I have a feeling only for shadows

What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.

The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence.

My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible.

I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.

I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops.

The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on.