I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman.

Art upsets, science reasures.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

Art is made to trouble but science reassures.

It is the unforeseeable that creates the event.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.