabia, Miró and Masson. Later in America Breton admired younger American artists likeWilliam Baziotes and Arshile Gorky.
André Breton was born in Normandy France. In World War 1 he was active as a psychiatric ward which resulted in both traumatic and informative experiences. In 1919, together with Aragon and Soupoult he founded ‘Litérature’ and he started contact with the Swiss Dada movement lead by Tzara. In 1924 Breton published his first ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ and founded later the magazine La ‘Révolution Surréaliste’. He is the inventor of the surreal and of the Surrealist method: automatic writing, drawing and painting, with its huge impact on later modern art like in abstract Expressionismhich.
Breton arrived as many other famous European artists in New York in 1941; Peggy Guggenheim offered him a monthly grant. From 1942 he worked as a reader for French radio broadcasts. He didn’t speak English very well, so his influence in the New York art scene was limited. He organized a lot of art shows in New York and contributed articles on surrealism. He was connected with William Baziotes and admired the art of Arshile Gorky a lot. He studied Native American artifacts, together with the famous French anthropologist Levi Strauss, and wrote in 1944 his long prose poem ‘Arcane 17’.
Later in his life, in 1946, Breton returned to France but soon he found difficulties with the disciplined French communist party. He remained in Paris an became an admired but somewhat marginal figure till in the 1960’s he found his way back as a ‘grand old man’ with the rediscovered ‘surrealist’ happenings of the mid 1960s… .
Andre Breton: click for 55 of his artist’s quotes about Surrealism art & biography notes
Paul Cezanne: 57 of his modern art quotes by the French landscape painter artist, famous for preparing Cubism with his ideas
name: Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906), artist quotes / biography facts of the French landscape painter artist, creating still life & landscape paintings and portraits. Cezanne is famous for his strong impact on later Cubism and modern art.
PAUL CEZANNE as a starting young painter was one of the ‘wildest’ artists in Impressionism but at the end of his life probably the most concentrated famous painter of French landscape (Aix, Mont Victoire, Estaque), still lifes and portraits. Cézanne painted many times with the Impressionist painter Pissarro in open air; later he broke with color divisionism of Impressionism art. The quotes of Cezanne illustrate his view on the serious – almost religious – task of the painter artist and his intimate relation with Nature; his influence on Cubism was huge.
Paul Cezanne was an artist painter of the first generation impressionist French painters like Monet, Degas, and Renoir. Cezanne frequently painted landscapes ‘en plain air’ with the impressionist painter Pissarro (also with Renoir in opne air) who helped him in discovering landscape painting. From then Cezanne gradually developed his personal style; a style of painting in which ‘form’ became most important again (like the classical painters and as opposed to the impressionist emphasis on broken ‘color’), together with the new structures he discovered in landscape and Nature in general. Color was most important for Cézanne, but not broken!
Cezanne had a huge influence on the art and painters after him, like French Cubists,Braque and Picasso, Italian Futurism and the modern abstract painters from Munich: the ‘Blue Rider’. Until 1905 Cezanne continued to paint his characteristic landscapes in oil and in watercolor, a lot of them with his famous motif, the mountain hill ‘Mont St. Victoire’ near Aix en Provence
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Early in his life Cezanne and the writer Emile Zola were youth friends from Aix, and he frequently visited the novelist in Paris, until the moment that Zola published his novel ‘L’Oeuvre’, in which Cezanne recognized himself as the tortured painter who could not master his own passions and talents. He broke his friendship with Zola immediately. This written portrait of the ‘artist’ in Zola’s novel is in strong contradiction to the highly focused painting art of the older Cezanne who developed a painting which was very conscious, quiet and well-balanced. It was the poet Rilke who recognized this patience and hard labor in the slowly developing ‘artwork’ of the old master Cézanne. Rilke wrote his famous series ‘Letters on Cézanne’ to his wife, the German sculptress Clara Westrop, a friend of the woman painter Paula Modersohn-Becker who had some stays in Paris and discovered the late Cézanne.
Paul Cezanneclick for 57 of his artist’s quotes about landscape painting, Nature and art & biography notes
Marc Chagall: 25 of his modern art quotes by the French / Russian painter artist, famous for picturing Jewish life in Russia
name: MARC CHAGALL (1887 – 1985) was a famous Russian artist, painter and print maker of lithographs; he created moreover several glass windows. His main motifs came from Jewish life (a.o. The Fiddler’) he experienced in his youth in Vitebsk, in Russia. Chagall is also famous for his Bible prints. Chagall’s quotes cover his youth period as a young painter in Vitebsk Russia, his French stay in Paris where he found inspiration in early Cubism, his return to Russia, his later years in Paris after the end of World War 1. permitted him to leave Russia, and at the end in America.
Marc Chagall was a famous artist of Jewish origin and born in Russia, in the town Vitebsk where he attended the art academy in Leningrad. He went to Paris in 1910 where he discovered the newly started art movements Cubism and Fauvism. Because of the outbreak of World War I, he had to stay in Russia for years against his will but he found his wife and love Bella. Marc founded a new School of Art in Vitebsk, but after a lot of political confrontations with Suprematist and Constructivist artists and art teachers like Malevich and El Lissitzky, Chagall left his school and went to Moscow to paint there his famous mural paintings, for sthe stage sets for the State Jewish Chamber Theatre.
It was only after World War 1. that Chagall could travel back to his beloved Paris, where he developed a personal and figurative style of Cubism, in which his youth memories, mixed with Jewish tales and stories formed the basic material for his strongly colored and integrated paintings and gouaches. A lot of his art is broadly seen as more or less religious (Jewish daily religion and the Bible, fh), which made him very popular and famous in Western Europe. Chagall was creating his art in paintings, gouaches, lithography and etching, and several famous glass-windows, located in Israel and in France.
Marc Chagall: click for 25 of his artist’s quotes about painting and jewish life & biography notes
CAMILLE COROT: 10 of his landscape painting quotes by the French Barbizon painter artist, famous for his gentle and classical atmosphere
name: CAMILLE COROT (1796 -1875) was a French painter, famous for his landscape paintings and portraits of young women; Corot had strong influence on younger Impressionist landscape painters like Boudin, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Cezanne; they loved the tenderness of his atmospheric paintings. A lot of his art quotes here are taken from Corot’s ‘Notebooks’.
Camille Corot was a French landscape painter, respected in Paris and France during the 19th century. His painting art simultaneously refers to neo-classical art and anticipates the plein-air painting innovations. By the mid-1850s, Corot’s increasingly impressionistic style began to get broad recognition in France, but later in his life Corot never agreed with the use of broken colors by the young Impressionist artists. Neither did Corot really belong to the ‘rough’ Barbizon painters like Daubigny, Troyon, Diaz and Rousseau.
The poet Baudelaire, who admired and loved Corot’s subtle harmonies, wrote in one of his famous ‘Salons’ that the painter Rousseau (Barbizon) was possessed too much by devils, whereas Corot was possessed too little. And indeed, most landscape paintings by Corot have a very gentle, silver, calm and tender atmosphere; most of them are painted in soft colors, and unaffectedly. The famous portraits Corot painted of the young girls from the country are much more composed (these portraits were strongly admired by Georges Braque the Cubist, who used them as model for his paintings, fh). Later in his life Corot became a famous painter and teacher in Paris. Corot’s studio was filled with students, models, friends, collectors, and dealers who came and went; he supported a lot of other artists financially; in 1872 he bought a house in Auvers as a gift for Honoré Daumier, who by then was blind, without resources, and homeless. In 1875 he donated 10.000 francs to the widow of Millet in support of her children.
Camille Corot: click for 10 of his artist’s quotes about landscape painting & biography notes
EDGAR DEGAS: 10 of his painting quotes by the French Impressionist painter of dancers, ballet, ballerina’s and many portraits; famous for initiating the first Impressionist exhibition
name: EDGAR DEGAS (1834 -1917) was a French Impressionist painter famous for his many pastels he made of dancers in the ballet; It was the firm energy and conviction of Degas which resulted in the preparation and the show of the first Impressionist exhibition, in Paris. In his many portraits and paintings Degas uses a rather classical technique and approach. Degas lived and worked in Paris and was an close friend of Manet. Degas never saw himself as one of the ‘revolutionary Impressionists’: he did almost never paint outside in ‘open air’; he preferred to be a classical ‘Realist’ painter. Nevertheless Degas took a leading role in organizing the first startling Impressionist exhibition alongside the official Salon exhibition in Paris; in that way he was the most revolutionary of all Impressionists at that moment. Moreover Degas defended woman painter Berthe Morisot against his friend Manet and took care for her definite participation in this first show.
Edgar Degas: click for 12 of his artist’s quotes about ‘classical’ impressionist painting painting & biography notes
(will be continued)
