#artist quote
Doris Caesar once said, “I try to be emotional, and yet get away from reality.” Characteristic of her expressive work, this figure is elongated and gaunt. The surface of the piece is covered with marks left by the artist’s hands as she worked the clay that would later be cast in bronze. With her slumped posture, drooping shoulders, and downturned facial features, the widow’s body appears to convey the emotional weight of her grief.
See this sculpture in our newest installation “Elegy: Lament in the 20th Century.”
“The Widow,” around 1930–50, by Doris Caesar
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Well, Picasso was a huge misogynistic piece of shit, but that quote is really mind blowing
Letter from Édouard Manet to Mme Jules Guillemet, 1880
Translation:
Bellevue, Thursday [July-August 1880]
To Mme Jules Guillemet
Nonsense if you will, dear Madame, but such sweet nonsense [sketches of her shoes and skirts] which enables me to spend my time very pleasantly. I’m getting better and better, and a letter from you now and then would help my cure along - so don’t be too economical with them.I haven’t seen Mlle L. [Lemonnier], her mother is very ill and she is moving. Still, I’m surprised to have had no news from her. I hope you won’t find my letters a bore, you’ll tell me, won’t you, and send me your news soon
E. Manet
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“An artist has to be the perfect contradiction at all times…You have to be just insane enough to want to do something that is so punishing and so difficult. But at the same time it takes a very sane person to execute it all.”
pictured: “Maybe She’s Born With It” (2015)
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John Singer Sargent - George Peabody, 1890. 85.1 x 66 cm oil on canvas
“A very fine looking old man - and very lively - yes, and charming, I should say - and tells killingly funny stories. But portrait painting…is very close quarters - a dangerous thing - no, I must say I had a very disagreeable time of it.”
– John Singer Sargent, in the diary of Lucia Fairchild. Boston, October 2nd 1890
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From a conversation between Ernest Guiraud and Debussy, Debussy: Volume 1, 1862-1902: His Life and Mind (by Edward Lockspeiser)
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What is the use of art? The answer to this question resides in a formula: “art is a prayer.”
— Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, edited by John Gianvito
Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it,—: that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life recites a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymously to the outside, nameless, existing merely as necessity, as reality, as being—
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne
Art is a wound turned into light.
— Georges Braque
Eva LeWitt
“I tried to make work in metal and wood, but felt I couldn’t totally manage those materials on my own. I couldn’t quite control and manipulate them the way I wanted to without outside help. I don’t like to have work fabricated. I like to touch everything, have a personal connection with it.” | W magazine interview
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“He’s an odd one, wonderfully tender and generous by nature, yet with curious streaks of cruelty, especially to his friends. I think that in this portrait I managed to catch something of the fear which must underlie these contradictions in his character.”
– John Deakin
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Portrait of Francis Bacon, 1952
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In a series of letters to pen pal and art collector Elizabeth Stein, sculptor Beatrice Wood (1893–1998) often shared daily anecdotes of her cats’ antics, observing that cats “are of course just human beings with four legs instead of just two.” During this time, Stein was in her nineties and Wood was more than one hundred years old. Through their correspondence, both women relished the daily pleasures of life.
This letter is currently on view in our exhibit ‘Before Internet Cats’ http://s.si.edu/2o7sJWN
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